FUTURE SCENARIO PLANNING : A POWERFUL MANAGEMENT TOOL FOR STRATEGIZING

Fast Forward to Future

As technological change accelerates, as business volatility grows, and as markets go global, it has become more important than ever for executives to have some grasp of the future. Attempts to forecast accurately have become increasingly futile due to accelerating technological progress, faster cultural change, and unexpected competition emerging outside an industry’s traditional borders. Instead of reacting to this uncertainty by ignoring the future, strategists are using different methods for anticipating and proactively preparing for events yet to unfold. These methods for modeling, simulating, forecasting, and planning for possible futures both protect your business from major changes and allow you to exploit opportunities. Those that prosper under changed conditions are either lucky or planned for the future by applying scenario planning to prepare strategically for the future. Scenarios and other systematic ways of thinking about the future play a vital role in strategic thinking for gaining insight into business futures. These futures tools need to build on and inform your strategic thinking. Scenario planning yields far more value when performed at the appropriate level of detail, when conducted iteratively, and when it feeds into and is fed by an organization’s strategy and innovation processes.

Scenario Planning To The Rescue

Scenario planning is a creative method of examining possible futures and building the one that is desired while taking into account what could happen and how it would affect the overall business plan. A major advantage of using scenarios to set up strategic planning is to gain ideas and insights that would be missed by using the traditional projection process. It is also a method of forcing the planning team to look at more than the "desired" outcome and, therefore, be prepared for or even aggressively plan for, events out of the ordinary.

The purpose of scenario planning is not to imminently decide which scenario is correct. It looks at each plausible future scenario and examine how prepared your company is for the potential change and consequences. Ideally you should try to establish markers or milestones that may occur in each scenario that would alert you to which scenario is actually unfolding. By knowing in advance due to these pre-determined benchmarks, you put yourself ahead of your competition in not only reacting to the events but actually having an outline of a plan in place to take advantage of the situation

Anshumali Saxena www.soilindia.net