Scenario Planning

Scenario planning is a tool used to solve large, complex problems that concern a range of stakeholders, often with a range of perspectives. It is common a common tool used in organisational management and strategic policy making. We will use scenario planning to stress-test some ideas before we bed down the requirements of your system as a final way to ensure that you have adequately explored the problem space.

Example applications

The classic use of scenario planning was by Royal Dutch Shell, which used scenario planning to their strategic advantage in the 1970s to out-forecast other oil companies. They were able to react to the predicted overcapacity in the tanker business, and moved out of that area before the oil crisis.

Steps

Like all the tools we use in our interdisciplinary swamp of systems problem solving, constructing a good scenario plan is as much an art as it is a science. We are going to utilise only a part of the suite of tools

and approaches used in scenario planning:

1. Consider two possible variables that are important to your client/project. Some examples could be be cost, safety, reliability, performance, etc. These need not be the two most important ‘requirements’ but rather should be things that you have found to be important to the success of the project. (Let’s consider cost and safety here.)
2. 18.Take the two variables, and place them on two perpendicular axes. Put low and high at either end (i.e. low cost to high cost, low safety to high safety).
3. 19.Consider your main ideas from Concept Generation step. What would this idea look like in each of the four quadrants.
4. 20.Question your ideas. Are any ideas more robust than others? Keep the ideas that still seem to look promising after this stage. Note: in the next stage we’re going to start to be specific about the design of our system. It’s worth taking a number of independent ideas to the following stages.

Hints

• It’s good to stress-test your ideas at this stage, but be prepared to change your thinking completely - we’re still ideating, and the purpose of stress-testing your ideas is to have a broad sense of possibilities as you go into the requirements phase.
• Try a different set of axes to stress-test your idea further.

Core resources

• Wulf, T., Brands, C., and Meissner, P., 2010, A Scenario-based Approach to Strategic Planning, Center for Scenario Planning [PDF, specifically pp.8-16, alternative download]