THEORY 70

SCENARIO PLANNING

WHAT TO DO

• Appoint an experienced external facilitator to help you run the workshops with your Scenario Team. You want someone who will challenge the preconceived ideas that you and your staff hold.
• Working with the facilitator select about six people (three in small organisations) who have imagination and an understanding of the changing environment that the organisation operates in. At least one of the team needs to be a technology expert.
• Brief the team on the aims of the exercise. Specify the variables that you particularly wish to explore, for example, inflation rates, leaving the European Union (Did your organisation predict Brexit?).
• Don’t try to look too far into the future. In today’s world, anything over three years is about as accurate as an astrological chart.
• Working alone, ask every member of the team to prepare a list of the issues that they see arising from the variables proposed. Allow members to add variables that you didn’t specify in the briefing. Give them about a week to think about their list and to write up their ideas briefly.
• Circulate each person’s report before the team’s workshop. Allow for between 30 and 60 minutes to discuss each person’s submission. At this stage avoid criticism of people’s ideas. You want everyone to contribute. If you stamp on someone’s ‘daft’ idea early on everyone else will get the message and clam up.
• Follow up the first Workshop with another meeting about a week later. In between meetings encourage team members to talk to one another and with the facilitator. This will enable them to change or moderate their views about their own and other people’s ideas.
• At the following Workshop/s evaluate each scenario on the basis of how likely it is to happen and what will be the effect on the organisation if it does happen. This gives rise to the following table of risk:

• Clearly, it’s not worth working up strategies for low-risk/low-cost or high-risk/low-cost scenarios. Concentrate your efforts on low risk/high cost and high risk/high cost. If any issue in these two categories has a 30% chance or more of occurring you need to determine a strategy for how you will deal with it.
• It’s very likely that a single strategy will address several scenarios. These are the strategies that you should work up in greatest detail as they are the most likely to be used in practice.
• For each scenario develop a best and worst case scenario and one midpoint between those.
• Report to senior management/board and get their approval for your recommendations. This will save time if you have to implement one or more strategies in the future.

QUESTIONS TO ASK

• Do you enjoy playing around with different business scenarios or do you think it’s a waste of time?
• On a scale of one to ten, with ten totally uncertain, how predictable do you think the business environment is in which you work? (Did you predict Trump?)