Improving Long-Term Strategic Planning: An Analysis of STEEPLE Factors Identified in Environmental Scanning Brainstorms

Given an understanding of factors that drive change in a firm's external environment is an important element of strategy development, some form of environmental scan to identify factors tends to be included. This paper presents findings from an analysis of environmental scans conducted by 76 manufacturing firms. Firm's senior decision makers brainstormed factors using the standard STEEPLE framework to prompt participants to consider social, technological, economic, ethical, political, legal, and environmental factors. The first finding reveals that participants' perspectives are dominated by events rather than trends. When the 886 responses were categorized as events, trends, requirements or uncertainties, over 70% of responses related to events. This finding is significant for advocates of systems thinking in strategy, and in addition the finding may provide quantitative evidence of cognitive bias in scanning. Second, the brainstorms were found to vary significantly across two key dimensions: the breadth of factors identified within STEEPLE categories, and the number of factors identified in the most distant future time-period. Four brainstorm archetypes are suggested, and while the validity of the archetypes is subject to ongoing research work, the finding could aid workshop facilitators to tailor their approach to future scans.