Strategies are based on a chosen route between a sober admission on where you are and a reasonable prediction on where the future will be, and your desired position there. It is an absolute necessity to foresee what the future holds.
Therefore, planning for the most likely scenario amongst a multitude, while still being agile enough to change when change inevitably happens, should be focus for organizations seeking their strategy. According to Harvard BusinessSchool, scenario planning “is a process that stimulates imaginative, creative thinking to better prepare an organization for the future. Participants in a scenario planning exercise first conduct research to understand the major forces that might move the world in different directions. They then map out a small number of possible alternative futures (called “scenarios”), craft narratives to describe these scenarios, and develop options for their organization for managing within these future worlds.”
In a fast changing market where development of technologies, environments and policies are fast-forwarded, scenario planning is a tool for piloting possible outcomes of the future. Today, there are several different methods; forecasting, contingency planning, sensitivity analysis, back casting, hype testing and more.
- Do you use scenario planning? If so, which method? If not, why?
As one of the founding members of the Innovation Pioneers Network, Googol will host the upcoming Tank Meeting #38 on May 10th. The theme of the day is Scenario Planning and we will review five different methods for Scenario Planning and apply one of them to a case which is the basis if our workshop. Join us!