How Senior Managers Acquire and Use Information in Environmental Scanning

Environmental scanning is the acquisition and use of information about events and trends in an organization’s external environment, the knowledge of which would assist management in planning the organization’s future courses of action. This paper reports a study of how 13 chief executives in the Canadian publishing and telecommunications industries scan their environments and use the information in decision making. Each respondent was asked to relate two critical incidents of information use. The incidents were analyzed according to their environmental sectors, the information sources, and their use in decision making. The interview data suggest that the chief executives concentrate their scanning on the competition, customer, regulatory, and technological sectors of the environment. In the majority of cases, the chief executives used environmental information in the Entrepreneur decisional role, initiating new products, projects, or policies. The chief executives acquire or receive environmental information from multiple, complementary sources. Personal sources are important for information on customers and competitors; while printed or formal sources are also important for information on technological and regulatory matters.