“Scenario Planning for Hotel Development Professionals”: New e-course launches in March

(A version of this interview first appeared on Hospitality Net.)

On March 25, a first-ever online course on “Scenario Planning for Hotel Development Professionals”will launch, designed to give these investment and strategy specialists a valuable foresight tool for assessing how the future might change – no matter whether they are evaluating the future outlook for their entire company, for a specific project, a country or even an individual city. The designer of the course and online instructor is Woody Wade, a scenario planning expert who conducts in-company scenario generation workshops for organizations worldwide.

HospitalityNet: In a nutshell, what is scenario planning? How is it different from, say, forecasting?

Wade: They both look at the future, but in different ways. Scenario planning is a methodology that helps you foresee how your business landscape might change – and also see that it might not evolve only in the direction you expected. Instead, completely different futures are also possible, depending on how various uncertainties play out. With scenario planning, you identify what these different futures could realistically be. You go through a structured process that reveals alternative outcomes that are different but nevertheless plausible. Forecasting, on the other hand, has more to do with trying to predict the future, usually in quantitative terms. To be sure, forecasts may also include some variations, but they’ll probably be based on tweaking the numbers. 

And that’s not the case with scenario planning?

Not exactly. Scenario planning is about foreseeing entire landscapes – primarily qualitatively but of course you can also quantify how your KPIs are likely to evolve in those landscapes. But the focus of scenario planning isn’t really about trying to get the numbers right. You’re not attempting to predict how the future will turn out, but explore how it could turn out. This is a very valuable exercise, because if you can foresee different ways the future might plausibly develop for your business, you can prepare yourself earlier for opportunities – and challenges – that could arise as these different scenarios unfold.  

You see this as especially relevant to hotel development professionals?

Absolutely. Jeff Immelt, the former CEO of GE, once said, “I have to manage for tomorrow’s world.” That’s very much the case for anyone in the hotel business whose focus is on laying the groundwork for the company’s future growth. If you’re responsible for the future success of a project or portfolio of projects, with millions on the line, then to help you make the best decisions today, you really need to have an idea how its future landscape could change.

We all know that the future is going to be different.  That’s a given. But how will it be different?  That’s where scenario planning helps you.

Tell us about the new e-course.

Scenario planning follows a logical, very structured process, so the course takes participants through each of the steps, one after the other. Altogether, there are over a dozen modules, each consisting of a video where I walk you through the practical “how to” aspects, illustrating that part of the process with examples from actual scenario generation exercises I’ve conducted over the last few years. 

What will participants get out of the course?

Well, they’re going to get good at generating future scenarios, in a relevant amount of detail.  But besides this practical know-how, an intellectual benefit is that it gives you a completely new way of thinking. You’re going to come away from the course with an appreciation for visualizing the future in terms of alternative possibilities rather than the conventional way people think about the future, which is to assume that things will evolve in a fairly linear, predictable way.

How long does the course last? Is there a start date and end date?

No. You can enroll any time, start whenever you want, and proceed through the modules at your own pace. So it’s completely up to you how long the course lasts.

What about your background, Woody? What are your qualifications for designing and teaching a course on this subject?

On the academic side, I got my MBA from Harvard (many years ago now!), and during my business career I’ve had the chance to teach strategy at a couple of schools as an adjunct professor.  

On the practical side, I’ve been conducting scenario generation workshops for a few years now, for a variety of different kinds of organizations. Mostly in the business world, but also for governments, educational institutions, and NGOs – in about 20 countries so far. For example one typical workshop looked at possible futures for the 5-star hotel market in Dubai, but another one looked at fundraising futures for a charitable organization.

As for my hotel industry experience – I guess you would call me an interested outsider. I was the Director of Marketing at the Ecole h?telière de Lausanne here in Switzerland for seven years, where my main mission was to reposition EHL from a mainly operations-oriented “hotel school” to a real business school. Part of that entailed honing relationships with hotel groups and investment conferences such as IHIF in Berlin and ALIS in California. Later, I created a publication called “The Hotel Yearbook” which was a platform for opinion leaders to share insights about key issues facing the industry.  Over ten years, about 500 hotel industry leaders wrote for the publication, including 30 or 40 CEOs.

How did you get interested in scenario planning?

I can trace my interest in scenario thinking back to my time on the Executive Board of the World Economic Forum.  At our big annual meetings in Davos, it always impressed me to see how hungry business and political leaders were for any ideas and insights about how the future might develop. CEOs understand that their most important task is to prepare their organizations for the future. Foreseeing how their future markets or business environment might turn out is a vital concern for them.

You also wrote a book on scenario planning. 

Yes, about seven years ago my book Scenario Planning: A Field Guide to the Future was published by Wiley, one of the largest business publishers in the US.  It’s become one of the five or six reference books on the subject, and also published in some foreign language editions.

How can people find out more about the course, or enroll?

If you follow this link (www.scenariotigers.com), you’ll go to the course site where you can get all the details. By the way, you’ll also see that there’s a very attractive discount offered if you pre-enroll before the launch date! So if you know you’d like to take the course later this year, you’ll save quite a lot by enrolling as an early bird – and then you can actually take the course at your convenience!