Friday Scenario Warning: Check Your Ideology at the Door
In election season as in any other season, when making business decisions in conditions of uncertainty, ideologies can be deadly – and we all have them. Scenarios can help.
Decision-making and Judgment
Types of Scenario Planning
by Charles Thomas
The term “scenario planning” encompasses a surprisingly diverse range of activities. While there are many potential schemes for categorizing these activities, the discussion below presents a fairly comprehensive view of them, and indicates – if imperfectly – the relationships among the various approaches.
Silos, seams and business model reengineering
“Silos” are an inevitable part of any organization; indeed, of any human activity. Even if you confine yourself to individual action, your own mind is thinking within certain categories, usually operating off a mental model that tells you what to expect – “If I do X, then Y will happen” – and what NOT to expect – Z or W or something completely different.
Scenario Planning at FSG
What exactly does the Futures Strategy Group do? We help excellent organizations make better decisions under conditions of uncertainty — mainly through the use of scenarios.
Seven Wrong Things People Think About the Future
All along the untrodden paths of the future I see the footprints of an unseen hand. – Sir Boyle Roche
We who inhabit the Land of Scenariotopia (as a former colleague termed our little realm) think that the best way to predict the future is not to.
What We Are On About Here
Few people think more than two or three times a year. I’ve made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week. – George Bernard Shaw
McKinsey, Scenarios and Us
by Patrick Marren
The November 2009 issue of the McKinsey Quarterly includes an article by Charles Roxburgh entitled “The Use and Abuse of Scenarios.” It includes a number of good tips about scenario-based strategic planning, based on his experience in building scenarios over the past 25 years. It also highlights some important distinctions between his understanding of scenarios, and the way in which FSG has gone about creating and using them over the past few decades. And finally, it brings to the surface the urgent concerns of executives as they go about leading their organizations under uncertain conditions.
The Big Mistakes Obama Has Already Made
As the economy fails to recover instantaneously, and foreign enemies bluster, President Obama is taking increasing heat from expert critics. It is clear that his administration has made many missteps already in its handling of the economy, foreign policy, and virtually every other area. Some of these mistakes will take years, if not decades, for the United States to recover from.
Scenario Planning Bookshelf: Chasing Black Swan Tails
by Patrick Marren
Much has been made lately of “long tails” and “Black Swans.” The latter is a formulation of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an options trader and academic whose book, The Black Swan, lays out what Black Swans are and why just about everyone but him in the financial world is a fool.
Crisis Scenario Planning in an Eventful Year
It’s early April – not even 100 days into the Obama administration – and already it’s been a turbulent year. At this moment, a modest rally is buoying Wall Street and investor hopes that maybe – maybe – the worst may be over, as leaders of the G-20 nations meeting in London pledge hundreds of billions more dollars and coordinated action in the face of the greatest financial mess since the Great Depression.