How can you use allusion to identify risks in strategic planning?

2 How does allusion work?

Allusion works by using metaphors, analogies, or stories to link your strategic plan to another domain or context that has some similarities or differences. For example, you can compare your plan to a journey, a game, a war, a movie, or a historical event. By doing so, you can explore the implications, challenges, and opportunities that arise from this comparison. You can also identify the key elements, relationships, and patterns that are relevant to both domains and how they can affect your plan.

3 How can you use allusion in strategic planning?

Incorporating allusion into strategic planning requires four steps. Firstly, you need to define your strategic plan and its objectives, scope, and constraints. Secondly, pick a domain or context as a source of allusion. This can be something familiar, unfamiliar, or even fictional. Thirdly, form a metaphor, analogy, or story that connects your plan to the chosen domain. Explain how they are similar or different and what insights you can gain from this comparison. Lastly, identify the risks that come from the allusion. Evaluate the positive and negative aspects of the comparison and how they can influence your plan. Finally, prioritize and categorize the risks according to their likelihood and impact.

4 What are the benefits of using allusion?

Using allusion in strategic planning can offer several benefits for risk identification, such as stimulating creativity and innovation, broadening perspective and knowledge, challenging assumptions and biases, generating comprehensive and diverse risk scenarios, and engaging stakeholders and team members. Allusion can help to enhance imagination and divergent thinking, expose new ideas and information from different domains, force questions and reframing of the plan and its context, consider multiple dimensions and factors, and make the plan more interesting and relatable.

5 What are the challenges of using allusion?

Using allusion for risk identification in strategic planning can be challenging; you must find a suitable domain or context that provides relevant and useful allusions. Additionally, it is important to avoid overgeneralization or oversimplification of the comparison and its implications, while balancing creativity and realism. You should also validate and verify your risk assumptions and sources by using other techniques and data, as well as communicate and explain your allusions clearly to stakeholders and team members.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?