Designing insightful inquiring systems for sustainable organizational foresight

This paper contributes to the theory of collaborative problem solving and strategy design by reviewing the state of the art in the application of problem solving and dialectical methods, and then linking up with analytical and computer-aided approaches. Churchman's concept of dialectical inquiry (DI) is presented, and some major derivatives of DI are reviewed, as well as an integrative method for sustainable insightful foresight developed by the authors called comprehensive situation mapping (CSM). In addition to its dialectical process side, CSM offers computational capabilities for devising and figuring out change scenarios. The theory for the manual application of CSM is summarized; in addition, its recent computerized version is presented and likely future improvements are sketched out in light of a current spate of case studies investigating the user-friendliness of its computerization.