Scenario development - understanding alternative futures and making profitable strategy
You cannot react to the future until you can imagine it.
The essential part of foresight is to imagine coherent discrete views of the future, and to avoid poorly-explored, superstitious, fear- or fantasy-based thoughts about what's next. That's why the penultimate step in the future intelligence process is the development of a series of pictures of what could be next, based entirely on the rigorous trend data and forecasts discovered during the research phase.
Scenario planning is not a new discipline; its entry into the professional management lexicon now goes back close to fifty years. Pick some date five or ten years into the future, write some form of story that includes what you think the future might look like, and show the organization either thriving or in tough times.
Really using scenarios to their maximum effect actually including much more expertise than this caricature. For example - how many scenarios should you use? One? Two? Three? The standard is often to show Great Success, Status Quo, and Not Quite As Much Success. Is this the best way to go?
This is where Competitive Futures' decade-plus experience of using scenarios as tool to explore strategic options is of great use to its client base. We make sure that the presentation of scenarios don't allow for the easy, faux-moderate user of Status Quo scenarios. All our visions of the future are backed up with expert trend data, naturally, and are also fine-tuned to make sure the organization can discover the case for change. All scenarios show the essential factors of a world in the midst of change, illustrating how customers are changing, supply chains are evolving, and threats and opportunities are presenting themselves.
The result is a complete intelletual product that shows relevant strategic trends, forecasts from experts and the variety of uncertainties for which our clients can prepare themselves to find profitable opportunities ahead of their competitors.