Online scenario planning and future development

The market Bredenoord operates in is moving fast. Many external developments are at play and it is hard to predict what the future will look like.

To prepare for a flexible multi-year plan, Bredenoord developed a set of future scenarios that give insight into possible shapes of the external environment. To build these scenarios, Bredenoord used the Social Scenario Planning tool.

Jester trained an internal project leader at Bredenoord to facilitate the online scenario project. The project leader has their own online environment in which they post assignments for the community and publish (interim) results. The community in this case consisted of the company's international top 20. Working together online saved a great deal of time and cost.

The standard steps of a scenario project were completed inside the tool: formulating strategic questions and a scope, selecting trends from our database, adding trends based on the team's own insights, assessing trends on impact and unpredictability, reviewing a proposed scenario framework, surfacing drivers and characteristics for the four scenarios, surfacing challenges and strategic options for the four scenarios, and assessing the relevance of those strategic options in each of the four scenarios.

Although the internal project leader led the project, Jester was asked to provide support on a number of components, focused mainly on the analysis of trends and the elaboration of the future scenarios.

The result of the online scenario project is a set of four fully developed scenarios (narratives) and more than 50 strategic options for the company. The scenarios and options form the basis of a multi-year strategy in which concrete choices have been made. The scenarios are also the foundation of an online early warning system that tracks the likelihood of each scenario and the ongoing relevance of the options.