SCENARIO PLANNING

Does it feel like the world is changing too quickly for you to develop and implement a strategic plan? Do you find yourself having to make strategic decisions without sufficient information, or not being able to take a long-term view? Scenario planning helps you envision a range of possible futures and build a competitive advantage from understanding and planning for future scenarios that would present opportunities for or threats to your firm’s success.

• Takes strategic planning a step further in an approach that considers scenarios that could unfold in the future.
  
  
• Provides broader consideration of more factors, improving the relevance of decisions when uncertainties exist.
  
  
• Stimulates future-focused thinking among your management team and heightens awareness of external influences and forces.
  
  
• Helps you and your management team to make strategic decisions that are financially, economically, demographically, environmentally, and globally relevant.

Scenario planning will help you to make better business decisions through a process that considers the following:

• The “big decision.” Your planning team will focus on the highest-level strategic decision that your firm must make in order to meet your objectives.
  
  
• Trends and drivers. Using our Ignore-Beware-Prepare-Act ranking tool, you’ll identify the external trends that seem most likely to play out as well as have the most significant impact on your firm and your “world” so that you can allocate your resources wisely.
  
  
• Scenarios. You’ll write stories of “alternative futures” within the context of which you might have to make decisions.
  
  
• Triggers. You’ll note the signals or events that may unfold in the future that would indicate that a scenario is beginning to play out—thereby calling your management team to action.
  
  
• Strategies, action plans, and contingency plans. Decisions and activities that your planning team agrees that the firm will employ—either regardless of future events or because of them.

The goal of scenario planning is not so much to predict the future as it is to consider a range of possible, alternative futures and to discuss, rehearse, and strategize how your firm would act within the context of each and any of them. We measure the success of the scenario planning activity not merely by the development of provocative stories of the future and intellectual stimulation, but by real changes that your management team will make in the way you make decisions as a result of the process.

The result of scenario planning is a long-term vision and action plans for your firm that are based on both the anticipatable aspects and the less-predictable aspects of the future, which will better position your firm competitively—as well as provide a rare intellectual opportunity for your planning team.