- Stochastic resonance
- Scanning the Periphery
- The Labyrinths of Information
- The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning.
-Erich Fromm
Environmental scanning is not monitoring. It is a deliberate activity designed to increase the possibility of surprise. It assumes you already have a commitment to changing your current view of reality by exposing yourself to what you couldn’t anticipate.
So, having a rigid procedure for environmental scanning won’t work. Over time, you’ll find less and less novelty and more and more repetition. You need an approach that has enough noise in its scan to produce stuff you didn’t expect or even know might exist.
I use a variety of ways of accessing information, including ones that I am uncomfortable with, or frankly disagree with, in order to maximize the possibility of surprise. This approach requires scanning a lot of useless crap. But I’ve gotten faster and more accurate in my scanning for crap over the years, so I still get a fair amount of surprise. I also add and subtract sources regularly to maintain the surprise. I use the criterion that a particular source is no longer surprising to me.
Since anybody’s experience of surprise is conditioned by the personal path they have followed in all its eccentricity and uniqueness, a useful environmental scanning approach will be customized to that anybody. The vagaries and dynamic of our personal purpose and meaning will also influence what we find surprising, and that will change over time as we change. Our ecosystem always includes ourselves.
The way that this kind of environmental scanning helps us detect weak signals is best understood as similar to a kind of process called stochastic resonance. Stochastic resonance happens when you add noise to a weak signal. That part of the noise that matches some part of the signal will boost the “volume” of the signal. That part that doesn’t match will cancel out through interaction with other parts of the noise.
We often try to remove noise if we are dealing with a weak signal because we believe that will make the signal clearer. So it is surprising to find out that noise can help us understand weak signals. This reality is an interesting metaphor/framework for interaction with any CAS.
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