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Interactive Scenarios
Cartegic uses structured interactive scenarios to help its clients formulate strategy, make decisions and set priorities for the health, growth and success of their organizations in the midst of rapid (often discontinuous) change and uncertainty in their operating environment.
Scenarios are especially useful under such conditions because they...
...provoke out-of-box thinking to address out-of-box challenges
...establish a robust common framework for quickly recognizing new opportunities, new threats and new classes of both;
...align distributed teams around a shared language and context for more effective strategic debate and more efficient decision-making;
...move beyond internal politics and one-story predictions to identify conventional wisdom and organizational blind spots;
...allow a management team to agree to disagree (for a time), while gathering the data that's needed to act with speed and conviction.
Selecting the most promising opportunities and perilous threats on which to spend resources is never easy. The persistent trap for planners is being asked to forecast the unforecastable.
I know we don't know.
That's not good enough.
I need a number.
Now.
When an organization's operating environment is relatively stable, (the present looking much like the past; a future that's fairly easy to predict), straight-line or even "rearview mirror" planning is often good enough. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer organizations face such conditions. Entirely new industries and rulesets are being created all the time. Traditional planning tools work poorly at these margins.
It's difficult to pay appropriate attention to a vast array of high impact possibilities all of which seem to be relatively unlikely.
It’s critical for an organization to look at the 'weak signals' (the subtle precursor signs) that, when taken together, can indicate the increasing likelihood of a major step-function change coming in from the margins. In a more proactive sense it’s also helpful for organizations to know how to seed such a revolution, manage it and prepare to capitalize on its results.
Interactive scenarios give management teams a rare
opportunity to rehearse together.
Scenarios give executives a chance to develop and practice compelling responses to a variety of archetypal situations they may face... or that they wish to create. Sports teams do this as a matter of course and nobody doubts that it makes them more effective. Management teams do this infrequently and often suffer for it.
Scenarios for senior decision- makers weave together an otherwise unmanageable array of possible future events to identify those that are truly important.
For more on our thinking about scenarios see this thread on our blog. Or contact us for more information.