Scenario Planning: A Field Guide to the Future

by Woody Wade

Is your business ready for the future? Scenario planning is a fascinating, yet still underutilized, business tool that can be of immense value to a company's strategic planning process. It allows companies to visualize the impact that a portfolio of possible futures could have on their competitiveness. It helps decision-makers see opportunities and threats that could emerge beyond their normal planning horizon. Scenario Planning serves as a guide to taking a long-term look at your business, your industry, and the world, posing thoughtful questions about the possible consequences of some current (and possible future) trends. This book will help you:

Outline (and help you prepare for) any trends that could play out in the future that could change the political, social, and economic landscapes and significantly impact your business Explore the impact of technological advances and the emergence of new competitors to your business Examine challenges that are only dimly recognizable as potential problems today This visual book will help you answer this question: Is my organization ready for every possibility?

Genres: Business

208 pages, Paperback

First published March 7, 2012

Reviews

[Martin Hernandez]

En este libro, el autor propone una metodología para la elaboración de escenarios para apoyar la Planeación Estratégica de una empresa. El procedimiento parece simple de implementar, pero es una poderosa herramienta para desarrollar un Plan Estratégico de visión amplia, y razonablemente blindado.
Este manual se puede complementar con un par de cursos que el mismo autor ofrece en la plataforma digital de Udemy.
Recomendado para profesionistas con responsabilidades en la planeación de sus organizaciones, y uno que otro curioso interesado en aprender de casi cualquier cosa. :)

[John Crippen]

A Coffee Table Book about scenario planning. The information (on every other page due to all the graphics and photos) in the chapter titled "How-to" was a great introduction to scenario planning and really taught me a lot about the process. Sadly, the helpfulness of that single chapter was overshadowed by the form factor of the book that made it hard to hold, the glossy pages that made it hard to read compared to a regular book, and the very high photo-to-words ratio.

[Tey Shi]

A concise guide to how scenario planning works with actual case studies to help illuminate how the process may be conducted. Although the book is aimed more for organisations, I felt that it is also helpful to the individual who may be interested in understanding how certain world events may play out in the future.

Essentially, the aim of scenario planning is not to predict the future but to consider what could possibly happen and be prepared for such events if it should happen. The planning starts with determining the type of question/planning and the long frame of the "prediction". The longer the time frame, teh range of possible future outcomes increases, and the likelihood of certain trends having a greater potential increases. hence, it is important to note what is an appropriate level to pitch the question at. After scoping the problem, it's important to get a wide variety of views from experts and bring together stakeholders to identify possible trends and form hypothesis about how the future will turn out. Some driving forces to consider include societal values/attitudes, technological, economics, natural resources, demographics, political, international, legal and environment. Critically, it's important to identify "black swan" events, incidents that are highly uncertain to happen but creates a huge impact on the organisation when it happens. e.g. 2008 financial crisis, sudden health epidemic, large scale terrorist attack that disrupts supply chains, etc.

At the end of the planning, we should be left with stories of how these scenarios play out via a logical, step-by-step reasoning of the intermediate causes and effects that resulted, over the long term (e.g. 10years) into the scenarios that we planned. We should also be able to identify several signposts that would serve as indicators on which of the scenario would be more likely to play out, or to make changes to update the scenarios forecasted.

I have not read other books on scenario planning so I do not know how it compares, but this was a good introduction for me.

[Louis Ng]

Great book on scenario analysis with a bunch of examples

I was reading another book on scenario analysis but that book was too academic. After doing some research. This book came to me and it has described 10 steps and also provided a bunch of examples.

It was like the first part was interesting and useful. The book then jumped to all the examples but it didn't give detail in for example, imagining for your own project, life or case. A walkthrough would make a big difference (Because it already described the 10 steps, it is logical if something like that is provided).

Otherwise, the book is a good read, especially the first part. For the second pot, you can skip whatever example and read what's interesting to you.

[Yoko]

Although Scenario Planning by Woody Wade is always listed as a highly recommended book for consultants, First couple chapters were not so impressive.
However, Chapter 4 Black Swan & Chapter 5 Are you ready? - were literally wake up call to me. I almost felt his remarks strike home and was urged to get ready for my own future.

[Manoj Joshi]

An interesting text could have been better. The case method is always a tricky element to demonstrate the research context and that is entirely up to the authors to demonstrate. It just came to my mind if industry wise analysis could have been built it might have been an everlasting text

[Christina Klavsen]

If you want a quick, reader-friendly and simple introduction to scenario planning you should read this book. It has great cases which make it easy to understand the implication of the method.