Prospects for the Application of Strategic Foresight in the Tunisian Context: The Case of Industrial Companies

Abstract

If foresight aims at providing information and analyses which will allow better considering the uncertainties and the turbulences of the environment; strategic foresight would be a management tool which controls the necessity of ensuring the serious attempts of investigating the future before making decisions. The survival of the organization, its development and its evolution depends on this exploration.Through this research, we have tried to describe the practice of strategic foresight by the Tunisian companies and consequently their capacity to adopt such approach.More specifically, through an administered questionnaire with 39 industrial companies, we have tried to explain the factors allowing a better understanding of the mechanisms determining the companies' commitment in the field of strategic foresight.The empirical results have shown that the adoption of strategic foresight by companies which would be reduced to the adoption of a preactive and a proactive attitude towards changes, would be the answer to the limitations of the classical methods of planning which the manager resorts to in his daily management, would require the implication of the various concerned actors, and finally, would be most of all interested in large companies. However, foresight tools do not seem to affect the companies' adoption of strategic foresight.Thereby, for the Tunisian managers, strategic foresight is essentially perceived as a state of mind, an attitude facing the complexity of the problems they are confronting.