Foresight
What is Foresight?
"The analysis of relevant information in the past and present, to take into consideration probable future developments in such way that courses of action (plans) can be determined thus making the organization able to achieve its objectives " (Sisck and Sverdlik).
"It is the element of administration in which, based in the future conditions revealed through technical investigations an enterprise will face, the principal courses of action are determined enabling the completion of objectives of an enterprise" (Agustín Reyes Ponce).
"It is to calculate what is to come and prepare for it. It is to articulate the programs of action". (Henri Fayol).
As it can be deduced, the word foresight comes from foreseeing or fore - see, which means, "seeing things before they happen", or "trying to see what will happen before it does". As a result, we will understand foreseeing as that administrative process stage where we diagnose through past and present data deemed as relevant. Consequently, we will be able to construct social, political, economical, technological or other contexts in which the enterprise will be involved in a short as well as long term.
Every administrator must be a visionary, but at the same time, foreseer, since in these days the only constant is "change", and we must be prepared to face it. The world can change in one moment or another, as it happened on September 11 with the Twin Towers in New York.
Principles of Foresight.
· Principle of management consistency: we must be stable and coherent when we make a decision and keep firm until we complete what we have set ourselves to do. If inconveniences emerge, we must find solution alternatives for such problems and always follow the path we have traced.
· Principle of Priority: being the first stage in the administrative process, foresight has a direct and indirect incidence in the rest of stages (planning, organizing, integration, management and control).
· Principle of transition: it is related to the previous Principle, since foresight is immersed in every stage of the administrative process, and it transits through all of them.
· Principle of execution: everything we have set out to do must be executed in the programmed time, trying to avoid delays and any situation that hold up the operations of the enterprise.
