Scenario Planning and Agility: The Case for Scenarios In an Uncertain World
Scenario planning and agility. Too often, managers and leaders focus on controlling the near term. They don’t take the time to consider if what they prioritize as important today will be useful, valuable, or applicable to some future state of the organization. As soon as the future comes up in conversation, people typically take one of two positions:
- They dismiss the future as something beyond them, or
- They engage in the discussion haphazardly, with great confidence in their own prognostications.
Both create dangers when attempting to navigate the future. The first ignores it, hoping that its arrival will be slow and its implications nonconsequential. Rarely is that the case. The second asserts assumptions that may put the organization on the wrong trajectory, perhaps one it cannot adjust in time to meet the real needs of a future market. Both lock people and the organization into a set of assumptions about the future that may go undocumented. Plans rub up against the unfolding future, creating friction rather than fulfillment.
Scenario planning’s “uncertainties” are best captured using STEEP, which stands for Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental and Political. These categories help prompt thinking that goes beyond most participants’ day-to-day areas of influence. The uncertainties should be explored from the outside in. This means that global and higher-order market uncertainties should be gathered, rather than those directly related to the company or its immediate market and competitors. When a competitor will ship a new product is a much more near-term issue than the shape of the regulatory framework for an area in ten or twenty years.
Scenario planning offers a third approach, a more rational path that incorporates both fear and forecast. Scenarios begin by documenting all the forces and factors for which no one can know their future value. These forces and factors must be critical to the organization and its business, or its sphere of influence in the case of NGOs and governments. By purposefully documenting uncertainty, scenarios help people and organizations confront what they can’t know.
Although individuals may fear the future, at least its components have a name. Scenario planning, taken to its conclusion, develops a range of possible ways those uncertainties might play out. This can help managers and individuals consciously navigate the future more effectively by providing signposts to monitor and contingencies to evoke. Scenarios will likely not predict the future, but they may well influence outcomes.
Scenarios help organizations innovate and see possibilities by undermining the single myth about the future and replacing it with a range of possible futures. The prediction evolves into forecasting. The false certainty of an asserted future gives way to a qualified statement that reveals different paths depending on how groups of uncertainties play out against one another.
Scenarios offer organizations a wide range of strategic value, including:
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Helping identify how they might need to adapt to future circumstances
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Identifying emergent opportunities
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Avoiding surprises
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Testing and challenging prevailing assumptions
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Understanding the implications for different possible futures on strategies, goals, and objectives
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Creating an early warning system so they can better anticipate change
Perhaps the most important impact of scenario planning lies in recalibrating the minds of those associated with the project. No longer can a person exposed to scenario planning be complacent. The future is no longer abstract. It becomes fluid as assumptions fall away, exposing the raw core of history unfolding.
Scenarios present stories of the future. Those who help develop the stories want to know, often passionately, how they turn out. And unlike other stories, their lives, their careers, and their very futures are bound into the scenario narratives.
Scenario planning and agility
As organizations look for ways to engage their employees and help them find passions that align with their work, they could do worse than to give their leaders and managers a robust framework for facing their fears and a tool for co-creating and navigating the future. Scenario planning drives agility. Many organizations provide employees with incentives to innovate, but they often withhold permission to actively pursue opportunities. Scenarios offer permission to explore, and with that permission comes innovation, engagement, and agility.
Additional insight into the scenario process can be found here:
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In Zambia the Uncertainty of the future is so pronounced even in the eyes of the leaders, such that citizens can’t even look to the leaders for solutions.