Our Introduction to Scenario Planning workshop, explores the process, its usefulness in anticipating future change, and its importance in making strategic decisions for the future. During the workshop, natural teams examine the natural inclination to create scenarios, develop an understanding of the methodology, and apply its usefulness to real world decisions.

Specific objectives of Scenario Planning are:

• To introduce the concept
• Experience the process in a team environment
• Learn the methodology
• Demonstrate its usefulness
• Develop a discipline that insures strategic focus
• Carry new skills back to the workplace

What Are Scenarios?
A scenario is a tool to organize perceptions about several future environments in which today's decisions might play out. In practice, scenarios resemble a set of stories, written or spoken, built around carefully constructed plots. Stories are a familiar way to organize knowledge, and when used as planning tools, they can express multiple perspectives on complex events. Scenarios give meaning to these events.

How Do You Create Scenarios?
Scenario Planning follows systematic and recognizable phases. The process is highly interactive, intense, and imaginative. It begins by focusing on the decision to be made, identifying our current perceptions, and hunting and gathering information, often from unorthodox sources. Next, driving forces (social, technological, environmental, economic, and political) predetermined elements (i.e., what is inevitable); and the critical uncertainties (i.e., what is unpredictable or a matter of choice such as public opinion) are all identified. These factors are then prioritized according to impact and unpredictability.

This results in the creation of three or four carefully constructed scenario "plots." If the scenarios are to function as learning tools, they must be based on issues critical to the success of the decision. Only a few scenarios can be fully developed and remembered, and each should represent plausible alternative futures, "not best case, worst case, and most likely". Once the scenarios have been fleshed out and woven into a narrative, we identify their implications and the leading indicators to be monitored on an ongoing basis.