BUS602: Marketing Management

'When scanning, you will be making a subjective assessment of the value of the scanning hits you identify. You need to be wary of allowing your mind to retreat to explanations and assessments based on what is already known. You need to ensure that your mind doesn't shut down when something new doesn't match expected patterns. 

If you are not alert to your worldview when scanning, you will miss things that just might be important, and you will make assumptions that may be just plain wrong! 

Action-oriented biases often drive us to take action less thoughtfully than we should. In the book 'Think Again', the authors point to why good leaders make bad decisions. 'They, and Walter Derzko, a Canada-based technology futurist, describe many cognitive disconnects including: 

• Excess Optimism Bias… the tendency for people to be overly optimistic about planned actions, overestimate the likelihood of (+) events, and underestimate the likelihood of negative events. 
• Competitor Neglect… the tendency to plan without factoring in competitive responses. 
• Overconfidence bias… overestimating skill & competence levels leading to overestimating the ability to affect future outcomes, taking credit for past outcomes and ignoring the role of chance and luck, 
• Impact Bias… the tendency of people to overestimate the length and/or intensity of the impact of future states. 
• Omission bias… the tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral than equally harmful omissions (inactions) 
• Not Invented Here Bias... the tendency to ignore that a product, service, or solution already exists, because its source is seen as inferior or the "enemy. 
• Planning fallacy… the tendency of underestimating task-completion times. 
• Wishful Thinking… the formation of beliefs and the making of decisions according to what is pleasing to imagine instead of by appealing to evidence and rationality. 
• Early hype error… in the short term, marketers, promoters, and eager inventors seem to overestimate the impacts of any new technology and in the long term underestimate such impacts and consequences (reference the Gartner Hype curves) 
• Replacement hype error… the belief that new technology will replace the existing incumbent technology & that this will happen relatively fast. In reality competing technologies often coexist over a long period of time with the old technology re-inventing itself. (i.e. Radio & TV) 
• Enhancement error… the belief that new technology will only solve old problems & supplement existing technological systems. Instead new technologies, especially platform or core technologies often lay the groundwork for entirely new systems and new resulting systemic problems. (i.e. the electric motor for the railway, the car for the roadway infrastructure, the PC for the Internet, nanotech and biotech for our bodies "intra-structure" (the Human Genome project and HapMap, and SNP's), the impacts of which we do not fully understand yet. 
• Panacea error… the mistaken belief that new technology will function as a panacea for various social problems. 
• Patterning and sense-making error… the difficulty of seeing new important links between seemingly unrelated and different fields of technology, especially in cases' where this novel combination of fields is precisely what will offer major accelerated development opportunities 
• Social impact errors… often people who have tried to predict the future have become bogged down in the actual technology and neglected the economic and social aspects. 
• Prisoners of our times error… that without realizing it, people tend to be prisoners of the spirit of their times (Zeitgeist), erroneously believing that the big issues of today will also be the big issues of tomorrow 
• Decision criteria error… the belief that only rational economic considerations are the only factors behind that choice of one technology over another. However, for many people, seemingly irrational considerations determine such choices. 
• Information gap error… the information on which science and technology (S&T) foresight studies are based on is often insufficient. Technology development is not linear, transparent, or fully predictable, with surprise developments coming out of left field such as the secret work that is done in the military or a new start-up working in stealth mode before it goes public with a breakthrough. 

Figure 27: Personal style analysis. Courtesy of Shaping Tomorrow 

Therefore, scanning is not about being certain, but rather about being comfortable with uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity. Being certain is not an asset when you are scanning. 

It is about moving beyond traditional and familiar sources and thinking in new ways about existing and potential markets, emerging technologies, and new business models. It is about looking beyond current ways of working, and thinking the unthinkable to see what might be needed in the future. In short, scanning requires you to: 

• Have an open, semi-sceptical mind about what might be important, look beyond dogma and perception, and be constantly dissatisfied with what you know and what you don't. 
• Formulate bold propositions and hypotheses and look for ways to improve them. 
• Continually test your assumptions about why you think something is valuable or not, and then look for ways to prove your propositions and hypotheses wrong, or start a new one. Dismiss nothing until tested (particularly if you think that it's rubbish). 
• Capture your propositions and hypotheses as trends, uncertainties, and wildcards in the form of rounded commentaries, metaphors, and stories rather than transitory, single focused ideas.' 

Try taking this Style questionnaire in Figure 27 to see how you perceive, intuit and reason versus others and how your cognitive style influences your thinking about the future. 

The left-right poles of this style questionnaire suggest different cognitive biases for each of us as follows: 

• Independent - Interdependent. An independent orientation is a preference for individual initiative and action, whereas, an interdependent orientation is a preference for a more group-oriented approach that emphasizes the interests of the team as a whole. 
• Egalitarian - Status. An egalitarian orientation is a preference for mutual consultation in decisionmaking, whereas, a status orientation is a preference for greater deference to rank and hierarchy. 
• Risk - Restraint. A risk orientation is a preference for rapid action and risk-taking, whereas, a restraint orientation is a preference for more cautious and calculated actions based on ample information. 
• Direct - Indirect. A direct orientation is a preference for open and explicit communication, whereas, an indirect orientation is a preference for careful attention paid to context, or to implicit meanings in a given message. 
• Task - Relationship. A task orientation is a preference for immediate attention to getting the job done, whereas, a relationship orientation is a preference for establishing strong and trusting personal relationships first. 
• Short Term - Long Term. A short term orientation is a preference for making choices based upon a narrow time horizon, whereas, a long term orientation is a preference for considering the impact that choices will have over a longer span of time. 

This is why it is important to involve groups of people in scanning and to encourage right rather than left pole thinking in the participants.