Futures and choices
Scenario planning, environmental scanning and strategic choice.
A half day on futures and choices: scenario planning and foresight, adaptive leadership, strategic thinking, reading the operating environment, the Strategic Choice Approach and decisions under uncertainty.
- Level
- Explore
- Learning time
- 4 hours
- Where
- Complexity, decisions and innovation
- Price
- £129
When you step up to a higher level, what you paid in the last 12 months for lower-level courses inside the bigger course comes off its price, in proportion to how much of each is inside it, whichever topic it's from. Courses at the same or a lower level don't give credit against each other. A Focus course or above always costs at least £15. Read the full terms
Certificate of Completion, or Certificate of Completion and Assessment with a short assessment
Overview and Outcomes.
Who It's For
Senior leadership teams, strategy and policy leads in local government, health, housing and voluntary organisations
Overview
No one can predict the future, but a leadership team can rehearse for several and choose wisely between them. The first half of the Immerse Seeing further, together begins with scenario planning, from Pierre Wack's work at Shell before the 1973 oil shock to Peter Schwartz's The Art of the Long View. It turns to Heifetz's adaptive leadership and to what strategic thinking really is, with Rich Horwath's three disciplines and Kodak and Fujifilm. Reading the operating environment follows, through Cascio's BANI, Cynefin and wicked problems. Its final part covers Friend and Hickling's Strategic Choice Approach and matching the decision tool to certainty, risk or uncertainty.
Aims
The course is there to help leadership teams rehearse the futures and then choose: building and revisiting scenarios together, naming their situation before deciding how to act, and being clear about what to commit to now and what to leave open.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Plan a scenario exercise with your team, drawing on Wack's work at Shell and Schwartz's The Art of the Long View.
- Diagnose your operating environment using BANI, Cynefin and wicked problems before choosing how to act.
- Use the Strategic Choice Approach to decide what to commit to now and what to leave open, matching tools to the level of uncertainty.
What you'll develop
Across this Explore, you will develop the ability to:
- Distinguish forecasting from scenario planning and identify a single forecast that is being presented as a scenario exercise.
- Distinguish technical problems from adaptive challenges by asking whose behaviour, attitude or priority has to change.
- Distinguish strategic thinking from strategic planning, strategic management and strategic leadership, and apply the test of value and real choice to a strategy document.
- Distinguish the five Cynefin domains and describe the decision-making approach each one calls for.
- Describe the four modes of the Strategic Choice Approach and identify which mode a discussion is actually in.
- Distinguish certainty, risk, uncertainty and ambiguity, and use four questions to place a live decision on that spectrum.
- Build a two by two scenario matrix, selecting as axes the two forces that are both highly important and genuinely hard to predict.
- Apply the balcony and dance floor discipline, using specific questions to read resistance and avoidance after a difficult meeting.
Built from 6 modules.
4 hours of learning.
- 01Scenario Planning and Strategic ForesightVUCA, Uncertainty and Complexity38 min
- 02Leading Through Complexity: What's New Beyond Module 4VUCA, Uncertainty and Complexity38 min
- 03Foundations: What Strategic Thinking Is (and Isn't)Strategic Thinking39 min
- 04Reading the Operating EnvironmentStrategic Thinking40 min
- 05Strategic Models II: Structuring Strategic ChoiceStrategic Thinking38 min
- 06Decisions Under Certainty, Risk and UncertaintyStrategic Thinking38 min