Summary
Planning for the future is a core requirement for all businesses’ resource-allocation decisions, and something that executives must do in any industry. Attempting to predict the future can be a perilous exercise in a world with constantly evolving technology, consumer tastes, regulatory regimes and geopolitics. The best way to deal with uncertainty is to embrace it through scenario planning, a structured process in which decision makers develop a small number of scenarios that describe how the future might unfold and map decision trees consistent with optimizing shareholder outcomes in each scenario.
L.E.K. Consulting embraces scenario planning for both its process and its outcomes. The process of imagining the future through discreet scenarios forces executives to acknowledge that the recent past is rarely a reliable guide to the future; it minimizes the risk of groupthink by providing a safe setting in which assumptions can be called into doubt; and it sharpens strategic decision-making in general by illuminating the major forces likely to affect an industry in the future. Moreover, when scenario planning is backed with systematic research and analysis, the outcome is usually a set of scenarios that provides a surprisingly informative foundation for executives as they face an uncertain future.
In this Executive Insights, Peter McKelvey lays into a five-step process for effective scenario planning
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