How many times has a high-impact event surprised your organization? How often do you seek for signals that could affect your future? How much do you know regarding the behavior of key competitors, suppliers and partners? These questions only scratch the surface of what we call peripheral vision. Depending on your organization's need and capability for peripheral vision, the future could blindside your company. The biggest dangers are the ones you don't see coming. Understanding possible future threats, and anticipating opportunities, requires strong peripheral vision.

This blog serves as a forum to discuss key topics and processes regarding peripheral vision. Feel free to visit this blog to learn more about peripheral vision and to share any thoughts, ideas, and questions on the topic. After all, improving peripheral vision begins by asking the right questions.

MINDING AND MINING THE PERIPHERY   by Paul Schoemaker	1/30/2006
A key part of managing uncertainty is to detect early those weak signals that can pose new threats or create new opportunities. These early signals tend to be blurry at first and thus are easily dismissed. If only Microsoft had seen the Google threat sooner, or Mattel the erosion of its Barbie brand, or light bulb manufacturers the victory of LED in the traffic light segment. George Day and I addressed the challenge of minding and mining the periphery in our recent Harvard Business Review titled Scanning the Periphery (Nov. 2005) and examine it greater depth in our forthcoming book Peripheral Vision: Detecting the Weak Signals that Will Make or Break Your Company (Harvard Business School Press, May 2006). The main problem that managers face in scanning the periphery is that of information overload and the high level of ambiguity about the deeper meaning of weak signals that reach them. We invite you to comment on any aspects of this challenge. A recent case in point is how the main stream media, as well as the local exit polls in the Palestinian Territories, badly misread the signals about the political elections in January 2006. Nearly everyone was surprised by the landslide victory of the terrorist organization Hamas over the incumbent regime Fatah, prompting Condoleeza Rice to remark that we really need to improve our data collection and interpretation. So, what went wrong in reading the tea leaves? Was it biased or slanted data, wishful thinking, the convential wisdown reinforcing itself or is the problem perhaps rooted in deeper issues such as our Western thinking paradigm regarding the Middle East? When I heard the election results, I was reminded that we often expect the world to be more rational than it really is. Moreover, we interpret the information very much from our own vantage point without appreciating its inherent limitations. How well do we really understand the mindset of voters who favored Hamas; how deeply disillusioned they were with the corrupt Fatah regime, the lack of economic, social and political progress over more than a decade, or their willingness to be Islamic martyrs in what they deem a holy freedom fight. We were surprised by their disregard for the possibility that the Palestinian people may face another decade of violence as well as become pariahs in the community of nations if terrorism becomes an official part of the political platform. Hopelessess and anger can express themselves in strange ways. This case bears paralles to the IRA’s long futile struggles in Ireland and the plight of the Basks in Spain.
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PERIPHERAL VISION AND THE STRATEGIC ACTION RADAR   by Scott Snyder, Ph.D. and Paul Schoemaker, Ph.D.	1/17/2006
(Adapted from a DSI Quarterly newsletter article) While many organizations have adopted corporate dashboards to help them monitor the road ahead and adjust their speed and direction accordingly, the business environment is often much more complicated than a trip down the highway. As the previous entry summarizes, important signals from the periphery need to be identified and tracked. The road itself may be shrouded in uncertainty and the organization needs to move forward through this fog. The picture that is emerging from various signals needs to be understood. As discussed in the HBR article "Scanning the Periphery", organizations may need to develop a broader “radar” to monitor and respond to this complex environment. The Need to Sense and Respond In his book Execution, Larry Bossidy[1] highlights the capability of organizations to sense and adapt to the changing world around them as a fundamental element of long-term success. In The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge[2] singles out the ability of organizations to learn and adapt as the most important discipline of all. GE has titled its most recent annual report “Growing in an Uncertain World.” John Browne, Group Chief Executive at BP, says, “Giving up the illusion that you can predict the future is a very liberating moment. All you can do is to give yourself the capacity to respond to the only certainty in life – which is uncertainty. The creation of that capability is the purpose of strategy.” At the heart of each one of these messages is the call to address uncertainty and change in the world around us head-on as we plan for the future. We can no longer view strategy as a static event where leaders come together to design a roadmap that they can follow for the next few years. The reality of today’s world is that the terrain and weather conditions are constantly changing, making our roadmap obsolete unless it accounts for these changes. Schoemaker’s book Profiting from Uncertainty [3] lays out a conceptual methodology for winning no matter what the future brings. It consists of three pillars: scenario planning, flexible strategies and dynamic monitoring. This article addresses the last pillar, assuming the earlier ones are in place. We focus on the challenge of scanning for and integrating new signals from the environment, including those that lie beyond traditional fields of view. Peripheral vision, the ability to sense and respond to these weak signals, is one of the most difficult and yet crucial capabilities for an organization to develop. In one survey of 140 corporate strategists, fully two-thirds admitted that their organizations had been surprised by as many as three high-impact competitive events in the past five years. Moreover, 97 percent of the respondents said their companies lacked any early warning system to prevent such future surprises.[4] Jack Welch included among his top five capabilities of leaders the ability to see around corners: the need for leaders to have a sixth sense of what lurks at the periphery (as a threat or opportunity) and even a seventh sense as to what the future may bring. The Business Intelligence Gap In recent years, organizations have used IT as an enabler to create real-time systems with access to information both inside and outside the company. However, most of this information is still relegated to tactical uses and fails to find its way to the strategic decision-makers in the firm. Some of the key limitations in the way business intelligence (BI) is currently utilized in companies include: The intelligence is narrowly focused on performance metrics and the company’s ...
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SCANNING THE PERIPHERY   by George S. Day and Paul J.H. Schoemaker	1/9/2006
Decision Strategies International is pleased to announce the publication of "Scanning the Periphery," Paul Schoemaker and George Day’s article on peripheral vision in the Toolkit Section of the November 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review. Below is a summary of the article, and a link that you can click to download the full text version of the article, compliments of DSI. Check your peripheral vision at www.thinkdsi.com with a free on-line diagnostic quiz. We’ve expanded our offering to include consulting and workshops designed to help your organization achieve the appropriate level of peripheral vision for your business. Sincerely, Scott Snyder President and COO Decision Strategies International, Inc. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Scanning the Periphery Harvard Business Review, November 2005 George S. Day and Paul J.H. Schoemaker Companies often face new rivals, technologies, regulations, and other environmental changes that seem to come out of left field. How can they see these changes sooner and capitalize on them? Such changes often begin as weak signals on what the authors call the periphery, or the blurry zone at the edge of an organization’s vision. As with human peripheral vision, these signals are difficult to see and interpret but can be vital to success or survival. Unfortunately, most companies lack a systematic method for determining where on the periphery they should be looking, how to interpret the weak signals they see, and how to allocate limited scanning resources. This article provides such a method- a question-based framework for helping companies scan the periphery more efficiently and effectively. The framework divides questions into three categories: Learning from the past: What have been our past blind spots? What instructive analogies do other industries offer? Who in the industry is skilled at picking up weak signals and acting on them? Evaluating the present: What important signals are we rationalizing away? What are our mavericks, outliers, complainers, and defectors telling us? What are our peripheral customers and competitors really thinking? Envisioning the future: What future surprises could really hurt or help us? What emerging technologies could change the game? Is there an unthinkable scenario that might disrupt our business? Answering these questions is a good first step toward anticipating problems or opportunities that may appear on the business horizon. The article concludes with a self-test that companies can use to assess their need and capability for peripheral vision. Click here to download the full text PDF of the article (Reprint R0511H), compliments of DSI. A book expanding on these concepts, working title "Peripheral Vision: Detecting the Weak Signals That Will Make or Break Your Company," is scheduled for a Spring 2006 release from Harvard Business School Press.
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