Scenario Planning

Strategy for any organisation is about the way its leaders fulfil its ‘mission’ in the environment in which they find themselves. The tendency is to assume that the wider environment is either unchanging or predictable. Based on forecasts, strategic thinking is converted into plans that get frozen into budgets and structures. These are slow to respond to rapid or unexpected change, and our workforce is left to deal with the crisis or failure to deliver. If we are to manage the risk of the ‘unknown’, we must imagine the unknown, be alert to its warning signals, and make our resources flexible enough to cope with the unknowable.

‘Too many forces work against the possibility of getting the right forecast…accept uncertainty, try to understand it, and make it part of our reasoning.’ Pierre Wack, Harvard Business Review,1985

This workshop is an introduction to the technique of ‘Scenario Planning’, a strategic thinking tool designed to tease out the range of possibilities in your operating environment. This is a step beyond forecasting - it is creating a new reality, where imagining the unlikely future can make us prepare for its possibilities and demands: culturally, emotionally, structurally and intellectually.