Scenarios and horizons
Scenario planning, foresight and environmental scanning.
Two and a half hours on scenarios and horizons: scenario planning and strategic foresight, adaptive leadership in complexity, what strategic thinking is and reading the operating environment.
- Level
- Focus
- Learning time
- 2 hours 30 minutes
- Where
- Complexity, decisions and innovation
- Price
- £69
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 leaders and strategy leads in housing, health, councils and the voluntary sector
Overview
Strategy is often mistaken for planning, and under pressure that confusion changes what an organisation actually does. Sharing its material with the Immerse Seeing further, together, this Focus starts with scenario planning and strategic foresight: forecasting compared with scenarios, Pierre Wack at Shell, Peter Schwartz and a four-step scenario matrix. It turns to adaptive leadership, with Heifetz's balcony and holding environment and Toyota's response to the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. It finishes on what strategic thinking is and is not, through Rich Horwath's three disciplines and Kodak and Fujifilm, and reading the operating environment through Cynefin and wicked problems.
Aims
Everything here is designed to help leaders separate forecasting from foresight, stay calm, curious and committed as complexity rises, and match their approach to the situation they are actually in, so that strategy shapes what the organisation does rather than sitting in a plan.
In summary, you will be able to:
- Compare forecasting with scenario planning and build a four-step scenario matrix for a question your organisation faces.
- Apply Heifetz's balcony and holding environment to stay steady as complexity rises, drawing on Toyota's response in 2011.
- Explain what strategic thinking is and is not, using Horwath's three disciplines, and match your approach to your operating environment.
What you'll develop
Through this Focus course, you will build 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.
- 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.
- Describe Horwath's three disciplines and the three habits of strategic thinkers, and identify which failure each habit guards against in your own organisation.
- Identify whether a challenge is tame or wicked using Rittel and Webber's four key properties, and explain what that means for how a strategy is written.
Built from 2 parts.
2 hours 30 minutes of learning.
- 01Seeing round cornersScenario planning and strategic foresightBitesize · VUCA, Uncertainty and Complexity2 modules
- 02Seeing the bigger pictureStrategic thinking and environmental scanningBitesize · Strategic Thinking2 modules