Something I had been meaning to read for a while was the excellent HBS article called Scanning the Periphery (it’s a PDF). The article – which in the HBS tradition – has become a book, examines the value of fringe scanning and suggests methods for doing so. Interestingly there is also a “Peripheral Vision” blog which is suffering from neglect with a mere three entries.

This quote goes some way to encapsulating the value of fringe scaning :

Buckminster Fuller developed a very personal and systematic approach to scanning the periphery. Whenever he was at an airport, he would randomly select a magazine from the stands in the bookstore and read it on his plane ride from cover to cover. On one trip the magazine might be about gardening, on another about fashion or airplane design. With each trip, Fuller learned something new and saw the world in a different way. Many managers could benefit from adding such vicarious reading discipline to their travel routines, especially now that we customize our computer screens and newsletters to report only what we deem relevant. Undirected searches may offer answers to questions that we do not even recognize or know how to formulate.

There’s also some interesting validation for harnessing the fringes inside an organisation :

Most organizations have maverick employees with insights about the periphery,but they rarely tap these individuals. Find informed people, either inside or out, who reject the conventional wisdom about your businesses. Maybe they are congenitally unhappy with the direction of the business, or maybe they are talented outliers with insights into new customers and technologies that give them an idea for a new business. What shifting winds are they feeling that the rest of the organization is missing? As Andy Grove notes in his book Only the Paranoid Survive, these mavericks usually have a difficult time explaining their visceral feelings to top management, who are usually the last to know.