planning

Why we need scenarios to be ready for the future

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No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be…This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking 

–Isaac Asimov, Asimov on Science Fiction 1981

Organizations have to consider outside forces and trends as they build their strategies. But in most, too few people spend time thinking about how the future will shape the organization. Not enough of the knowledge and ideas of the organization finds its place in strategy. Leading firms use scenarios to solve these problems.

A science fictional way of thinking

Scenarios answer Asimov’s call for a “science fictional way of thinking”. They ask, “What if?” They are stories we build about future possibilities. The stories let us test and explore future risks and opportunities. 

The scenario building process draws out the insight of a team and helps make future challenges and opportunities clearer and more compelling. It gives participants a shared view of future possibilities. That view enriches their day-to-day work and strategic thinking.

We can use scenarios to think through potential decisions about strategy. The scenarios also become a tool for sharing strategic thinking with others. 

Most organizations have a good idea what they intend to do in the next few years. But that view can weaken their sense of more transformational change and bigger opportunities further out. Taking a look ten or even more years out lets us imagine bigger change. Then we can step back to today to understand what to do about it. 

The further into the future we look, the less certain we are about what will happen. But also, the further out we look the more our decisions today have the power to shape change and opportunity. 

This diagram shows how using scenarios can help us avoid just pursuing an “official” future. Official futures usually assume continuity. They tend to ignore both new threats and opportunities. Good foresight, exploring alternate scenarios, builds and maintains a broader view of what’s possible. 

Cone of uncertainty

Scenario building is a shared, immersive activity

The power of scenario building is in how it gets people to immerse themselves in the future. Working on scenarios leaves them no choice but to think both broadly and concretely about the future.

Once people have had the scenario-building experience, they have new ideas and places to go in their heads. They’ve got a much richer view of the future. They have a new mental habit–to think about alternative futures, not accepting that there’s some inevitable future out there. They should, and usually do, have a sense of empowerment. They discover there are parts of their future they can shape, starting now.

By the way, part of my practice is helping teams use scenarios. So, to be clear, I not only want you to do this, I’d love to help. We build scenario programs for all sorts of organizations. Here’s a page describing our support for workforce futures explorations.

Let me know if I can help you: jbmahaffie@leadingfuturists.biz and 202-271-0444.

Some of my other posts on scenarios:

Noun = bad, verb = good

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Consider the difference between a plan and planning. A plan is a thing—most often a document in some form. It’s a fixed set of ideas about what you are going to do next.

Just at the moment a plan is completed, it begins to age into irrelevance or incorrectness, possibly very quickly. Conditions and context are always changing. And because of the decisions and narrowing necessary to concoct a plan, the thing may never have been particular right in the first place.

Now consider planning. Planning is an ongoing process. It’s a process you work on, improve, and continue. Instead of a limited stepwise effort resulting in a literal or figurative 3-ring binder, you have an organizational process that has a life, sees growth and development, and can change as needed.

Among my clients are many who engage in a periodic strategic planning process. That’s the old-school thing you do—it’s text book management. But that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.

Organizations put their heart and soul into periodic strategic planning. They spend time and money. Usually, a special team or department takes the lead. Too often, the work is a task for experts, and doesn’t connect to the wider organization. The effort suffers because it is set up as a special activity.

So don’t put your energy into completing that three-ring binder, celebrating or breathing a sigh when you have punched and inserted the last pages. Put your energy into getting good at the verb*–planning, not the noun–plan. Focus on learning to be agile, strategic, and to plan, plan some more, and plan yet more. The payoff is in your ability to move and shift with changing conditions.

Don’t make planning only an episode or periodic activity. Make it continuous, and build it to be ready to move and shift as conditions do. Your plans will be relevant, workable, and easier to adjust when they are not.

Note: I’ve shared a closely similar view here: The Power of Words — but this is a topic worth revisiting!

*Please also note: I am aware that “planning” is a gerund, noun form of the verb to plan, but for a succinct title, I settled on noun vs. verb

A view of the future has to speak to today

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To be useful, a vision of the future has to speak to today. It has to help you decide on things to do right now.

Savvy foresight clients always say to me that they need the "what for" in the work we do for them. They mean, they want insights and help figuring out what the future view we're helping them have means to what they have to do right now.

And they are exactly right. Without connections to our lives and work today, a view of the future is not much more than playing with ideas–fun, entertaining, but not helpful.

At the same time, it's essential to not let the focus on "what for" back you off from really exploring your future. Working on strategy without a true view into the future is downright dangerous. It is fire, ready, aim.

So what are you supposed to do? It's simple to recognize, but hard to execute. You need to build views of your future, for example ten years from now–2021–and then focus carefully on how things would change, and what you would need or want to do between now and that year. 

You can work backwards or forwards doing this: tracing possible pathways from today to 2021 or working back in time from the 2021 outcomes to see how we might have gotten there, or working backwards and forwards in time. 

Ultimately, with ideas about where things are headed, and what changes will or must begin to happen now, your strategic options and needs will show through. You will have connected a view of 2021 to things you need to do right now, and you will have made the future relevant to today and clearly connected to your actions now.

So to put it succinctly, any foresight activity should end with "now let's begin."

 

Image: adapted from Mike Licht, notionscapital.com, via Flickr, cc attribution license

Failure to think in systems

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Far too often, people propose solutions to problems large and small that are narrow and shortsighted. they take a binary view: cause and effect, A by itself leads to B.

They fail to think about how things are part of much bigger systems with complex interacting forces, players, and parts. This happens in businesses, in families, and at the regional, national, and global levels. 

Sometimes this is simple narrow thinking or ignorance, but often today, at least in the US, it comes from partisan politics. How the public understands the issues or how opponents will characterize your decision later becomes more important than what's really true. And for similar reasons, politically, the short term usually beats the long term.

That is why shutting down the US Federal Government looks like a reasonable tactic to some people. They have not thought about how it would affect things beyond the political tussle underway right now. In fact, a US Federal Government shutdown would have a steep price tag–rather than reducing the budget deficit, it would increase it.

Some other examples. In the budget debates, it's easy to say that US aid to poor farmers in Asia and Africa is something we just can't afford right now. Their plight–however unfortunate–should not be our top priority, when our resources are limited, we should invest first at home. 

Yet that aid is integral to critical things: the supply of affordable food in those countries and in the global marketplace, political and economic stability in multiple countries, the ability of people in those countries to afford US products and services, and so on. Investing in African poor farmers is investing in the US. 

Arguments about issues like this are often touted as "common sense." Usually that means using a rationale that comes from a different context. For example, politicians like to say "I have to balance my checkbook each month, why shouldn't the Federal Government have to balance its budget?" But clearly, the US Federal Government and an individual's family finances are not the same thing.

Such arguments also tend to focus on the near term at the expense of the long term. Another example: arguing that we cannot stop burning coal for energy because too much of our electricity is generated from coal to stop using it. Doing so would weaken the economy now and in the next few years (never mind the critical need to move to alternative energy and the potential growth from transforming our energy systems).

The response to failures to think in systems has to be to regularly, and clearly offer a "Yes, but….." and to show people what else is affected, and what else is at stake. It will also make a difference to elaborate on the future outcomes of a decision by describing what is likely to result in the system and related systems that the decision will affect. A scenario or set of scenarios can be a powerful tool for doing that.

Image: Elsie esq. via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution license.

Planning, scanning, forecasting: It’s the verb, not the noun

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In exploring the future, it’s the journey that counts most, not the plan, report, or briefing you produce. Remembering that is essential. You need to make sure your colleagues, clients, bosses understand that the value and power of the journey is foremost. You don’t want your key stakeholders to wait for the “answers” they think you should produce for them, you want them in on the process.

The process is about rehearsing flexible thinking, alternate views, what ifs, and contingencies. You can’t explore all the possible what ifs, and should not try.

Instead, learn from the thinking you do in exploring a range of possibilities. By that you can get better at facing uncertainty with assurance that you and your colleagues build into your thinking resilience against the unexpected. Chances are, your plans will be robust in a range of different outcomes–you can hope so.

Dwight Eisenhower understood this:

“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of “emergency” is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning”

–Speech to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference in Washington, D.C. (14 November 1957) [Link]

A great tool for this journey is scenario planning. A set of scenarios is a sampling of a range of what ifs against which you can build some plans and strategies. But your set is never a complete view of the possible future. And most of all, it’s the process of exploring alternative futures with scenarios that matters most. You can find a lot more about scenarios here.

(My colleague Jennifer Jarratt reminded me of this quote, and I am grateful in this, as in so much of her work, for her ideas and inspiration.)

Eisenhower’s little bit of wisdom, like so many quotes, has taken up residence on the Internet in a paraphrase, cut loose from its true moorings in Ike’s speeches and writing. It turns up most often as “Plans are worthless. Planning is essential”.

Image source

Personal futures matter too, perhaps most of all

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A futurist colleague of mine, Verne Wheelwright, has created a body of work on personal futures, including a book It's Your Future: Make it a Good One, and an accompanying workbook. His goal is to take the ways futurists think about what's shaping organizations, technologies, cities, countries, and so on, and help individuals apply those approaches to their personal lives.

Verne writes that you can know a lot about your future, shape it to be what you want it to be, and avoid a lot of unpleasant things that can happen along the way. You can do that "by simply thinking about your future in a systematic manner [using a] system that leads you through the exploration of your future and then shows you how to decide on and achieve the future you want."

What could be more valuable or important than that? And yet how rare it is for people to think beyond a broad vision about their life and its possibilities. Most of us, even if we've taken a 30-year mortgage, have not made our expectations about our life 30 years out clear or complete.

This is a unique body of work and may be a terrific resource for you to come to grips with your future, and have the best chance to make it what you want it to be. What it does so well is to open up, and add concreteness to your thinking. Thought most of us have some idea about what we want in life, too often we don't know enough about what we will do, and what it will take to get there, nor about the things we will confront along the way (e.g. aging parents, dependent adult children, career changes, financial crises, financial windfalls, etc.)

You can order the book through Verne's website: www.vernewheelwright.com, or through Amazon. The workbook is a free download from Verne's Personal Futures website. You can use the Personal Futures workbook with or without the book.

Ask the right questions

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Be sure to look at things differentlyI always try to think, in organizations I am a part of and in the work I do for clients how I should play my role as a futurist. What can the futures perspective add that helps? Should my role be to provoke, to inform, or to bring a fresh perspective? How assertive should I be?

It’s tempting to be a capital “F” Futurist, and play that role, as they say in the theater, broadly. To me that means getting in people’s faces with ideas about a bold new future: transformational changes in technology and society, for example.

But sometimes that’s not what will work well for the situation. People with a futures perspective risk tooting on the same trumpet no matter the question at hand, the setting, or who is there. That can do more harm than good. So, temptations aside, I try often to internalize my futures focus and perspectives, and instead work quietly but persistently to make sure that the right questions get asked about the topic at hand.

In anything we do that involves evaluating ideas, planning, or making strategic decisions, we should work with a checklist of critical questions. We need to make sure people consider the right things, ask the right questions, and avoid mental bad habits and thinking traps.

Some of those questions:

Are we talking about the right thing? Have we opened up the question to the right level? For example, an exploration of workplace safety needs to include a lot more than what’s going on in offices and factories, what about people working from home, workers on the road, and people who work outdoors? It is easy to frame the question too narrowly.

Did we consider all the boundary conditions and how they might change? Our tendency is to look at change inside the system or subject we’re exploring, and hold the rest of what’s going on in the world constant. So, for example, a high school building its curriculum might determine that since China has become a critical player in the world, it should add Chinese language to its curriculum. China’s rising influence is important right now. But what cultures and languages will be important in ten or twenty years? Can we prepare our students for those? In fact, too many businesses put themselves in jeopardy by giving all their attention to today’s problems and opportunities without considering how conditions are changing. The future goes wanting.

Are the right people in the room to discuss this? Having the right people in the discussion matters especially for two reasons. First, you need to have people that bring knowledge, experience, and wisdom to the topic at hand. Second, you need to involve the key stakeholders in the discussions, or risk that they will not accept your findings later.

Are we overly influenced by our past interests and sunk investments? For example, if a company is underway with construction of a new facility, it’s hard to break loose the thinking to explore ideas free of the assumption that that facility must be a central part of the organization’s future. Of course, sunk investments matter, and an organization’s assets have to be considered in a view of its future, but they should not make people blind to true change in the world. There’s an old saying that if you have a hammer in your hand, everything is a nail. That’s dangerously narrow thinking, a trap for organizations trying to move successfully forward.

Do we really all understand each other and our assumptions about the future? It’s critical to get everyone’s assumptions about the future out in the open. They powerfully influence perspectives on the future, what information people connect to the problem at hand, and the decisions people make. A frank and full discussion of the future—and there are lots of great foresight tools for facilitating those discussions—can help get those assumptions out of people, discussed, and considered.

Are we accounting for multiple perspectives? For example, on a particular question related to technology, we can tend to respond from the point of view of technology, with technical questions, ideas, and details. What about the personal/social perspectives? What about the institution’s point of view. Hal Linstone laid down some great thinking on this as the TOPs perspectives, Technical, Organizational, and Personal. Ensuring you consider all three can make a difference in the validity of your exploration and decisionmaking. 

Are we really looking at the future? This question is best answered by testing the thinking that you are doing. Are you exploring the possibilities and your aspirations out to the year 2018 or 2023? Can you describe some possibilities in a future year? Are you really talking about a changing world, or are you just talking about catching up with the unfinished business and the unmet needs of today?

You can have your own list of questions, in your mind, or made explicit with your colleagues. Either way the goal is to be sure you don’t focus too narrowly in your thinking or focus on the wrong things. Our fast-changing world makes that too risky.

Seth Godin was on this same wavelength in a recent post on, “Seth’s Blog”.

Image: by fdecomite, via Flickr, creative commons license

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