Scenario planning

Edited book, 2010

A new project idea irrespective of origin and organisations will always need to react and adapt to their operating environment in order to survive. However, the most successful organisations will predict the future with intelligent insight, enabling them to change proactively to maintain competitive advantage. Traditional planning techniques use predictions, forecasts and projections but they may not be able to cope with ‘disruptive’ changes in the environment. A more powerful approach is scenario planning, which can be seen as a rediscovery of the original entrepreneurial power of creative foresight in the context of accelerated change, greater complexity and genuine uncertainty. In practical terms, this involves thinking, unconstrained by the present, to consider plausible future options. It is about making choices today with an understanding of how they might turn out tomorrow.