Scenario Planning: How to Build and Use Scenarios

Nobody can predict the future, but proven tools help us illuminate the path ahead so we are able to make better decisions about opportunities and threats in an uncertain future. The most comprehensive of these tools is scenario planning, a storytelling technique that allows managers to explore different “plausible model worlds,” each based on alternative resolution of the most important pending technological, societal, or regulatory uncertainties facing them.

Scenario planning has been adapted for both corporate and for nonprofit/government situations, and there are fundamental differences in these two approaches. In this course we will investigate both types of scenario planning, with a focus ultimately on policy-oriented, public-interest scenario planning.

Following an overview and elaboration of past examples, attendees will get a chance to make and test scenarios in small groups.

The program will also teach participants best practices in extracting the value from scenarios—how to use scenarios to test and improve decision making and how to distil from competing scenarios the optimal decisions a specific organization in a particular sector at a given time should make.

The program is part of an MBA course, “Industry Foresight and Strategic Innovation,” taught by the presenter at various prominent business schools worldwide.

Who should attend: This course is relevant both to futures professionals who seek the tools to work more closely and deeply with client companies and to managers who seek to be better able to develop future insights and apply them in their daily work. It will be relevant to participants from business, nonprofit, and government sectors, with a particular emphasis on executives in public policy and governmental organizations that are required to negotiate, determine, and communicate robust initiatives for managing the future under conditions of external uncertainty.

What you’ll learn: Participants will emerge knowing how to build scenarios and with an integrated method for getting from scenarios to strategic decision making and innovation. The course selects the best materials from both academic and business sources, including many past examples, good and bad. It is pragmatic in style and approach.

How this new knowledge can be applied: Attendees will have the opportunity to apply the tools learned to their topic area and to work up scenarios that are directly relevant to their situation. Over the longer term, participants will be able to use the tools learned to develop scenarios of the future in their topic area and use them to challenge their own or others’ future thinking and future preparedness, or utilize this as a basis for fundraising or media exposure or other initiatives to positively influence the future.

Adam Gordon, is the director of Adaptive Leadership Foresight, a consulting and executive education firm specializing in industry foresight and scenario planning for business and public-sector organizations. He has been a business-school professor at INSEAD and Monash, Australia. He is the author of Future Savvy, (American Management Association Press, 2009) and writes for Forbes magazine (blogs.forbes.com/adamgordon). He is a past senior associate, Coates & Jarratt, Inc., Washington D.C. See also:

Friday, July 8, 2011
9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.
$199 members/$249 nonmembers
Register online now