Part 6 — Adjusting course with scenarios.

The world is a film, not a photograph

With scenarios you can anticipate important uncertainties. But that is always a snapshot. What you see today as great uncertainty can, a (few) years later, have gained certain momentum. Sometimes things we see as certainties suddenly become unsettled too. In short, the world does not stop changing once you have drawn up scenarios. All kinds of events, trends and developments keep playing off, reinforcing or weakening each other. The scenarios form a photograph, but the world is a film. It is therefore important to keep monitoring what is happening in that world. How important developments are taking shape, which scenarios appear to be moving closer, which are becoming less likely over time. Only by doing this can you truly be an adaptive organisation and adjust strategy in good time.

By doing this systematically, at set times, you provide a degree of anchoring and embedding for regularly pausing together on the question of what everyone is seeing happen in the world around us and whether you, as an organisation, are well prepared for it. You can do this by setting up an Early Warning System (EWS). In an EWS, the scenarios act as lenses to interpret weak signals of change. If you have already practised making scenarios, you have probably experienced how that works. Because you have immersed yourself in radically different futures, you already see early signals of change around you. To set up an EWS, there are three things you will need to do: 1. Define change indicators 2. Set up a dashboard 3. Embed it in your planning and control cycle. We explain these steps in our new article. Download it here.

---

Jeroen Toet is a senior strategist at Jester Strategy and co-author of the book Scenario planning in practice. For more than 10 years he has been helping organisations in the private and public sector make future-proof choices through a range of foresight methods, including scenario planning.

Questions about the article? Please contact Jeroen: j.toet@jester.nl or 06 11 451311.