Planning and Managing for Uncertainty

The global business environment has changed and will continue to change. This makes the abilities to anticipate, lead, and adapt to changing markets vital competencies in organizational life. Companies must be quick to develop and engage new strategies, shift culture, and mobilize their people to master new business realities.

Business environments face ongoing changes in, and complex interactions between, each of these following areas:.

• Technology
• Economic growth
• Customer value propositions
• Competition
• Regulations
• National politics
• Global geopolitics
• Demographics
• Social and cultural values
• Market maturation

Scenario Planning and Analysis provides a comprehensive and uniquely insightful window on how these dimension will play out in your markets. The process enables leaders to assess and build a testable perception about their future markets, plan and implement changes, measure and refine actions. Subject matter experts, scenario experts and your leaders tasked with implementing the strategy build foundational scenarios to start or augment strategic plans. The scenario process initiates targeted actions that often generate breakthrough changes, and organizational readiness for market leadership - now and in the future.

Scenario planning and analysis includes tools that create:

• Understanding and capability for managing uncertainties
• Team-based learning opportunities (specific to company markets and technology)
• Senior leadership capability to identify early indicators of relevant market shifts
• A foundation for strategic planning and implementation
• Broader stakeholder involvement
• Ability to benefit from focused research and data base information
• A powerful dimension of organizational communication and motivation

Our models, tools, and approaches for discerning and engaging the emerging business environment are derived from more than 20 years experience building organizational capability for change.

Our customized consulting services in the areas of strategic planning, culture realignment, leadership and team development can be employed to move from the scenario planning and analysis phase to change and implementation.

Use Scenarios to Assess Organizational Fitness for the Future

Useful scenarios are built around the strategic context of the organization - in other words, the relevant and pressing uncertainties facing the organization that derive from its business environment. Important drivers of change are isolated and researched to refine understanding and gather insights. Very often two key drivers can be isolated as very important and be the basis of a scenario matrix that presents four challenging but very different environments. A general example is shown below in which the two most important drivers are technological change and changes in customer value propositions. Once these scenarios (or different worlds) are thought through over time and their basic stories are clear, they can be used to test the fitness and readiness of the organization to succeed in those different worlds. Very often the organization of the past is not the best for the future. At this stage of analysis the scenario assessment can be combined with other tools of strategy and organizational analysis to provide a deeper level of understanding.

One of our scenarios, Navigating Turbulent Times, was developed through the Institute for The Future, and comprises a forecasting “roadmap” that highlights ten sets of strategic issues all organizations will face over the next ten years:

1. Valuation Volatility
2. Competency Addiction
3. Leadership Insecurity
4. Strategy Tragedy
5. Talent Tantrums
6. Customer Conundrum
7. Identity Crisis
8. Alliance Angst
9. Technology Infrastructure Ills
10. Regulatory Rendezvous

NAVIGATING TURBULENT TIMES

Organizations are encouraged to address each challenge head on, building organizational capability to anticipate and navigate the future. This set of tools includes particular skill building in the following Core Principles of Transformation for our complex environments:

• Scan, Scout, and Steer
• Tell The Truth; Act with Integrity
• Foster Rapid Decision-Making
• Engage in Disciplined Execution
• Seek Collisions
• Position Yourself at The Intersection of Multiple Pathway
• Leverage Strengths
• Innovate Opportunistically
• Relax; Pace Your Progress

Cultural Transformation