Building a Successful Company

 

Strategic Scenario Planning: How to Get Ready for the Future

The future is open and cannot be predicted. The goal of strategic scenario planning is to destroy our original ideas about the future and realize that the world of tomorrow may not correspond with our today’s ideas about it. Strategic scenarios will remove the blinds from our eyes, will help us overcome our company blindness and get rid ofour tunnel vision of the future. They will enable us to “think about the unthinkable”. They will enable us to think over and above of our usual - individual, group or organizational - frame (“thinking outside the box“). They will enable us to realize that the future can bring us great opportunities and great threats that we have never thought about and, therefore, did not prepare for. Strategic scenario planning “gives us new eyes”. We will never see the future the way we used to see it before.

Strategic scenario planning is the first, initial phase of developing the long-term business strategy for the future and of formulating the long-term strategic vision of the company. If we want to be successful, we must build such a robust and flexible company that will “grow and thrive” in any future. And, because we are unable to tell which scenario (or which combination of scenarios) will become a reality, we must thoroughly prepare for all scenarios. We must build a company that will be ready to take advantage of all the great future opportunities and, at the same time, will be able to face all big future threats (or will be able to prevent their occurrence) in all alternative scenarios. Naturally, a part of this preparation is our maximum effort to influence the future so as to pro-actively create as many great opportunities and prevent as many big threats as possible.

In strategic scenario planning, we are not modeling only several scenarios of alternative futures, but also “evolutionary roads” from the present to these futures. We then determine the so-called weak signals on these roads. Weak signals (leading indicators, early indicators) on the road from the present to the future can be identified and correctly interpreted only by people who have already mentally traveled this road during strategic scenario planning exercise, and who are therefore ready to see these weak signals and are able to correctly interpret them. The others will either not notice them at all, or are not able to correctly interpret them. Weak signals will not be meaningful for them. Thus, weak signals tell us with considerable head start, which road from the present to the future we have been following, and towards which alternative future we are heading. They are our “memories of the future” or our “déja vu”. They will enable us to get a considerable head start to prepare for taking advantage of great opportunities and eliminating big threats in the alternative future to which we are heading. To identify weak signals we must of course develop means for their monitoring and we must build a comprehensive environmental monitoring and scanning system: i. e. we must develop our early warning system.

 

Strategic scenario planning can be implemented in many different ways. For our clients we prepared an intensive problem solving workshop Strategic Scenario Planning.

Participants: Top and upper management, candidates for these positions, high-potential managers and strategy specialists.

Goals:

1. Creating a common knowledge and skill base and laying foundations for strategic scenario planning.

2. Creating customized consise strategic scenarios for the company.

3. Developing the long-term business strategy for the future.

4. Identifying "weak signals", developing means for their monitoring and building a comprehensive environmental monitoring and scanning system: building an early warning system.

5. Preparing for scenario communication in the company: way of their presentation, visualization, etc.

Process

After completing the training module Strategic Scenario Planning (see training program Building a Successful Company: Business Strategy), workshop participants can start developing scenarios. The work on "customized" strategic scenarios will start "inside-out" - by identifying the most importants strategic decisions that the company should make in a near future to be well prepared for the future. Scenarios of alternative futures will allow the top management to make these vitally important decisions in an optimal way. Strategic scenarios will describe the key parameters of alternative futures of the company's external environment that are the most important for making these decisions.

We are not capable of "predicting" the long-term consequences of global economic crisis. It is not possible "to predict", what devastating threats and strategic risks they may yet bring for individual countries and regions, for individual industries and companies, and how they may affect the quality of life and fate of all people. Strategic scenario planning currently constitutes the best preparation for all big destructive threats that the future may yet bring. It may be successfully applied in any industry and in company of every type and size. It could be called “managing the company from the future“.



Our approach to strategic scenario planning is described in more detail elsewhere.

See: Perlaki, I.: Building Successful Companies in Transition Economies. In: Denison, D. R. (ed.): Managing Organizational Change in Transition Economies, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, Mahwah, New Jersey, 2001, p. 483-509.

Case Study: All strategic scenarios we built with our clients are of course strictly confidential. One of our clients - Central & East European Health Policy Network - made an exception and published their Strategic Scenarios 2020: The Future of CEE Healthcare on their website www.ceehpn.eu both in English and Czech. Short videos of four alternative futures of the CEE healthcare and five wild cards can be also found on that website. CEE HPN published these scenarios and wild cards also as a book.

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