BUS602: Marketing Management

Our minds are wonderful things, but they are habitual things as well. They look for patterns, and they tend to ignore things that don't fit the pattern. They simply miss things because they do not see them. For example, the world almost universally missed the recent emerging financial crisis because of this inherent myopia. Yet the strong and growing signals were there for all to see for several years before the crash with some pundits warning of the dangers including ourselves at Shaping Tomorrow. 

Taking an integral approach to scanning therefore draws attention to the intangible qualities that help determine what is scanned and what is not. There are no future facts, and when confronted with uncertainty and the unknowable that characterizes the future, your mind tends to retreat to explanations based on what is already known. 

Your mind uses your existing benchmarks of what you believe to be right and wrong, how things work, what is real and what is not. It shuts down when something new doesn't match expected patterns. It misses things that might just be important, and makes assumptions that often are just wrong. Your mind falls into a certainty trap that does you no favors when you are scanning.