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Scenario planning is used in situations where an important decision needs to be made, however before the decision is made the possible outcomes of the situation need to be recognised and factored into the decision-making process. Scenarios are powerful planning tools because of one reason: the future is unpredictable. Scenarios aid in postulating possible futures that result from extrapolating current trends from the present. Scenario planning is useful in the sense that given the impossibility of knowing exactly how the future will transpire, a good decision to make is one that can be used for many different possible futures. The main benefits from using scenario planning are that it is a flexible process, one that can be tailored to meet the needs of the situation. The purpose of scenario planning is to highlight various forces that lead the future into different directions.
It is about acknowledging these forces, and determining how these forces influence how the future will pan out. It is ultimately about making better decisions and avoiding any variables that can affect the success of the decision made. The strength of the scenario planning process is that it generates a unified view, which is, nonetheless, non-prescriptive. Not only does it assist in developing multiple futures, it offers multiple strategies in response to them.
This presents a disciplined framework in which the organisation can make its decisions, and if the scenario process has been performed correctly, the relevance of the issues and the options will reflect and extend or challenge recognizable futures. Scenario planning gives you more than a dry statistical measure of a possible future it gives you a clear view of how to live in that future. Scenario planning requires going to unknown extremes, so that you have a sense of how to help your audience be persuaded into a possible future that might never have occurred to them. This possible future must still be demonstrably possible it is not enough to mention it.
To demonstrate this possibility, each future scenario must be carefully researched and documented. The better our research, the more convincing and correct the scenarios will be. The first step in the scenario planning process is to frame the question. Once you believe you have the right question, look at questions behind the question, to make sure you have gone deep enough. Once the question is framed, it is time to find out everything you can about the subject and its context. Having determined what the question is and done our research, the next step is to identify the local forces that will affect our decision.
From this we aim to answer the question that we originally came up with. Next we look for the global factors that underlie the local forces. These factors are typically drawn from the following sources: Society Technology Politics Economics From our investigation, we aim to isolate the driving forces that shape what may happen in the future. These driving forces are trends at work in the larger world that determine what direction the local forces take. Once these forces are catalogued, we can see that some forces are predetermined in a sense that they are completely outside our control and will play out in any story told about the future.
After we identify the predetermined elements from the list of driving forces, we are now left with a number of uncertainties. Next we look at the forces to make sure they are critical uncertainties. Once we have identified the driving forces and determined how they interrelate, the next step is to build the scenarios. Our goal is not to tell four stories, one of which we hope will come true.
Instead, we recognise that the future will not be any of the scenarios but a mixture of them. Once these scenarios are developed a strategic plan is developed to find out how we aim to meet the criteria for the scenarios. The next section looks at the focus issue and core situation.
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Research essay sample on Driving Forces Planning Process
