Using Scenarios in Practice
Using Scenarios in Practice
Getting Started
To start applying these transformative scenarios in your own organisation, please access: EMS Guide for Using Transformative Scenarios in a Climate Challenged World.
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That's Not All: Further Scenario Applications
That's Not All: Further Scenario Applications
Learning from the Future
As leaders and decision makers working within our own organisations, exploring the future through scenarios allows us to step out of our transactional, day-to-day environment and consider what is happening in the world around us. Why is this important? Because it allows us to learn to “see” how this contextual environment might be influencing the sector itself, and subsequently impacting our capacity as an organisation to succeed in what we are attempting to do. As the world around us changes, so does both the context within which we operate, and the sectoral and organisational priorities and capabilities required for our success. In matters of risk and safety, looking up and out of our current organisation is more than important, it is essential.
By parachuting into each scenario, exploring and visualising what is going on, and then overlaying the increasing volatility, frequency and magnitude of weather extremes, it is possible to experience a cognitive and visceral sense of what the future in each scenario may hold. By immersing ourselves in each scenario we can begin to feel what’s it’s like to live in there as a leader or worker, a citizen, a neighbour, a spouse, parent etc.
This exploration provides a unique opportunity to examine our own thinking and assumptions, test our plans and strategies and capability sets, and assess how robust they might be in these different contexts. From this point, leadership and decision-making teams can consider how to best plan, innovate, collaborate etc. in ways that not only adapt well to these futures, but help shape and transform them.
Even if we truly believe a future scenario is unlikely, it doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen... take note of world we live in today!
Scenarios have Many Uses
Scenarios have been used by organisations to support their strategic and operational planning since the 1950’s, first applied by the US Military and later in commercial settings at the RAND Corporation. By the 1970’s many corporations began using scenario planning in more sophisticated ways, including by Royal Dutch Shell as a way to reduce uncertainty and complexity in its long-range forecasts and enable managers to “see ahead”. Since then, the application of scenarios has deepened and become more sophisticated over time. Scenarios have been applied across whole countries, governments and industry sectors as a way of better understanding the dynamic context within which they operate, and how this context might impact on their ability to succeed and thrive as they intend.
Scenarios work effectively within organisations and teams: Scenarios are used to “wind tunnel” or assess the robustness of existing strategic and operational planning processes in alternate possible futures. By integrating various wind tunnelling processes into “business as usual” processes, new strengths are added to the organisation for improving foresight capacity, risk mitigation and operational effectiveness. Scenarios are powerful for opening teams and organisations to the outside world. Royal Dutch Shell famously ”rehearsed the future” of plummeting oil prices. By preparing for what might come they took preventative action which enabled the organisation to be staggeringly successful during the chaos of the ensuing 1973 Oil Shock. Other companies were left wondering what just happened and scrambled to survive. An oil price drop was seen as highly unlikely and against industry predictions. But it did happen and only Shell was prepared.
Scenario applications are also effective in building confidence and capability of individual leader or decision maker to question their assumptions and beliefs about the world and how they think the future will unfold and to consider alternate perspectives. There are many cases in history where leaders’ assumptions about the continuation of current trends has led to the undoing of many exceptional organisations, such as Kodak or Nokia. Managers too focused on their own immediate concerns, couldn’t or wouldn’t pay attention to external changes emerging, and when they finally did, it was too late.
More recently, scenarios have also proven to be transformative at a sector, country or regional level, enabling groups of stakeholders to see together what might need to be done – separately and collaboratively – to succeed in future contexts. In a number of cases, scenario have been attributed to helping shape the future direction of countries, such as peaceful transition out of Apartheid in South Africa (https://reospartners.com/learning-from-experience-the-mont-fleur-scenario- exercise/) or the direction of Colombia under President Juan Manuel Santos (https://reospartners.com/publications/destino-colombia/) for example.
Transformative Scenario Planning
Transformative Scenario Planning provides a methodology for people to work with complex problematic situations that they want to transform but that they cannot do so unilaterally or directly. While traditional scenario planning provides a framework for “adapting” to different possible futures as they might emerge, the Transformative Scenario Planning method used in this work, also enables actors to work together and separately to not only adapt to the future, but help create it. The process provides a unique space for actors to work cooperatively and creatively to get unstuck and to move forward. For further detail please refer to the book by Adam Kahane (2012), Transformative Scenario Planning: Working Together to Change the Future (https://reospartners.com/publications/transformative-scenario- planning-working-together-to-change-the-future/).
What do these Applications Actually Look Like in Practice?
Working with scenarios can be daunting at first. It takes courage and resolve to open ourselves to challenge our assumptions and world views and admit that we don’t actually have all the answers we need – either as a team or organisation, an individual leader or as a sector. Working with scenarios requires openness, a learning mindset, an acknowledgement that we cannot reliably predict or control the future and that we don’t and can’t have all the answers.
The application of scenarios can make an enormous difference to our current effectiveness and future success as we translate new learnings about possible futures into our planning, decision making, learning and operational priorities. The applications can extend from building capacity of individual leaders through to whole- industry and even country or region-wide initiatives. Scenario applications generally fall into three broad categories:
Teams or Organisations – Applications can involve a range of programs, workshops and exercises that can be integrated into day-to-day operations and standard ways of operating for improving decisions and outcomes.
For example:
Strategic planning processes – processes and workshops for opening teams to the outside world and integrating scenarios into strategic processes for strengthening existing plans or priorities.
Building leadership and team capability – in-house development programs to build leadership agility, foresight capacity, strategic thinking for future risk mitigation for improving planning and operations.
Innovation programs – “safe spaces” for bringing different leaders or teams together to examine and explore what could be done to improve operations and adapt to alternative futures.
Implementation and BAU alignment – aligning scenarios, strategy and operations as business-as-usual – providing a clear line of sight between planning and action.
2. Individual Leaders or Decision Makers – Programs provide safe and confidential learning spaces for leaders, individually or with peers, to build confidence and capacity and explore what works in practice.
For example:
Leadership development programs – sector-wide open programs to build networks, strengths and capacities for leading teams and organisations effectively in complex and uncertain contexts.
Executive leadership coaching – tailored, confidential one:one coaching to support leaders adapt to leading in complex contexts where there are no easy solutions and no precedent answers.
Action learning journeys – a robust methodology for small groups of industry peers to share, explore and resolve key challenges together in a confidential manner.
3. Sectors, Countries or Regions – Events, processes or ongoing platforms for driving system-wide transformation across a sector, jurisdiction, country or region. These involve proven processes for making progress when stakeholders face common challenges but have neither the resource, capacity or authority to solve them alone.
For example:
Transformative Scenario Processes – wider scenario engagement to connect with broader stakeholder groups and encourage immersion and insight. These processes building shared understandings and create new system-wide relationships, new insights, new capacities, new commitments and new experimental initiatives.
Innovation Labs – Strategic and collaborative innovation processes that bring together key stakeholders from across a given system to work on specific systemic challenges together – to collaborate and experiment on what can and must be done to best adapt to and transform our current situation.
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