The Quantumrun Foresight Platform (QFP) helps businesses thrive from emerging trends by providing tools to accelerate strategy development. And this month—October 2022—we are learning how to integrate scenarios into strategy development.
The effective production and use of scenarios within an organization can improve the preparedness and understanding of its strategic decision-making while accelerating its response time to varying environmental forces. Similarly, scenarios provide organizations with a method to systematically explore the possible, plausible, and probable futures (business environments) that lie ahead but with the ultimate goal of strategically selecting one preferred future to pursue. This process encourages brainstorming and building multiple potential scenarios that organizations can assess, rank, and use to either guide their strategic planning or product development processes.
The various methods of scenario production are covered in detail in Quantumrun Foresight’s Scenario Composer tutorial guide, which can be read here.
However, once scenarios are produced, some organizations experience confusion about how to apply the findings of these scenarios practically.
There are three practical methodologies that organizations can use to translate scenarios into strategies and policies that can drive real operational improvements across various metrics.
Scenario immersion
This method presents completed scenarios to as many organizational members as possible in a workshop format. Participants are asked to identify and discuss as many threats and opportunities as possible for each scenario. Once complete, the group can vote on those threat and opportunity responses that they would like to incorporate into their strategic plan.
Wind tunneling
In this method, existing company strategies are stress-tested against varying conditions placed upon them by competing for future scenarios. The individual scenarios act like a ‘wind tunnel,’ and the existing strategies act like ‘plane models’ whose performance and integrity the wind tunnels are testing. In this exercise, workshop participants are asked to grade each company strategy (using a 1-to-5 or 1-to-10 rating range) by how well it would perform when operating within each business or environmental scenario. The strategy with the highest score is the one that would theoretically perform best amidst the widest variation of scenarios set against it.
Objective wind tunneling
A more rigorous variant of the Wind Tunneling method can be used when an organization has competing strategies and wants to decide which one to keep. In this method, competing strategies are tested against scenarios given a set of objectives to determine which is best.
Regardless of the methodology selected, taking the time to analyze scenarios and strategies will ensure that whatever direction your organization chooses to reach its objectives, it will do so with a greater degree of confidence and reduced risk.
For a more detailed description of these methods, please read our website detailing these methods further.
If you want to know more about signing up for the Quantumrun Foresight Platform and its different pricing plans, contact us at contact@quantumrun.com. One of our Foresight consultants will contact you to find out how best the Quantumrun Foresight Platform can serve the needs of your business.
You can also schedule a live demo or test the platform over a trial period.
