Environmental scanning is an essential futures practice. The purpose of scanning is to systematically identify trends, developments, and points of inertia that may influence an organisation’s (or society’s) future operating environment. Scans typically focus on the implications of trends and developments over the short to medium term (from a few years to the next couple of decades), or sometimes the longer term.

Done badly (and it often is) such scans are often just a set of bullet points identifying common trends with little analysis – an ageing workforce, digital transformation, environmental crises, etc. These don’t lead to any real insights into the most important challenges and opportunities facing the organisation.

Done well, environmental scans help set the stage for more detailed examinations of future consequences and potential organisational (or societal) actions and strategies.

Scanning is also not a once and done activity. Things keep changing, so repeated scanning is essential. However, systematic scanning takes a lot of effort, and regular scanning appears to be the exception for many organisations. Or at least for those who publicly release their scans.

New Zealand Search & Rescue’s environmental scan

A local exception is New Zealand Search and Rescue, which provides leadership for the sector. It has updated its environmental scans several times in the last five years. A variety of government organisations, charities, and businesses are involved in providing search and rescue services, so the scans are used to inform a range of stakeholders about how demand for and supply of search and rescue services may be affected by a variety of changes (and lack of change).

I was asked to update their scan this year. While largely a computer-based activity, I supplemented the online research with interviews of people in organisations who are involved in search and rescue operations. This helps to reality check assumptions about general trends or developments.

This year’s scan in addition to providing a general update also considered what the medium-term implications for the pandemic may be, as well as looking more closely at how changing activities and conditions in Antarctica and the South Pacific could affect search and rescue.

Previous year’s scans were designed to be read online, which is a challenge because there is a lot of information. So this year, PDF versions were created to make the current scan (and previous ones) more useful for those who want to browse it offline or have a printable version. [Currently the latest scan is only available in pdf form, an online version is being developed]

Visual summaries

A key challenge with environmental scanning is synthesising different, often voluminous, information into useful insights. Scans are typically based around categories – such as social, technological, economic, environmental, and political trends. It is easy, but unhelpful, to list a lot of different trends and developments under these categories without showing how they could influence each other.

For the latest NZSAR scan we write about how different trends and developments can reinforce or oppose each other. But that can make rather a dense read. A good summary helps, but visuals often illustrate interactions to greater effect.

In general though, I’ve found most diagrams summarising environmental scans are too simplistic. Search for images of “environmental scan” and you’ll see what I mean. They usually don’t show how different trends can contribute (positively and negatively) to several possible outcomes in combination with other trends or developments.

Visualising interactions for the NZSAR scan proved to be challenging, so couldn’t be completed before the end of the contract. Now, though, I’ve developed some charts to illustrate the diversity and patterns of trends and developments. They are based on Sankey diagrams, which can be created relatively easily using SankeyMATIC’s website. They aren’t perfect, but show some promise for further refinement.

Below are five charts that show how demand and supply for search and rescue services may be affected by different trends. The information is drawn from the scan, although there is some additional interpretation for how trends and impacts are categorised in the charts to avoid making them too difficult to interpret. They are intended to highlight some key points, rather than be detailed summaries.

What the diagrams do is show how many “sources” (particular trends or developments, clustered by broad categories) influence different “targets” (factors that contribute to demand &/or supply). For clarity I’ve shown increases and decreases in both demand and supply separately. I’ve also not included the specific trends or developments that lead to the implications (such as number of people active outdoors, and attitudes & behaviours), because that makes them too messy. But I have indicated how many specific trends contribute to each outcome.

For the diagrams I clustered the trends and developments identified in the scan into 14 social trends or developments relevant to search and rescue, two (broad) technological, five economic, two environmental, and two political categories.

Insights from the diagrams

A clear message from the diagrams is that increased demand for search and rescue services is influenced by a larger number of factors than decreasing demand. And, unsurprisingly, different numbers and types of trends contribute to different demand or supply influences. The diagrams show this succinctly compared to the written text.

For example, a large number (14) of different trends or issues contribute to the number of people active in the outdoors, with more than half being social factors (the increasing number of older people, greater ethnic diversity, improved physical activity programmes, greater mobility, etc). The pattern of influences for decreasing demand is, unsurprisingly, different.

Effects on the supply of search and rescue services were looked at in terms of capacity (people and assets) and capabilities (like skills and training). Increases in capacity and capability are likely to be affected more by technological and political factors, while some economic trends adversely affect supply.

The environmental scan also considers how trends influence funding, business and governance models for search and rescue organisations. The diagram of that isn’t as informative as the others.

Limitations

While these charts do provide more insight than a generic illustration, they still have limitations. For me the main one is that the same trend (such as an ageing population) can contribute to several different demand (and supply) outcomes, but Sankey diagrams can’t show that properly. All the charts do is illustrate the number of “source” factors (on the left) that link to each “target” on the right hand side.

 To more clearly illustrate all the targets a trend contributes to requires more specific diagrams. Instead here I have just duplicated trends when they link to more than one outcome, implying a more diverse set of influences.

This limitation can also be overcome by manual creation of the charts in another drawing package, but that requires considerably more work. A simpler work around is to further annotate the diagrams, but this becomes messy as more trends connect with more outcomes.

The second major limitation is that the diagrams can be misinterpreted. So a good description of the diagram is needed. Sankey diagrams are quantitative, so thicker bands/lines could be interpreted as greater influence. That’s not what I’ve used them for. The intent is to just illustrate the number of factors that influence an outcome.

While a large number of social trends affect the number of people who are active it isn’t intended to show that social factors or more people active in the outdoors are the most important factors that will affect demand. A single economic trend could have greater influence on the number of people active outdoors, than several social trends. But the environmental scan didn’t determine which factors may be more or less influential.

The SANDYMatic application also orders and scales the charts automatically, so you can’t keep them consistent between the charts.

Still, I think these types of diagrams, with further refinement, may be useful for helping illustrate insights from environmental scans