8 Future Scenarios & New Ways of Doing Things
Future Scenarios New Ways of Doing Things
How can scenario thinking help you to be open to new ideas? How might you encourage yourself and your teams to apply scenario thinking to situations where the current solutions no longer seem to be working as well? Here are some tips that will help you.
A word of caution
Given that you may work in an HRO – a High Reliability Organisation, where things can’t go wrong and if they do disaster may follow – you want to consider the implausibility rule in a considered and mindful manner.
Many organisations use scenario planning as a risk management approach. It can allow planning for poor outcomes as well as better future outcomes. It requires you to at least think about ‘what is the worst thing that could happen’? It is a great technique when safety is key for example, and organisations that need a strong safety culture tend to use this approach for safety workshops and training.
Now the next step is to start using scenario thinking. The ‘thinking’ element encourages us to think more about new possibilities and options. It helps us to also accept the possibility that the outcomes could potentially be much worse than we might anticipate or much better than we might anticipate. This is the step of ‘implausibly’: what is highly unlikely to happen, but might be either catastrophic or way beyond expectations. This thinking tends to work because we set up the process as an act of exploring and building multiple, flexible and shifting versions of both inputs and outcomes. The scenarios’ ‘anchors’, or inputs, can ideally be easily changed.
The easiest way to think about the idea of scenarios and multiple, flexible and shifting inputs and outcomes is to imagine a Rubik’s Cube. A simple ‘spin’ of an axis, and the inputs to a surface change, and the overall ‘look’, the outputs, of the Cube change. In fact, the analogy of a Rubik’s Cube is a good one for when you are facing a complex situation with many unknowns.
Scenario planning is a disciplined method for imagining possible futures and outcomes.7 It is a systematic methodology that has both fuzzy and ambiguous boundaries combined with detail and rigorous thinking and analysis. In the language of scenario work, scenarios explore the joint impact of various uncertainties as multiple variables change both simultaneously and at intervals. These interactions allow for both subjective and objective interpretations and insights, and create future opportunities and possibilities as well as insights into potential challenges and barriers.8
Scenario thinking is a branch of scenario work that focuses more on the concept of implausibility, the exploration of concepts, ideas and possibilities that are potentially highly unlikely and may have highly disruptive impacts, either to the upside or to be catastrophic.9
Scenarios, scenario planning and scenario thinking are fundamental strategy, planning and learning tools in many organisations. You would all have experienced these in various ways. Some of you might have developed scenarios. Others of you will have used this when you were instructing and training others. We are sure that most if not all of you will have experienced scenarios in some ways in your time in your organisation. Later in this unit you get to make your way through a scenario experience.
The underlying goal of scenario thinking is to explore and question assumptions. There are many considerations and possibilities to consider, and there are as many opinions and approaches to this thinking model. Even expanding the technique to encompass scenario thinking, changes the purpose and approach to some degree. Scenario thinking is an ideal ‘wicked-problem-solving’ strategy.
Further Reading
These is an excellent reading in your Additional Resources site that you may find interesting.
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Additional Reading
Scenario Planning: A Tool for Strategic Thinking |
Schoumaker, P. (1995) Scenario Planning: A Tool for Strategic Thinking. Sloan Management Review, Winter
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Here is also a short insight from the QUT GSB Team.