Picturing the future: Using mental imagery to enrich strategic environmental assessment

Abstract

Executive Overview As organizational planners and managers sit down at today's planning sessions, they find themselves racing significant challenges. The business environment is growing more turbulent, complex, and global, and strategic-level managers and planning teams are finding it harder to process and conceptualize the multitude of conflicting environmental data. It has become even more difficult to create a realistic vision for the organization and its environment based on the large cache of historical and current data, which has been distorted to some degree by personal biases and assumptions. Mental imagery appears to hold significant promise for management planning and practice. Mental imagery is the process of visualizing pictures, events, and scenarios in the “mind's eye.” This article discusses why and how mental imagery has proven useful in business settings. In addition, it offers a model the authors have found to be extremely successful in their facilitation of environmental scanning and planning efforts in many different organizations. The application of imagery leads to a less abstract, more meaningful understanding of the environment with creative and novel solutions being the ultimate result.