Arizona State University has an Applied Futures Lab that I've worked with in the past which is very useful. They do Futurecasting (defining what you want to achieve) and Threatcasting (defining what you want to avoid) The hardest part is quantifying the impact but that typically should just fall into general Risk and Opportunity managment vs. anything special.
What I like best is how it gets people to open up and be more imaginative about classing R&O in ways that allow the organiztion to unlock innovation.
This is exactly the benefit of doing this work. For it to have a real effect, it needs to be embedded in an effective strategy process - e.g. something like Roger Martin's Play To Win framework.
Nice article, Matt. As a sometime practitioner and fan of scenario planning, the research you cite strikes a chord with me. On the one hand, I still believe the approach has merit and efficacy when correctly applied to the appropriate question or industry. OTOH, I think that in this case it seems to be conflated with futurist thinking and predictions, which are in fact not the same thing.
I believe where long-cycle, big bet decisions are a central part of the reality of a given business or industry, scenario planning still has a very important role to play and can be of enormous value. It is not, however, that applicable in very many areas; and so perhaps it is not accurately represented in the research you were looking at. Or?
I agree with you. Scenario planning can be very useful with the following provisos:
- Care and effort are put into the scenarios. Crafting scenarios should be seen as a collaborative sense-making process.
- The scenarios themselves need to tread a fine line between being sufficiently disruptive of thought to have an impact and not so outlandish people switch off.
I think your point about time cycles is interesting because I think you can do scenario planning over relatively short timeframes (e.g. 3 years) if you are operating in a dynamic and uncertain environment. But you may disagree. Thoughts?
Your provisos are, in fact, all components of scenario planning as I was taught how to do it by the folks at Global Business Network. So I take those as givens anytime I suggest it or consider it as an appropriate tool to use.
You can do it over any timeframe you want. The underlying thinking remains the same. Over longer time periods there is more complexity, obviously, and the “known unknowns” problem space becomes bigger, requiring more creative approaches to identifying what it contains and what the implications are for the future scenario options.
Arizona State University has an Applied Futures Lab that I've worked with in the past which is very useful. They do Futurecasting (defining what you want to achieve) and Threatcasting (defining what you want to avoid) The hardest part is quantifying the impact but that typically should just fall into general Risk and Opportunity managment vs. anything special.
What I like best is how it gets people to open up and be more imaginative about classing R&O in ways that allow the organiztion to unlock innovation.
This is exactly the benefit of doing this work. For it to have a real effect, it needs to be embedded in an effective strategy process - e.g. something like Roger Martin's Play To Win framework.
Nice article, Matt. As a sometime practitioner and fan of scenario planning, the research you cite strikes a chord with me. On the one hand, I still believe the approach has merit and efficacy when correctly applied to the appropriate question or industry. OTOH, I think that in this case it seems to be conflated with futurist thinking and predictions, which are in fact not the same thing.
I believe where long-cycle, big bet decisions are a central part of the reality of a given business or industry, scenario planning still has a very important role to play and can be of enormous value. It is not, however, that applicable in very many areas; and so perhaps it is not accurately represented in the research you were looking at. Or?
I agree with you. Scenario planning can be very useful with the following provisos:
- Care and effort are put into the scenarios. Crafting scenarios should be seen as a collaborative sense-making process.
- The scenarios themselves need to tread a fine line between being sufficiently disruptive of thought to have an impact and not so outlandish people switch off.
- The scenario planning itself is embedded in a robust process of strategy formulation and execution - e.g. Play To Win, esp. What Would Have To Be True: https://rogermartin.medium.com/what-would-have-to-be-true-83dac5bd2189
I think your point about time cycles is interesting because I think you can do scenario planning over relatively short timeframes (e.g. 3 years) if you are operating in a dynamic and uncertain environment. But you may disagree. Thoughts?
Your provisos are, in fact, all components of scenario planning as I was taught how to do it by the folks at Global Business Network. So I take those as givens anytime I suggest it or consider it as an appropriate tool to use.
You can do it over any timeframe you want. The underlying thinking remains the same. Over longer time periods there is more complexity, obviously, and the “known unknowns” problem space becomes bigger, requiring more creative approaches to identifying what it contains and what the implications are for the future scenario options.