Scenario Planning Mastery: Visualizing Alternative Futures

At the outset of any scenario planning exercise, you need to decide on a few key parameters. This lesson shows you how to make these important preparatory decisions, which will make sure that when you go through the process, you and your colleagues are all focused on the same - realistic - goals.

In the scenario generation methodology this course is teaching you, the first step is to identify as many so-called "driving forces" as possible, i.e. trends or developments that will probably have some influence on the way your future landscape emerges. This lesson shows you how to approach this task.

At this stage you will have come up with a large number of driving forces potentially affecting your future. But because it's not practical to wrestle with so many different factors, you must narrow this list of driving forces down to the most critical uncertainties that will be challenging you over the next few years. This lesson shows you how to do this.

The next step in the scenario generation process is derived from the choice of critical uncertainties. Using these important parameters, you build a logical framework of alternative future landscapes, or scenarios, and then activate your imagination to describe these landscapes in relevant detail. Despite their highly contrasting profiles, all of the scenarios will be plausible!

At this point in the process, you now have an understanding of how the scenarios you've defined differ from each other, and what how they would "look and feel" as business environments in which you may find yourself operating. What now? The next step is to identify potential opportunities and challenges that each scenario would present. These are likely to be quite different in each of the futures you have postulated.

This is where the rubber meets the road! Logically, the opportunities identified in the previous lesson can be exploited, and the challenges can be tackled (or even avoided) – but how? This lesson explains how to work out a basic action plan that would improve your chances of success in each of the different futures.

Developing realistic scenarios, and your plan for each one, would be a waste of time if you are not able to identify, from the many indicators in your business environment, which scenario is actually materializing. In this lesson, we will discuss this vital aspect of the process.

During COVID, an Italian company that produces fresh pasta examines the future for this product, evaluating potential post-pandemic “new normal” situations that might arise in Italy.

A young company that produces high-quality baby food tries to ascertain how well it could perform given various uncertainties about its future business environment.

Representatives from a number of universities sit together to visualize the futures they might face as they meet the challenges of recruiting qualified students from around the world.

Chile’s political leaders have been making many substantial changes that could result in radically different futures emerging for the country’s economy - and ultimately all of society there. A group of Chilean executives undertook the challenge of trying to foresee what these futures could look like for the average citizen.

Before ending the course, we should talk about one other strength of scenario planning: putting this technique to work is the sign of a good leader.