How Does Scenario Planning Work in the Age of Zoom?
Over the past few months, many people have asked me how a #ScenarioPlanning workshop works now that everything is online. If you're considering such an exercise, you might find it interesting to read how I've been doing it, after coming down the learning curve quite a bit. In a nutshell, here is the basic structure and flow:
On Zoom, our time together is usually divided into three sessions, each one needing around three hours. They’re not back-to-back, but rather spread over a few days. (Pre-pandemic, face-to-face workshops were typically done over 1 1/2 or 2 days, consecutively.)
The first session starts off by me walking the group through the scenario generation process, step-by-step, so everyone understands the logic of what we are going to be doing together. This introductory presentation includes lots of concrete examples from past workshops I’ve led, chosen because they really illustrate how that step of the process produces good results. Then we start off on the journey, which begins with some breakout group work focusing on assembling a solid list of factors – "driving forces" – that could have some impact, large or small, on the future success of the organization.
I should mention here that “future success” can mean 8 to 10 years from now, but now, given how much change the pandemic has brought about, the time horizon most companies want to focus on is only 1 to 3 years, i.e. what could their immediate post-pandemic “new normal” look like? But no matter whether you are trying to visualize the terrain a decade from now or just next year, the process is the same.
We re-assemble as a plenary group to end this first session with an initial discussion about which of these myriad driving forces that they came up with in the working groups constitute the most "critical uncertainties" that will affect their future business landscape, i.e. those that are potentially very impactful but at the same time highly uncertain. End of day 1.
The second session picks up where this discussion left off. The choice of critical uncertainties is very important, because the logic of scenario building is based on the idea that your future strategic environment will evolve depending most of all on how these critical uncertainties turn out. If they turn out one way, you will have one kind of future. If they turn out another way (and they might, if they are truly uncertain), you may have a very different future. So we all need to agree on what these uncertainties are – and this is easier said than done!
But once we have managed to reach a consensus on this important step of the process, we can create a scenario matrix consisting of 4 quadrants representing 4 different futures that the organization could potentially find itself operating in, based on the assumption that the 2 critical uncertainties (the axes of the matrix) will eventually resolve themselves in one direction – or the other. Then it is back into the breakout groups to think about these four contrasting scenarios in detail, and flesh out what they could realistically look and feel like as business terrains. Back in plenary, each working group presents the scenario they examined, and we all add to their vision of that particular future, especially focusing on identifying specific business opportunities that would be likely to arise in each one. End of day 2.
The final session revisits the 4 scenarios, now understood in some detail, and we deduce specific challenges that they would each represent – risks that the company must try to avoid, or actual difficulties that would not be avoidable and would have to be dealt with. Then, the logical way to conclude the workshop is to come up with an action plan for each of the four scenarios. By this is I don't mean 4 full-blown strategies, but for each scenario perhaps half a dozen ideas for strategic initiatives or innovations that the company ought to develop/implement in case it is the scenario that in fact materializes.
So all in all, it’s a structured process but also a highly creative one. The final results give you a solid idea of different ways your future landscape could possibly evolve. In my experience these past 12 months, this workshop structure works very well, and participants seem to be happy that the process has opened their eyes to some possibilities that maybe they had not thought about before. When the workshop is over and they're "back at the office" (whatever that may mean these days), they can take some time to mull over the outcomes and decide concretely how to make those scenario-specific action plans happen: who to put in charge, when to start, how big a budget to dedicate to the proposed activities, how to acquire any particular skills or capabilities that would be needed that they don't already have, and so on.
Result: An enlightening experience about what is possible in your future landscape, and down-to-earth ideas about how to prepare/respond. Also, a good team building experience; a chance to get creative together, with the added bonus that this work has some real strategic value).
If this is something you think you and your team could benefit from, give me a shout and we can discuss how to organize this process for you and your specific situation.