Scenario Insight

Scenario Training, Design and Coaching

  • Home
  • Services
    • Scenario Training
    • Scenario Design & Facilitation
    • Scenario Coaching
  • About
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Home
  • Services
    • Scenario Training
    • Scenario Design & Facilitation
    • Scenario Coaching
  • About
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • March 24, 2023

Connecting Foresight and Action

April 4, 2014 By Jonathan Star

A few months ago, I spoke at a Foresight and Futures Trends conference. The sessions were the usual mix of provocative presentations, nicely designed slides and (mostly) engaged audiences.

But in talking with participants at the breaks, there was a common theme. People in strategy and trends and competitive intelligence roles all struggling with the same issue: how do we bring these ideas about external change back into our organizations?

The problem is larger than just the time and expense of attending a single conference. Companies now commission or create their own impressive trends reports. A few are investing heavily in locating staff in innovative regions, where they can tap into the latest thinking and practice about new technologies, business models and social movements.

But the problem remains the same. No matter how much you invest in expansive thinking, how do you bring the ideas back to the core so that they make a difference?

For me, there are three gaps creating this chasm between foresight / trends and action:

A focus gap: trends reports and conferences are wide-ranging, offering many, broad, diverse ideas. But the core typically wants to deal with only a few issues or ideas. Someone – or some process – needs to winnow down to just a few important issues.

A socialization gap: the benefits of trends and foresight work tend to accrue to individuals. Conference attendees are informed; readers of new reports gain insights. But making a difference in the core needs those insights to be shared. Any change needs buy-in, often from many people in our large organizations.

An ownership gap: even when trends work is presented back into the organization, it is often packaged, or “delivered”. But change mostly happens when decision-makers in the core “discover” insights for themselves. Bringing ideas back from the outside must be carefully orchestrated to allow decision-makers to contribute their own views.

Anyone responsible for trends work in their organization needs to constantly think about effective ways to close these gaps. When I spoke at that conference, I argued that scenario work is as good a device as any to solve this problem. Scenario creation takes many trends and winnows down to a few key ones; it is conducted through engaging, interactive working sessions with many people; and it is specifically designed to allow people to discover insights for themselves.

Next time you commission some trends work, or go to a foresight conference, think about the best way to bring it home.

Filed Under: BLOG Tagged With: foresight

Embedding Scenario Thinking

March 24, 2014 By Jonathan Star

In my experience, organizations engage in scenario work in three different ways.

Sometimes, scenarios can be helpful as a “jolt” – a one-off , one-time experience that is designed to provoke and shift the thinking of the session participants. People are engaged for a day (or a few hours), and that’s it. Good, interesting session. “Made me think”, and then it’s often back to business.

Scenarios are also used in “projects” – as a technique to help address a particular time-bound challenge, like rethinking an existing strategy to deal with a changing and unfamiliar situation. Here, people are usually engaged two or three times over the life of the project – usually two or three months. The work gets done, new insights are created, and change (hopefully) gets implemented.

I think that organizations that use scenarios most successfully do so as part of a “program” – where scenario thinking is used regularly over time to help shed light on a range of strategic issues. Organizations like Shell, UPS and Morgan Stanley have all used scenarios in this way over many years.

This is not an easy thing to do. There is a tendency to put a lot of energy into a single scenario session or project. Once that is over, attention often moves away to the next event, or back to the regular cycles of work. In many organizations, not enough thought is given to the ongoing value of the scenarios and their insights.

So here are four areas to focus on to “embed” scenario work in your organization:

Conversation – scenarios can be used to track shifts in the environment, providing a strong, regular platform for scanning and strategic conversations about how the world outside is changing, and how the organization plans to deal with this

Communication – scenarios can be a powerful backdrop to deliver important messages or engage other groups in a conversation about the future. Use scenarios as a way to share your thinking with colleagues, associates and collaborators

Choices – scenarios can be an important input to strategy discussions They can help test strategic choices or future plans. Encourage your colleagues to ask questions like: “Will our proposed approach work, given the different ways we can imagine the future playing out?”

Capability-building – this is not just about developing your own skills as a provider and facilitator of scenario planning work. It is equally important to develop the capacity of your colleagues and associates to be “smart consumers” of scenarios.

Filed Under: BLOG

Scenarios as part of a toolkit

March 24, 2014 By Jonathan Star

In this blog, I intend to highlight any issues or insights that I think are valuable for teams who want to use scenarios in their organization. I hope to cover ideas about trends and uncertainties, tips and techniques for developing, communicating and using scenarios, and anything else that might be relevant for people thinking about the future.

Just to be clear, scenarios are not a suitable approach for every strategic challenge that an organization faces. There are other tools and techniques that can provide value in many situations. But my hope is that scenario thinking becomes one important element of the toolkit for anyone engaged in strategy, innovation or planning work.

Filed Under: BLOG

Recent Posts

  • Scenarios as part of a toolkit

  • Embedding Scenario Thinking

  • Connecting Foresight and Action

Contact

Scenario Insight
769 Center Boulevard #63  |  Fairfax, CA 94930     +1 415 306 7823
jstar@scenarioinsight.com

Copyright © 2020  Scenario Insight

Copyright © 2023 ·Outreach Pro Theme · Genesis Framework by StudioPress · WordPress · Log in