Scenario planning

Scenario planning is a strategic planning method that some organizations use to make flexible long-term plans. It is in large part an adaptation and generalization of classic methods used by military intelligence.

Related Topics:
Strategic planning - Military intelligence

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The basic method is that a group of analysts generate simulation games for policy makers. The games combine known facts about the future, such as demographics, geography, military, political and industrial information, and mineral reserves, with particular possible social, technical and political trends.

Related Topics:
Demographics - Geography - Military - Political - Industrial

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Scenario planning can include elements that are difficult to formalize, such as subjective interpretations of facts, shifts in values, new regulations or inventions.

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These combinations of fact and possible social changes are called "scenarios." The scenarios usually include plausible, but unexpectedly important situations and problems that exist in some small form in the present day.

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Any particular scenario is unlikely. However, good analysts select the features of scenarios so that the features are both possible and uncomfortable. Scenario planning can therefore help policy-makers anticipate hidden weaknesses and inflexibilites in organizations and methods. When found years in advance, the weaknesses can be repaired or reduced more easily and more correctly than if a similar real-life problem should present as an emergency. For example, a company may discover that it needs to change contractual terms to protect against a new class of risks, or collect cash reserves to purchase anticipated technologies or equipment.

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Therefore, the flexible plans to cope with similar problems can have real future value.

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Strategic military intelligence organizations also construct scenarios. The methods and organizations are almost identical, except that scenario planning is applied to a wider variety of problems than merely military and political problems.

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As in military intelligence, the chief challenge of scenario planning is to find out the real needs of policy-makers, when policy-makers may not themselves know what they need to know, or may not know how to describe the information that they really want.

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Good analysts design the games so that policy makers have great flexibility and freedom to adapt their simulated organizations. Then these simulated organizations are "stressed" by the scenarios as a game plays out. Usually, particular groups of facts become more clearly important, so that the intelligence organizaton can refine and repackage real information more precisely to better-serve the policy-makers' real-life needs. Usually the games' simulated time runs hundreds of times faster than real life, so that policy-makers can experience several years of policy decisions, and their effects, in less than a day.

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The chief value of scenario planning is that it allows policy-makers to make and learn from mistakes without risking important failures in real life. Further, policymakers can make these mistakes in a pleasant, unthreatening, game-like environment, while responding to a wide variety of concretely-presented situations based on facts.

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