Ride the Storm: Navigating Through Unstable Periods / Katerina Rudko (Belka G...
Environmental scanning
1. Environmental SCANNING Careful monitoring of an organization'sinternal and external environments for detecting earlysigns of opportunities and threats that may influence its current and futureplans. In comparison, surveillance is confined to a specific objective or a narrow sector.
2. Purpose of environmental scanning The aim of the analysis is to provide knowledge and insights, and to foster anticipatory thinking to be used in management’s planning and strategic decision-making.
3. What can you do with environmental scanning? Making an environmental scan results in identifying the impact of relevant factors in the environment of an organization or sector. Whereas people often complain as powerless victims about negative factors in their environment, the environmental scan helps you to take action or adapt yourself to your environment. Scanning promotes an active response to positive (opportunities) and compliant factors, and leads to insights how to live with the 'hard facts'. While the scan is a simple tool, it nevertheless helps to get a comprehensive view of the chief factors, helping to go beyond reacting to scattered observations.
4. Explaining its process Environmental scanning is a research process, in which businesses collect all types of relevant information that helps these businesses in making decisions regarding surviving, expanding or entering new markets. In simple words, it can be described as keeping a close eye on external or internal happenings and analyzing this information to know how it can be detrimental or beneficial for the business.