Get With the Times!
Achieving More Dynamic Strategies With Scenario Analysis

Gone are the days of the old fashioned 20-year, 5-year, or even the this-year strategic plan.

In the last few years have you sat down dutifully with your leadership team to develop your "strategic plan" only to find it outdated months or even weeks later?

You're not alone. Those of us who work in innovation strategy now recommend that you revisit your plan multiple times a year in order to fine tune implementation, check in on changes of major assumptions and inputs, and keep up with a VUCA* world.

"What?!"

Yes, we can hear you. We've heard it before.

"Why on earth would I ever want to go through strategic planning more than once a year?"

It's not the strategic planning of yesteryear that we're talking about. It's a whole different mindset and way of working.

Without it, the fast pace of change continues to be stressful and your organization, department, or team breaks down.

With it, you get good at catching emerging possibilities, embracing the uncertainties, and riding momentum. It's exhilarating, even fun.

Scenario development and analysis is one of the essential skills that you can work on with your leadership team. It leverages what you already know while assessing an ever-changing landscape of conditions impacting your organization.

Here at Erin Mosley, Inc. (EMI) we recommend a flexible step-by-step process. Each step brings valuable insights on its own while also building on previous steps. You can complete as many of the steps as you find useful. We encourage you to bring in trusted advisors and reviewers for input on progress and assumptions at any time. A lot can be done in a retreat-style workshop or in a series of sessions to promote continuous adaptation and engagement.

With EMI's experienced facilitation, our clients benefit from process expertise, ready-made canvases, on-line tools, and databases that support each of these steps. You can also be inspired and work through some of this on your own.

Step 1: Complete a Business Model Canvas
Outcome: Describe on one canvas the key business attributes of the organization and draw out initial insights on the strategic direction.

Step 2: Complete a PESTLED360 Canvas
Outcome: Describe on one canvas the key drivers (political, economic, social, technological, legal, environmental, demographic) to draw out strategic opportunities and threats.

Step 3: Explore the 7 Questions
Outcome: Re-imagine the future and draw out possibilities for scenarios.

Step 4: Collect and identify forces
Outcome: Identify forces that, when unopposed, will change the nature of the organization.

Step 5: Categorize drivers
Outcome: Prioritize drivers and estimate level of certainty so as to take clear action (i.e., the "low hanging fruit" that have more certainty and a clear path forward) or recommend for scenario development (this will include important drivers with more as-yet-unknown aspects).

Step 6: Stretch understanding of uncertainties
Outcome: Capture the range of possibilities with axis/axes of uncertainty for the prioritized drivers with more unknowns identified in the last step.

Step 7: Prioritize and combine categories of uncertainties
Outcome: Deepen understanding by reviewing the possible impacts of combined uncertainties. Choose the most interesting combinations as a basis for scenarios.

Step 8: Develop and use scenarios
Outcome: Develop scenarios of possible future situations that address the common needs for change and uncertainties based on the previous steps. The scenario descriptions may include underlying assumptions, the direction of change, timelines, and the main recommendations.

Each scenario provides a story of a different possible future. The process of developing and analyzing scenarios answers the questions:

Which are the most important uncertainties?
What do the uncertainties facing our organization have in common?
How will we become resilient across multiple possible scenarios? What calls for increased attention and action, and what calls for downsizing or divesting?

Read a case study

Revealing Your Organization's Hidden Needs: Scenario Planning for Non-profits

Keep going with your dynamic strategies!

To continue checking and adapting your strategies, you can build on your scenario analysis with the following:

Reviewing the maturity and future relevance of current services and products using the "3 Horizons"
Using the Four Actions Framework to stretch thinking about business model innovations
Creating an aspirational (future-focused) business model canvas
Evaluating and prioritizing strategic initiatives based on feasibility and impact
Mapping strategic initiatives to the 3 Horizons and other elements of an effective strategic portfolio

You can read more about the 3 Horizons here:

Innovation Horizons

Erin (Pink) Mosley is an Innovation360 IMGB™️ Innovation Management Green Belt / Licensed Practitioner. Contact us to learn more.

* VUCA: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. (A concept described by Bennis and Nanus in 1985 and introduced as an acronym by the U.S. Army War College in 1987.)

Source credits go to:

Innovation360
Shell Scenarios
The Futures Toolkit, UK Government Office for Science