How We Can Help

Larger organizations are likely to have most, if not all, of the expertise and skills needed to do this specialized type of planning. Nevertheless, getting a team of this kind together may be difficult in these times of heavy commitments.

Let us outline some alternatives to internal staffing of this effort using our services:

1. Model Building & Validation

Building, testing and validating business systems models is not a commonly available expertise. There is a lot of art and experience involved. We have been building systems models for over 30 years.

2. Planning Process Facilitation

Planning processes can be very inefficient if not tightly managed and focused. This is especially the case when you are dealing with broader, less well-understood issues. An outside facilitator is often the simplest and best solution. We can offer over 20 years of experience in facilitating planning processes at the highest levels of large organizations.

3. Planning Team Resource

We can serve in a resource role to support your internal planning team. In this role, we would be able to handle a series of tasks, such as helping the team:

Define and model major uncertainties.
Understand how each might impact your organization.
Develop and model practical responses.
Link normal strategic plans to scenario plans.
Identify triggers and indicators for major events.
Develop an early warning system.

These services rely heavily upon the experience and knowledge of management and planning team while minimizing the planning process burden on them.

You should keep in mind that the first pass through scenario planning is the most difficult. Annual updates and tracking are nearly always much easier and less time-consuming.

A Different Process

Scenario planning is very different from the annual business, strategic and budgeting processes with which we are all familiar. It addresses high-stakes events that have a high degree of uncertainty.

Annual planning, even though it may look forward three to five years, deals primarily with a fairly stable environment and large numbers of events having low to medium stakes. The two planning processes are thus complementary.

Because scenario planning deals with very different issues and great uncertainty, it cannot be approached within the structure and techniques of annual planning processes. To be truly effective, it requires a separate process specifically designed to handle highly uncertain, high impact events.