<p> Unpacking Strategic Foresight: A Practice Approach</p><p>David Sarpong, UWE</p><p>Mairi Maclean, University of Exeter Business School</p><p>Sarpong, D. & Maclean, M. (2014). Unpacking strategic foresight: A practice approach. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 30(1): 26-36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.scaman.2013.04.002</p><p>Abstract</p><p>This paper unpacks strategic foresight by exploring the creative evaluation and reconfiguration of sources of potentialities into resources and productive outcomes. Placing emphasis on the everyday practices of organizational members’ positioned lower down the organizational hierarchy, we identified prospective sensemaking, multi-lateral conversations about future possibilities and limits in the present, and the application of future-related techniques and methodologies as embedded organizing practices that gave form to the patterns of ‘foresightful’ actions observed in practice. </p><p>Research Highlights</p><p>► We unpack strategic foresight by exploring the creative evaluation and reconfiguration of sources of potentialities into resources and productive outcomes ► Prospective sensemaking, multi-lateral conversations of future possibilities and limits in the present, and the application of future-related techniques and methodologies were identified as organizing practices that gave form to patterns of ‘foresightful’ actions.</p><p>Introduction</p><p>In the face of intense competition and accelerated change in the global business environment, strategic foresight has been heralded as a dominant logic for successful organizing (Bootz,</p><p>2010; Fidler, 2011; Hamel & Prahalad, 1996; Rohrbeck, 2012). The topic of foresight has therefore attracted considerable research during the past decade (Constanzo & Mackay, 2010;</p><p>Tsoukas & Shepherd, 2004a ), and a growing body of evidence suggest that strategic foresight promotes the enactment of organizationally useful actions and repertoires that enhances learning and the entrepreneurial capabilities of firms embedded in high-velocity</p><p>1 environments (e.g. Ahuja et al., 2005; Bootz, 2010; Chia, 2008; Heger & Rohrbeck, 2011;</p><p>Liebl & Schwarz, 2010; Schwartz, 2009; Vecchiato, 2012). </p><p>The majority of this research conceptualises strategic foresight as an extra-ordinary capability to “penetrate and transgress established boundaries and seize the opportunities otherwise overlooked by others” (Chia, 2008: 27), enabling the envisioning of new meanings and the development of pre-emptive strategies to prevent disastrous outcomes (Barden et al,</p><p>2008; Chia, 2004). We observe among these streams of studies the existence of a tacit assumption that strategic foresight as future-oriented action is primarily a managerial function. In this regard, ontological priority is seldom given to organizational members positioned much further down the organizational hierarchy in accounting for strategic foresight. Strategic foresight is considered remote from the situated activities and experiences of this group of organizational members whose actions and ‘doings’ in conditions of limited knowledge in fact concern both the extent to which future events may be anticipated, and how to deal with them in the present (Tsoukas & Shepherd, 2004). Such issues may have been sidestepped due to the theoretical and methodological complexities involved in mapping the tasks, connections and architectures that strategic foresight processes require. We concur that such knowledge would not only help organizations to balance their short-term performance targets and immediate challenges with their long-term foresight objectives</p><p>(Abell, 1999; Rollwagen et al., 2008); they may also be relevant in developing strategic foresight initiatives and the visioning of technical system requirements in complex and fast- changing environments. The study presented here aims to address this gap by exploring how the creative evaluation and reconfiguration of sources of potentialities into resources and productive outcomes may contribute to the enhancement of strategic foresight. This we do by</p><p>‘unpacking’ mundane organizing practices resulting from the many everyday activities and microscopic behaviours to show how they contribute to organizational foresight. In this</p><p>2 regard, we seek to provide a new angle of vision to extend our understanding on the emergence of strategic foresight from the meso level. Thus, the new paradigm as advanced in this paper seeks to enrich our understanding of how taken-for-granted organizing routines and activities are constituted, reproduced, and adapted to contribute to the enhancement of strategic foresight.</p><p>The paper seeks to provide new insight into the management and foresight literature in the following ways: (1) First, while prior research has stressed the importance of strategic foresight, this paper draws on everyday organizing practices geared towards the creative evaluation of potentialities and limits of open-ended compelling narratives and visions in the context of genuine uncertainties. (2) Second, employing a qualitative case-study approach, we explore the contingency role of ‘ordinary’ organizational members, lower down the organizational hierarchy in contributing to strategic foresight. We develop our contribution in the context of the global software industry, which is characterised by rapid change, driven by increasing computing power, complex technologies, and an uncertain market (Hartmann, et al., 2011; Bettis & Hitt, 2007). The paper is organized as follows. First, we review the salient literature on strategic foresight. Following this we outline our research design and methodology, which provides an overview of the empirical research context and the methods employed in the empirical inquiry. Findings from the research are presented and discussed, after which the study’s implications for management theory and practice are highlighted in the conclusion.</p><p>Strategic foresight in high velocity environment</p><p>The current interest in strategic foresight results from two key drivers. First, organizations face greater discontinuities and a genuine uncertain future more than ever as a result of changing competitive landscapes and customer demands (Bootz, 2010; Bradfield et al., 2005;</p><p>3 Constanzo, 2004; Schwartz, 2009). Second, the literature on foresight has produced empirical evidence that strategic foresight could lead to flexible, but desirable organizational outcomes such as adaptive learning (Antonacopoulou, 2010), improved decision making (Vecchiato,</p><p>2012), organizational ambidexterity (Bodwell & Chermack, 2010) and innovation (van der</p><p>Duin & den Hartigh, 2009). </p><p>Slaughter (1995: 48 as cited in Fuller et al., 2004) observed that foresight as a human attribute enables the systematic analysis of past and present contextual cues to probe the uncertain future. He delineates foresight as “[a] a process that attempts to broaden the boundaries of perceptions in four ways: by assessing the implications of present actions, decisions, etc (consequent assessment); by detecting and avoiding problems before they occur</p><p>(early warning and guidance); by considering the present implications of possible future events (proactive future formulation); [and] by envisioning aspects of desired futures</p><p>(normative scenarios)”. From this perspective, the theoretical thrust of what has become known as ‘strategic foresight’ is about anticipation, imagination, probing and the enactment of the future (Constanzo & MacKay, 2010; Tsoukas & Shepherd, 2004). Frequently theorised as a set of capabilities or competence (e.g. Amsteus, 2008; Ilmola & Kuusi, 2006; MacKay,</p><p>2009; Major et. al., 2001), extant research often conceptualizes strategic foresight as an executive function (Schwandt & Gorman, 2004) by explicating how managerial psychology and cognitive capabilities influence perception and enactment of the likely future. For example, Constanzo (2004) explored how the enactment of strategic foresight by a TMT led managers to spin out a stand-alone internet bank in response to the uncertainty surrounding the take-up of e-commerce. Observing that strategic foresight as a learning process seldom relies on ‘numbers’, she argues that it takes place within a broad vision through which TMTs enact the future through a continuous mechanism of probing and learning. An exception is the work of Constanzo and Tzoumpa (2010), which observes that middle managers play an</p><p>4 important role in enabling strategic foresight by facilitating learning among organizational members. Of particular significance is the proposition that managers who continuously challenge taken-for-granted assumptions are likely to build organizations that truly live in the future. Those who have a penchant for placing excessive emphasis on the past or the future tend to restrict their ability to spot subtle changes in the present, get entrapped in obsolete assumptions, schemas, expectancies, inferential processes and mental models that blind them to perceive emerging reality (Schwartz, 2006). In response, numerous similar foresight methodologies that focus tightly on the generation of possible futures, such as, counterfactual analysis (Booth et al., 2009), scenario analysis (Bradfield et al., 2005) and peripheral visioning (Cunha & Chia, 2007), have been developed and promoted by scholars within the</p><p>‘framework of scientific rationality’ (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011) to help organizations probe the future and navigate their business environments.</p><p>Emphasising practice as the site of the emergence of strategic foresight and the role of</p><p>‘ordinary’ organizational members in enabling (or impeding) foresight, a recurrent theme of recent theory has increasingly focused on theorising foresight as a social practice (e.g.</p><p>Sarpong, 2011; Sarpong & Maclean, 2011; Waehrens & Riis, 2010) to accommodate the advent of novelty, improvisation, and the potential for change arising from situated</p><p>‘foresightful’ actions. From this perspective, Cunha et al. (2006) argue that everyday micro- interactions of organizational actors, and the ‘foresightful’ micro-behaviour and actions of managers and their subordinates are important in developing strategic foresight. More specifically, this stream of studies recognises the role of ‘ordinary’ organizational members in contributing to organizational foresight. They conceptualise strategic foresight as a by- product of human actions and practices in context aimed at understanding the past and the future in the present (Fuller & Loogma, 2009). Surprisingly, there is as yet no explicit theory or empirical work explicating how organizations reconcile their short-term organizing</p><p>5 practices and performance pressures with long-term strategic foresight. Thus, in our effort to extend this line of research, we draw on the ‘practice turn’ in contemporary social theory to explore how everyday routine behaviours and activities treated under the general rubrics of organizing practices may contribute to the enhancement of strategic foresight. In doing this, we seek to understand how innovation teams evaluate and reconfigure sources of potentialities into resources and productive outcomes.</p><p>A practice approach to strategic foresight </p><p>The deep epistemic gap between what people say they do and what they actually do has led to the recent turn to practice contemporary social theory (Schatzki, 2001; 1996). The theory of practice is therefore concerned with how the taken-for-granted sense of space and routines of actors as inscribed in the ways they enact their situated practices contributes to their social life (Barnes, 2001; Bourdieu, 1990). In this regard, Reckwitz (2002: 249) describes a</p><p>‘practice’ as a “routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one another: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge”. For Foucault (1988: 102-103, cited in Malavé, 1998), practices are “those places where ways of doing and speaking meet and interconnect, and which ‘possess’ up to appoint their own specific regularities, logic, strategy, self evidence and ‘reason’”. </p><p>Temporally unfolding and permeating all social life, we argue that practices have a genuine epistemological relevance to the theory and practice of foresight because they are not only constituted in language and ongoing interactions (Sarpong, 2010; Sarpong & Maclean,</p><p>2011), but also shape and give rise to the bundles of everyday ‘doings’ of actors in their situated activities (Schatzki, 2005; 2001). This leads us to follow Sarpong (2010) in arguing</p><p>6 that strategic foresight as a human capacity to connect past, present and the future is a social practice played out in the everyday situated work of organizational actors as an actualisation of a continuous process of becoming (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). From this perspective, strategic foresight emerges as an ongoing social practice whose routines and activities are enacted on an everyday basis, sometimes with very little reflection, from an unintended action to an unintended outcome in the moment. A practice approach to strategic foresight therefore gives ontological priority to those regular discernable patterns of activities that take place within the ambit of their praxis of actors and attempts to explain such human micro-behaviours in terms of subconscious forces which guide practical coping when confronted with an uncertain future (Schatzki, 1996). It also places primacy on organizational actors’ quest to understand the future of their complex business environment, which is characterized by uncertainty, serving to condition actors’ behaviour and conduct in their everyday situated practice.</p><p>Driven by these theoretical choices, we conceptualise strategic foresight in this study as a bundle of human actions and practices in context geared towards the creative evaluation and reconfiguration of sources of potentialities into future resources and productive outcomes. Our emphasis on the past, present and the future not only recognises the intrinsic temporality of time in organizing (Neustadt & May, 1987), but is further synonymous with</p><p>Tsoukas’ (2004a) conception of strategic foresight as a dynamic and iterative process. In this regard, we take dispositions, shared values, relationships, background knowledge, and practical coping as some of the basic organizing logics (Schatzki, 1996), around which the practice of strategic foresight may come into representation in everyday work. In doing this, we transcend the individual subject to focus on discernable coordinated patterns of collective actions and practical activities (Rasche & Chia, 2009; Schatzki 2001), by giving primacy not just to consciousness, but also to internalised habits, skills, dispositions as well as reflexive awareness (Bourdieu, 1990; Raelin, 2007; Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011), in theorising the</p><p>7 reproduction of situated ‘foresightful actions’ − actions taken “in conditions of limited knowledge concerning both the extent to which future events may be anticipated and how to deal with them” (Tsoukas & Shephered, 2004b:7). </p><p>Research design and methodology </p><p>We develop our contribution in the global software industry because it is characterised by complex interaction between rapidly evolving computer technologies and uncertain fast- moving markets (Hartmann et al., 2011; Hagel & Brown, 2008). We chose a single industry in order to improve the comparability between cases and offset the effect of sectoral differences (Ellinger et al., 2005). Three firms of comparable size based in the South West of the UK, involved in the pioneering of a series of innovative products for different market segments, were selected as our empirical research sites, enabling comparative analysis between the cases. Since all three organizations were running more than one project, we devised the following purposeful sampling criteria (Patton, 2002) to select the four projects included in the study so as to reduce variations while enhancing their commonalities, and generalizations of observed patterns and explanations (Thomas, 2006; Tsoukas, 1989). First, project(s) required the commitment of significant resources (time and money) to be pioneered. Second, the project(s) needed to entail the development of an innovative product incorporating technology which was new or unfamiliar to the organization. Third, to decrease variations in the technological context between the empirical sites in order to ease comparability, the projects selected needed to employ Microsoft’s computing technologies including their user and data interfaces in creating the platform architectures of the yet-to-be- realized innovations. We preserve the anonymity of the three organizations with the pseudonyms: Interlab, Kemitech and Mercury. </p><p>8 Within these three organizations, our chosen level of analysis was the product innovation teams because they represent the very “level at which observable changes take place in the way work is done and the management of innovation process can be witnessed”</p><p>(Birkinshaw et. al., 2008: 282). Serving as the locus for the development of new products that provide the bedrock for strategic diversification and corporate renewal (Daneels, 2002;</p><p>Dougherty, 1992), the organizations we studied relied solely on their innovation teams to exploit their distributed expertise and limited resources in linking complex technologies to fleeting markets. In this scenario, we argue that the innovation team serves as a protagonist in mobilizing differential images of the future to delivering innovative products and services relevant for value capture (Sarpong & Maclean, 2012). Nevertheless, foresight as a long-term capability expected to be built into a yet-to-be-realised innovation implies that innovation teams as protagonists of the future need to balance their short-term responsibility of developing an innovative product with the organizational demand for a future ‘proof’ yet-to- be-realised innovation. This appears to us as a very interesting problematic which is highly relevant for the context of the present study.</p><p>Given that we conceptualised strategic foresight as an everyday practice, a qualitative exploratory research approach was found to be relevant and appropriate to advance insight into its enactment in the social context in which the organization is embedded (Eisenhardt &</p><p>Graebner, 2007; Yin, 1994). In this regard, qualitative methods of data collection were adopted to help us capture the actors’ lived experiences as well as their inherited knowledge which were of prime importance in generating relevant insights into their everyday situated practices. A short comparative biographical sketch of the case organizations are presented in</p><p>Table 1.</p><p>[Insert Table 1 Here]</p><p>9 Data for the study were collected over a twelve-month period through semi-structured interviews, observations and documents. The semi-structured interviews were the most important source of data. Hence, in each company, we interviewed all innovation team members (a total of 26) for the specific projects under study, as well as their project leaders.</p><p>Interviews usually lasted 45-50 minutes and were digitally recorded and transcribed. In addition, we carried out five or more observations at each organization (a total of 20), including observations of project meetings and observations of informal conversations between team members, which helped to enhance our understanding of the everyday situated practices of the innovation teams, capturing and deepening our understanding of</p><p>‘unverbalised’ rules and relevant group norms (Silverman, 1993). The frequent informal conversations with members of the innovation teams not only helped to reduce the psychological distance between team members and the investigators to a minimum (Schwartz and Schwartz, 1955), but also served as a tool for the identification of recurrent discourse features capable of extending our understanding of the relation between the linguistic form of such texts and the broader social and cultural world in which they were produced. </p><p>The gathered data were then triangulated, analysed and interpreted continuously and iteratively until common themes emerged and became saturated (Corbin & Strauss, 2008;</p><p>Suddaby, 2006). At this stage the triangulated data were studied thoroughly and reflected upon to see whether they matched correctly with what was heard and seen in the field. It was also an opportunity to identify some recurrent phrases which were “analytically converted”</p><p>(Straus, 1978: 30) into relevant themes corresponding to the research questions. </p><p>In response to our theoretical and methodological commitments, initial themes identified from the data were grouped under the organizing logics of skills and dispositions, values, relationships, practical knowledge and background coping, around which situated practices may come into representation (Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki, 1996). Here the research</p><p>10 questions driving the empirical study, as well as interesting issues raised by research participants, were used to further probe the data to match the various accounts of the ‘doings’ and ‘sayings’ of the research participants in their situated activities to see how well they fitted in with these themes. Comparing these initial themes with the extant foresight literature, three themes; evaluation, ordering, and enactment of the future were further developed to guide our analysis. Thematic analysis of the data focused on how team members’ differential visions were reproduced, legitimized, organized, and mobilized towards an idealised shared vision of the yet-to-be-realised innovation, producing a broad range of segments that were further categorised based on their thematic similarities and analytical connexions. The themes were then indexed to generate the analytical themes of prospective sense-making, multi-lateral conversations, and the application of foresight methodologies to explore viable theoretical explanations. These were then applied to the entire dataset by annotating them with numerical codes supported with short descriptors that elaborate the headings. Indexing here was also about making sense of the gaps and linkages between the analytical themes in order to develop a meaningful and more robust understanding of the data and the subsequent interpretation and verification of their meanings (Ritchie & Spencer, 1993). Systematic and rigorous comparison of the indexed themes with the existing literature enabled us to build up understanding of how the various innovation teams experience the world and to identify of logical patterns to produce generalities. The data were then re-arranged under the key themes in a matrix. Typologies were generated and causal associations between the various themes were made. Emerging patterns from the data were then used to develop greater insight and form descriptive explanations of strategic foresight in practice. </p><p>Empirical findings: A process of ‘path-finding’ </p><p>The analysis of the case evidence produced insightful findings regarding how the various innovation teams operated as an organizational subsystem with its own organizing practices,</p><p>11 and their critical approaches to enacting the future as they respond to subtle environmental cues. In accounting for this orientation and functions which contributes to strategic foresight, we identified prospective sense-making, multi-lateral conversations of future possibilities and limits in the present, and the application of futures techniques and methodologies as quintessentially embedded practices and that gave form to the patterns of ‘foresightful’ actions observed in practice. These practices, although unique in character, should not be treated as mutually exclusive because in reality they are complexly interconnected and somehow intrinsically embodied. We now explore these findings in detail.</p><p>Prospective sense-making </p><p>Sense-making, described by Weick (1995) as the social process of identifying and interpreting subtle contextual cues to form salient categories that can be used to inform action and sustain meanings and identities, represents an important component of strategic foresight</p><p>(Aaltonen, 2009; Nathan, 2004; Schwandt & Gorman, 2004). Many of the innovation team members interviewed and observed in this study, however, did not rationalise what they do by simply relying on their past experiences (retrospection). Rather, they appeared to simultaneously construct how their actions will play out in the future to define their environment. Thus, in the face of short-term competitive pressures of organizing, we follow</p><p>MacKay (2009) in referring to this phenomenon as prospective sense-making because interviewees typically did not draw on their past experiences to gain insight into the present.</p><p>Immersed in a temporal flow, they also extrapolated their actions into the future to construct images of the yet-to-be-realised innovation, as the following extract exemplifies.</p><p>I guess you have to think things through in your mind and try and picture what you have done before, what it is you want to do and where they might go and whatever… Just think about how you go by doing something and what problems that might bring or what obstacles you might come across to determine how your idea will impact the current and future state of the product. [Mercury team member C]</p><p>12 Swart et al. (2003, cited in Ibert, 2004) argue that that most software projects start with very little clarity with ambiguous task specifications. This was the case across the four projects we studied. All the teams reiterated that they were not handed clear development strategies or concise specifications of their yet-to-be-realised innovations. We are not sufficiently bold to predict whether this could serve as a primer for the emergence or stifling of strategic foresight, because the incoherent specifications not only serve to provide some form of focal direction as to what the team should do in a particular circumstance, but also tend to escalate the uncertainty surrounding the viability of any inference made to improve the innovation process. However, we observed that prospective sense-making in the various teams emerged as an automatic response to the evolving tensions between project task specifications, problem definition and an ongoing attempt at re-arranging existing structures to bring observed irregularities to some form of meaningful order. Thus, we argue that prospective sense-making is not centrally guided or explicitly set in motion by managers. Its emergence and final determination is a function of a series of interlocking contextual actions improvised in response to specific pattern recognition or projection often triggered by a problem driven search or a serendipitous event.</p><p>There is a lot of stuff in the specification that occasionally on re-reading you will go aha, ooops! This is how we can do something that previously had been done a different way. [Mercury team member D) Problem driven search and serendipitous events are treated here as specific instances that often drove team members to engage in prospective sense-making. Problem driven searches are rational-purposeful actions taken by actors to check how an alternative way of doing something could play out or alternatively to reach beyond a given situation that threatens the innovation process. Thus, unintelligent encounters in practice, environmental jolts and process disruptions tended to activate these searches. One such occurrence involved a customer walking away from a project. The project team had to decide whether to abandon</p><p>13 it themselves, or whether to persevere in the hope that another potential customer might be interested, as the following excerpt explains: </p><p>We spent a lot of time developing a bespoke product for a customer, only to realise the company isn’t interested anymore. We then had to think hard in turning the product into something else someone out there would like to buy. [Kemitech team leader]</p><p>Customer demands provided parameters which helped to guide the development of the future innovation. However, as the extract above implies, they were not the be-all-and-end-all of the creative process, being seemingly more concerned with the product’s functionality. This is confirmed by Mercury team-members as follows:</p><p>The customers don’t really care about technology; um they want something that works. The only thing that the people who manage the actual software and the database say they do care about is: it easy to install? Is it easy to add a new one? Is it easy to back up when it fails? Yes, to a large extent they don’t really care, as long as it is standard Microsoft and uses standard tools, that is all that is of interest to them. [Mercury team member A] The customers we are dealing with want stuff that mirrors what they are dealing with already, plus a few extra pretty fancy bells that always make it look nice, but it has all the functionality they have already got and anything else is a bonus. [Mercury team member D] On the other hand, serendipitous events included those unintended actions, unexpected situations or what may be called thought emergencies that by ‘chance’ bring into existence a new understanding or a possible and desirable future state. </p><p>… Oh my gosh! See what we can rescue and move on [pointing to the computer screen]. I think maybe that is what we should be looking at, I don’t know if our business development team does, but maybe you know there should be a dedicated team, that just looks at what is coming in from the public domain. [Mercury team member B] This moment of unexpected possibility coming to life-in-action may not only usher an actor into a new environment, but may also have the ability to provoke the actor to take some personal responsibility by engaging in some form of mental activity to ascertain the relevance of an observed signal, as one interviewee explains:</p><p>14 I had a burning issue that I thought I wanted to work on....Sometimes I think, you are really bored, Frank, you have been working on this for 5 years, and you don’t stretch yourself, but on the other hand I think ok, I need to find out why something is not working properly. [Mercury team member A]</p><p>Multi-lateral conversations about future possibilities and limits in the present</p><p>While prospective sense-making in individual situated practices may bring into view future possibilities and limits in the present, the reality of being embedded in a team requires such ideas to be legitimised before they can be exploited or explored further. Organized around shared skills and practical understandings, we refer to this practice of ‘path-finding’ where hard facts, hunches and ‘utopian ideas’ get debated and shared between team members as</p><p>‘multi-lateral conversations’. These conversations fell short of being strategic conversations</p><p>(van der Hiejden, 1996; Krogh & Roos, 1995), because they were sometimes limited to verbal interactions and did not go beyond mere information exchange. Nevertheless, we observed that these conversations were often “tied to an empirically grounded understanding of limits and possibilities in the present” (Benson, 1977: 18), and provided a platform for the various innovation teams to collectively evaluate identified possibilities and their anticipated differential consequences. Some of these conversations were generally limited in scope, took place among two or three members, and concerned the redefinition of identified possibilities and limits (Quinn, 1996). These informal discussions could take place anytime, anywhere, either through simple electronic mail exchanges or face-to-face inside or outside the official working areas. </p><p>There is no specific time set aside to talk about the challenges we face. It happens as part of the working day. Often people stand in the kitchen talking to each other about issues, and around four minutes past 11, there is a mass exodus, they go and buy crisps, chocolates and milk from the shops and that is 15 minutes, cross pollination, talking to each other, but out of the working environment so in that sense, there is time, but there is no specific allocated time for that. [Mercury team leader]</p><p>15 On the other hand, some of the conversations took place at the request and discretion of project managers. Thus, all members of the innovation team gathered at one location to review, discuss and evaluate ‘new visions’ and strategise as to how to explore or exploit identified possibilities. Here, potential complex issues that could not be resolved among several programmers in their situated informal discussions are brought to the attention of the team. The frequency of these meetings varied across the teams, providing occasions for the discussion of the overall innovation process, timelines and project milestones. While these meetings by their very formal nature often require a memo having been sent to members with an agenda, they were also organized on an ad hoc basis in response to an ‘emergency’. For instance, one member recalled:</p><p>Yesterday we were doing a gooey design, so we all just came to the whiteboard and said, it would be great to have these conceptual linkages, or if we did this, we might get this… It’s really flexible and we have a real agile environment down there. [Kemitech team member E] Nevertheless, the intensity of free discussions often depended on the extent to which the identified opportunities challenged existing assumptions and mental models of team members as well as the concreteness of the ‘utopia’, the novelty or disruptive nature of the idea and the critical uncertainties of its anticipated impact on the future innovation. As recounted by one team member:</p><p>I think we look at what else, the severity would be of the issue, what impact it has on the rest of the project and maybe I don’t know, the go live date as well if that would be affected. So we kind of sort of have a chat about it and see the different viewpoints of the various sections. [Mercury team member A]</p><p>Ensuing debates were often future directed, open-ended, efficacious and driven by what can be described as cultural presuppositions and a mutually beneficial social interaction which in turn serve as a dynamic medium through which members actions and alternate ‘visions’ come into presence. In this regard, the multi-lateral conversations served not only as a forum for actors to share their anxieties and vague mental conceptualizations of future expectations, but</p><p>16 also as a mechanism for negotiating ideas as well as an opportunity for both active and passive stakeholder voices to shape the collective actions of the teams. One team leader describing this dynamic had this to say: </p><p>You speak to any programmer, they are the best programmer, nobody writes better code than them, and their code is perfect. They are all like that, every single one of them. Then in the meeting, everybody will say, my idea is the best and this is how we do it, and someone says yeah, but I did it like this, and it stirs the thought processing. I can make my best idea better by using some of your almost good ideas, so, in that sense, there is cross pollination between the programmers and people come to understand why their idea might be flawed. [Interlab team leader]</p><p>The recurrent inter-simulations and responses characterising the presentations of ideas or points-of-view are not just about people taking their turn to speak or share their thoughts.</p><p>Rather, proponents are expected to articulate succinct explanations, justifications and possible implications of their ideas regarding the future of the product. It is all about temporal structuring and restructuring of dispositions – that is, constructing narratives capable of improving the teams’ collective practice and existing social order. The logic is again temporally embedded in the interactions that occur during these rounds of discussions. An actor who takes his turn in presenting an alternative narrative simply enters what Cooper</p><p>(1976: 1002) describes as an ‘open field’, where he “uses action as a means of revealing the latent in himself and his world; his action makes visible what is invisible”. Thus, the frank and open discussions at these formal meetings provide a means for the teams to creatively synthesise what may sometimes appear to be unrelated, competing and critical ideas into coherent versions of an emerging desirable future. On the other hand, it seems particularly important to note that peoples’ vested particularities and political interests may influence their views and the resultant counter-ideas and arguments they might advance for consideration. Some discussions, we came to understand, were part of a long-lasting debate which might continue even after being brought to an apparent temporal closure. This often occurred purposefully in response to ‘coping’ with the inherent environmental uncertainties</p><p>17 that may characterise the emerging alternative pathways, or when the strategic choices readily available to the team appeared qualitatively to contradict the desirable future. </p><p>Well, I suppose it all comes down to the set meetings, somebody will say something, they will say in the meeting, but that wouldn’t be actioned immediately. Everyone will go away and have a think about it and then for the next meeting, it will be brought up again and the same people can all throw in their real ideas and progress from there, so that a decision could be made. [Interlab team leader] In a related development another team leader interjected: Sometimes when people come up with a grand idea, the first question I normally ask is: How long will it take you to prove it to me? If it is going to cost me a day and I feel it sounds like a decent idea, I will give someone a date and try it on. If I am not so sure, I will say, tell you what, bring that subject up at our Wednesday meeting. If they say nothing about it in the meeting, I will then point to them and say you had something to say…. I will play stupid and then they will bring the idea up. If it is generally thought to be a good idea, we might try it. If it is thought to be a bad idea, we probably won’t. [Mercury team leader] These suspensions of discussions, while brief, nevertheless give the various actors some time and space to think independently about new initiatives as well as the already identified options before the group meets again to work together towards a collective judgment</p><p>(Sniezek & Henry, 1990). At this stage, ideas appear only as sensory images which tend to mobilise the actors towards active participation in search of viable interpretations and innovation on meanings in context. Thus, while multi-lateral conversations may lead to the exploration of new ideas and new angles of vision, potential possibilities need to be re- contextualized, tested and evaluated against competing alternatives to ascertain their viability in practice. </p><p>Application of futures techniques and methodologies </p><p>Following multi-lateral conversations, purposeful actions are taken aimed at converting prospective opportunities and limits into productive outcomes. Co-ordinated by experimental action and interaction, this is made possible through the application of selected future- oriented techniques and methodologies to potential opportunities and limits. The coordinated experimental actions resemble ‘wind-tunnelling’ − a perceptually guided process propelled</p><p>18 by imaginations on the part of team members to bring desirable futures into existence</p><p>(MacKay & McKiernan 2006; van der Heidjen, 1996), imaginatively reorganizing the range of plausible opportunities, their differential future impact and perceived consequences into factual relevant future-oriented organizational knowledge (Fuller & Loogma, 2009). This practical evaluation of potential future opportunities is akin to what MacKay and McKiernan</p><p>(2006: 97) describe as the “formal testing for surprise, plausibility, internal consistency and gestalt” scenario logics during scenario planning. However, across the teams we studied, we observed that members opportunistically combined future-related activities or techniques</p><p>(Popper, 2008), to help them get a better understanding of the full range of alternative possibilities. There was a total reliance on informal “simple low-hazard technologies”</p><p>(Weick, 1993: 376) in evaluating potential future opportunities in the present. One of the project managers observed:</p><p>We may come to realise another company is offering something that we need to put in our product. Some of them make sense and require simple thinking to decide. For complex ones we will do some form of value analysis on cost and function to evaluate whether it is worth going in that direction. Nevertheless, we scrupulously review any tender that will come out in our business arena, to see what functionality they are looking for, can we provide it based on what our core strengths are, or is it worth our while to provide it? [Mercury project manager] In a related development, another team member noted:</p><p>…I think we look at the severity of the issue, what impact it has on the rest of the project, and the go live date if that will be affected. So we kind of have a chat as to what to do and you have everyone making some input. The Developers are always talking about a long chain of things that can be done; the project manager is looking at time, so you know it can be very interesting. [Kemitech team member C] Generally, individuals with the requisite professional and technical expertise in an area of concern may be tasked to ‘wind-tunnel’ potential ideas in a live environment and report back to the team at a stipulated time. Here, we observed that these individuals often rely on ‘code- brokerage’ − the re-use of existing software codes (Ye, 2001) as a spontaneous coping mechanism to guide the exploration of future possibilities by drawing on their past and</p><p>19 present experiences. As observed by one team member, such experiences may also directly involve customers, for the purposes of tailoring bespoke products better to their needs:</p><p>We have had a few long meetings with the customers about changes in a large section which will require a lot of coding to make it work and then a reasonable amount of retro-coding on all the pages to implement it, but it is agreed that it would be for the best and improve products as a whole. [Kemitech team member A] The ‘retro-coding’ can be interpreted as an extrapolating of past knowledge in previously unexplored ways within the exigency of improving the future performance of the yet-to-be- realised innovation in the present. While historiography in the form of counterfactuals and scenarios in the form of statistics were a major symptom of the mental and interpretive schemes of the various innovation teams, the methods they relied on extensively were qualitative in nature. For example, while possibilities were frequently presented as probabilities, case probabilities were often preferred over class probabilities in advancing the argument for a particular pathway. Based on the empirical case data, we were able to map out some activities commonly undertaken by the various teams.</p><p>[Insert Table 2 Here]</p><p>Drawing on the existing literature and a mild form of “predictive fin-de-siècle thinking” (Barry & Elmes, 1997: 432), we then mapped these activities to their corresponding foresight methods. Note that the activities and methods presented are not exhaustive, but only an indicative summary of what we observed in practice. This extensive reliance on soft techniques by the various teams confirms Cohen’s (1993: 58) assertion that “formal methods are both too time-consuming and too divorced from the knowledge experts have accumulated”. Furthermore, it reinforces Mietzner and Reger’s (2009) findings that most technology firms engaged in foresight practices employ simple methods and techniques that do not require any deep understanding of methodology. Nevertheless, we observed across the different teams that most of the transformative actions they took were often evaluated on the</p><p>20 basis of fundamental norms, industry standards and historical social structures. The danger here was succinctly summarised by one member when she argued that:</p><p>Creeping standardisation sometimes enforces solution x, even though solution x may not necessarily be the best one. [Kemitech team member B] Notwithstanding the constraints imposed by industry standards, the quest for originality tends to encourage teams to defy conventions and look for novel ways to push their boundaries.</p><p>Thus, although application of foresight techniques to potential opportunities often centred on long-term development of the organization’s technological capabilities, the need to develop radically new and meaningful customer experiences, and novel capabilities into the yet-to-be- realised innovation served as the fundamental logic in choosing between the plethora of techniques at the team’s disposal. However, the application of foresight-oriented techniques and methodologies to identified possibilities did not produce an authentic closure. This is because in embarking on a desired pathway, the new future which comes into presence may open up a new context which likewise comes with novel opportunities and limits. Through prospective sense-making, for example, team members may invariably come to identify these new opportunities within the broad vision of improving the innovation process and the future innovation. </p><p>Discussion and conclusion </p><p>There has been a growing interest in the relationship between organizing practices and strategic foresight. Nevertheless, the role and contribution of ‘ordinary’ organizational members to strategic foresight has often been discounted. This study indicates that there are demonstrable links between the taken-for-granted organizing routines and practices of members positioned further down the organizational hierarchy to strategic foresight. We make this analytical claim after studying how different innovation teams creatively evaluate and reconfigure identified sources of potentialities into resources and productive outcomes in</p><p>21 their situated practice. Adopting an exploratory qualitative approach, three software organizations and their four new product innovation projects served as the empirical research sites. Data were collected through qualitative methods of semi-structured interviews, and supplemented with observations and archival documents from the projects. Our findings</p><p>‘unpack’ the key organizing practices (prospective sense-making, multilateral participation, and the application of foresight techniques and methodologies) and the associated actions of people positioned much further down in organizations that gave form to observed patterns of strategic foresight. Nevertheless, while these practices and their underlying activities come together to give form to strategic foresight, they may have personal ratings, as opposed to having been pre-structured with a morphological classification that needs to be pursued at all cost. Consistent with existing research that argues that foresight practices are used informal in everyday life (Daheim, 2008; Manu, 2007; Slaughter, 1995), our findings reinforce the assertion by Cunha et al. (2006: 947) that “the future of the organisation is the result of the many activities that take place every day in an organisational setting”. Furthermore, the suggestion that ‘ordinary’ organizational members’ play a vital role in the cultivation of strategic foresight also gives credence to the myriad of polyphonic and subjugated voices in the field of foresight studies which advocate for foresight to be treated as a distributed capacity rather than merely a managerial competence (e.g. Cunha & Chia, 2007; Cunha et al.,</p><p>2006; Sarpong & Maclean, 2011). More importantly, our findings highlight practices and activities as a pragmatic new site where the tasks, connections and architectures that foresight processes require come into representation (Sarpong, 2011; Waehrens & Riis, 2010). </p><p>By drawing on the contemporary turn to a practice approach, the findings from our empirical inquiry contribute to the existing literature on strategic foresight, as well as to the more recent emerging literature on strategy-as-practice (Chia, 2007; Jarzabowski et al., 2007;</p><p>Rasche & Chia, 2009; Whittington, 2006), by demonstrating how mundane practices and</p><p>22 everyday activities of ‘ordinary’ grassroots organizational members may contribute to strategic foresight. We suggest that the cultivation of strategic foresight may be less top-down and more ‘haphazard’ than is commonly recognized, in keeping with the nature of practice as identified by Schatzki (1996: 2), informed by the ‘contingent, shifting and fragile relations among social phenomena that weave them into ever-changing constellations’. From this perspective, the main contribution of this paper is in narrowing the (widening) epistemic gap between the theory and practice of strategic foresight, in addition to focusing attention on the scholarly and managerial neglect of foresight among organizational members positioned lower down in the organization.</p><p>Our research also has implications for managers, especially for those working in software organizations. First, managers need to take micro-level activities and practices seriously by encouraging flexible organizing architectures (Cuff, 1992) that may provide a forum for polyphonic voices, which are often neglected during objective discourse, to be heard. If well managed, such practices, we argue, can help promote creative thinking</p><p>(MacKay & McKiernan, 2010; Wright & Cairns, 2011), and possibly serve as a mechanism to evaluate organizational members’ sentiments, fears, anxieties, and/or expectations about ongoing projects (Kotnour, 2000). While not wishing to predict that the practices identified in our study could serve as a precursor for the ‘democratization’ of organizationally pervasive innovation processes, nevertheless we believe that they have the potential to lighten imagination, commit and energize collective exploration and exploitation of potentialities and boundaries in the present to reach an idealized future (Konstopoulos & Bozionelos, 2011;</p><p>March, 1991). In this way, ‘ordinary’ members of the organization may also become more enthusiastic in assuming ownership and responsibility for projects, especially during the development of technical system requirements in complex and fast-changing environments. </p><p>23 While our study offers several insights into how taken-for-granted organizing practices may contribute to strategic foresight, it also has limitations. First, the findings from this research are based on qualitative in-depth studies of three innovation teams embedded in different organizations, engaged in the development of four distinct products. Hence, we would not wish to claim that these findings are generalizable to all software organizations or technology-based firms. Secondly, the decision to accord primacy to innovation teams and their relationships, interactions and situated activities runs the risk of being perceived as attributing ‘everything’ to the innovation team, while discounting the role played by top managers in the cultivation of strategic foresight. While a modest attempt has been made to justify these methodological choices, the paper may have raised broader philosophical questions relating to the locus of knowledge, power and what counts as practices, all of which is open to debate. Thirdly this study at best can be described as a cross-sectional due to the limited time period of one year over which the various innovation teams were studied (Avital,</p><p>2000). The lack of a longitudinal perspective may mean that the research findings may have only provided a partial understanding of the relationship between organizing practices and strategic foresight (Pettigrew, 1990; Van de Ven, 2007). In this regard, a longitudinal study replicating this research may therefore be necessary to ascertain whether additional insights and findings can be observed or generated. Such study might also go further to operationalize strategic foresight in innovation teams to evaluate its impact on the successful creation and capture of value. This could help organizations better understand the importance of encouraging working practices that emphasize creation of space and time for reflection and conversation about strategic issues at the micro level. </p><p>We suggest that if managers and scholars are to take seriously the claim that organizing practices serve as a site for the emergence of strategic foresight, it is necessary to develop the theoretical connections and relationships between prevailing patterns of practices</p><p>24 that serve as the fundamental locus for the generation, evaluation and synthesis of alternative futures. 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Investigation software for security services.</p><p>Table2: Futures oriented techniques and their underlying activities</p><p>Technique/Method Underlying activities</p><p>31 Intuitive logics • Brainstorming sessions, code-brokerage, lateral thinking, and counterfactual thought experiments.</p><p>Trend and cross • SWOT analysis, market trends/patterns analysis, value chain impact analysis analysis, case probabilities, and impact simulations on product architecture. Competitive intelligence • ‘Autopsy’ of competitors’ products, evaluation of lead users’ feedback, and the evaluation of technological trajectories.</p><p>32</p>