|
The gods have rolled the dice - again! Over the past several weeks, we’ve seen the economy transform into something entirely different – totally unexpected. It’s too early to know what the new circumstances will be.
And that’s not all - change is rolling across the landscape! Here in America, we’ll soon have a new administration. Other changes are happening, albeit at a slower pace, but sure to have major, long lasting impacts on your organization: new technology, a global economy, energy markets, climate change, green technologies, a new generation with different values and expectations - to name a few.
Very few anticipated the melt down in the credit markets and fewer still can accurately predict what will happen in the next months and years. It’s a collision of a myriad of random events.
As these changes reverberate around the world, the combinations and permutations will create even more changes that will impact your organization or business in unpredictable and unexpected ways.
One thing is for sure: Tomorrow won’t be yesterday all over again!
To restate the old adage: If you keep doing what you’ve been doing, you may go down the drain.
It’s impossible to predict the future – especially in these turbulent times when something totally unexpected hits your company, your markets, and your customers that changes everything. What used to work may be totally invalid for your new situation.
But there are ways to articulate a range of ‘possible futures’ that you can use to imagine what might happen and develop a variety of ‘what if’ scenarios so that you and your people aren’t totally surprised and caught ‘flat footed’ when faced with an unexpected turn of events.
Peter Schwartz in ‘The Art of the Long View’ presents ideas about how you can anticipate a changing future. Here, I offer an approach based on Schwartz’s work that you could adapt to use within your organization.
Bring together people to generate a range of perspectives about ‘what’s happening out there’ and ‘what’s happening in here’ to interpret how the changing circumstances might impact your organization. You don’t want a single ‘This is the way it will be’ projection. You want a variety of scenarios - this might happen or this might happen – so that you and your staff stay mentally flexible, able to interpret events and react to whatever happens.
The key is to gather ideas from many sources, weave them together and create a range of possibilities about what the future MIGHT be. In the process, you can:
- Challenge your assumptions about what ‘is’ and what ‘will be’
- Raise your awareness about what is happening around you
- Create a forum for people to share understandings of how change might impact your organization
- Capitalize on opportunities and mitigate challenges
- Provide a framework for making informed, coordinated decisions and moving quickly
Don’t try to do this by yourself. I suggest you form a Scenario Team involving people with different perspectives, different management responsibilities, different backgrounds and different personality types. For instance, you’ll want some detail people, some who are logical thinkers, some conceptual people who see possibilities, some who are ‘people people’ (In Myers Briggs terms it’s the Sensor, Intuitive, Thinker, Feeler combination.)
You’ll want perspectives from outside the organization – maybe even some customers. (Some companies bring customers together on a regular basis to gather input they might not be able to get any other way. For more about this approach see www.cabhq.com.)
The team’s objective is to develop descriptions of ideas, trends, possible events that might impact your organization in the future. Their goal is to collect information – maybe numerical, often anecdotal and come together, share, interpret that information and move toward a shared understanding of possible trends and factors that may impact the organization in the future.
Have the scenario team to make presentations to your senior staff to integrate new information into the strategic planning process. The goal is to develop a range of scenarios as a basis for developing possible action plans. It is unlikely that you can take into account all the factors. Schwartz recommends ‘a few’ scenarios that give a broad perspective – a range of possible outcomes.
Along the way, the team will need to communicate their findings back throughout the organization. The goal is not always a written report, although that may, sometimes, be appropriate. They may share their findings in conversations, team meetings and other informal settings so that people are prepared for changes that may impact the way they think and work.
The results of scenario planning is a shift of focus from being mired in your current situation or trapped in solving yesterday’s problems to maintaining a flexible frame of mind, looking forward, being prepared for the unexpected and unpredictable but inevitable.
Peter Wendel is President of Peter Wendel Group (Buffalo, New York) an organizational consulting firm dedicated to building high performance organization that are able to prosper and grow in these rapidly changing times by offering succession planning, strategic thinking, team building and leadership development services. He blends a passion for organizations and people with a lifetime of experience both as a business leader/manager and an accomplished consultant.
The Peter Wendel Group specializes in succession planning, building on three elements:
- Building a strong sustainable organization in which people are aligned toward achieving a shared vision and are in positions that build on their personal strengths and aspirations.
- Developing a cadre of people who have the vision, passion, talent and skills to become the ‘next generation’ of leaders.
- Helping the current leaders prepare to make the ‘Grand Transition’ from work into what I call ‘the third phase’ of their lives.
Email: pkwendel@aol.com
Company Profile: Peter Wendel Group
Company URL:
http://www.peterwendelgroup.com
Back to Columns page
| 
