Knowledge-Based Scenarios
Organizations have to consider outside forces and trends as they build their strategies. But in most, too few people spend enough time thinking about how the future will shape the organization. Too often, not enough of the collective knowledge and ideas of the organization finds its place in strategy.
Leading firms use scenarios to solve those problems. Scenarios explore much more fully an organization’s future. Then they can become a tool for sharing that thinking much more broadly. The scenario building process draws out the insight of a team and helps make future challenges and opportunities clearer and more compelling to people. It gives participants a shared view of future possibilities that enriches their day-to-day work and strategic thinking.
Leading Futurists, LLC serves this need for organizations through a facilitated scenario building process. The scenario building workshop can be done with a select group or done repeatedly in the organization to expand the foresight capacity of the entire firm.
Leading Futurists applies a unique asset–its in-depth knowledge of the forces and trends shaping change–to the scenario process. This global knowledge base draws on our ongoing work on the future of lifestyles, forecasts in science and technology, and the future of sustainability.
Scenario building is a great team activity. For many, it is often their first full-fledged exploration of the future. The scenarios themselves can be powerful tools for communicating ideas about change to more people.
A workshop would involve between 12 and 25 people. The process is democratic, so people from different levels in the organization can work successfully together. Scenario building is well-suited to mixed functional groups, so you might consider a broad outreach to bring in a group that would then go back and pollinate other parts of the organization with futures enthusiasm.
What Leading Futurists will do for you
Leading Futurists will create a custom scenario-building workshop for your organization. In a day-long workshop, attendees will create and interpret scenarios for the organization’s future.
To inform the process, Leading Futurists will first brief workshop attendees on powerful forces of change that will transform the organization’s future. This is a key strength of our approach. It carries the work beyond facilitation, and will sharpen the attendees’ thinking on how change could shape challenges and opportunities.
The goal of the workshop is to give a team a full and compelling experience with scenarios so that scenarios could become a regularly used part of the organization’s toolkit for strategy, planning, and product development.
Why Leading Futurists, LLC?
Jennifer Jarratt and John B. Mahaffie have been building and using scenarios with Fortune 100 firms and others for almost two decades. Among our recent clients for scenario planning have been:
- Honeywell
- Nestlé
- Bovis Lend Lease
- The Department of Veterans Affairs
Mahaffie and Jarratt regularly teach scenario methodology courses. Jarratt has taught futures studies in the Master’s program at the University of Houston, Clear Lake.
Our knowledge base on the future assures that the futures views built by groups it coaches are reasoned, legitimate, and useful to planning and communicating ideas about change.