Traditional strategic planning offers very few tools to cope with uncertainty. Yet, leaders must be able to quickly make the right judgement call in a complex environment that keeps changing.
- How deep an impact will the change have on us?
- Is our business model viable in the new environment?
- How should we redirect our strategy?
- Are our investment plans still feasible?
Built on the inductive method, our scenario approach is systematic and refined in hundreds of client projects. As a leading expert in scenario analysis, we take great pride in developing the tools we use. Our proprietary Scenario Builder™ software draws on consistency analysis and mathematical algorithms to produce an informative, interactive scenario map. The Scenario Builder significantly improves the efficiency and functionality of scenario planning:
- A comprehensive analysis that involves all alternative scenarios enables a multidimensional view of possible futures. Ignoring plausible scenarios is virtually impossible.
- Visual clustering provides a clear overview of the scenario space made up of alternative scenarios, while the interactive map makes it easy to navigate the space and select differentiated scenarios for further analysis.
- The informative map draws attention to ‘outlier’ scenarios, boosting creative thinking with new – even unexpected – perspectives.
- Unlike black-box scenario methods, the Scenario Builder enables a transparent, visual and interactive scenario analysis.
- A systematic analysis helps build consistent, plausible and differentiated scenarios – improving the quality of strategic planning based on the scenarios.
Our method is flexible and based on a learning approach: accumulated learnings from scenario workshops are used for gradually turning scenario skeletons into comprehensive scenarios that capture the full complexity of the operating environment. The Scenario Builder makes the process both effective and reliable.