Strategy: Scenario Planning vs Step by Step Model

Common sense, reason and personal experiences are the foundation to make decisions, as well as are the elements to orient our present and future. We even are capable of making decisions that will affect our lives 20 years ahead: getting marriage, smoking or not, or studying or not, for instance. We can in part predict our future in accordance with some of our actions. Nevertheless, over the road will be at a crossroad sooner or later. We must be prepared; the ability to maximize opportunities and to adapt us to change is not an easy task. It demands wisdom. We need to expand our strategic thinking capacity and understand how this world works.

We all know that in order to handle situations intelligently, we should be more proactive and strategic. In business terms, there are some methods available to help professionals by using models extracted from scholars, applicable to almost any organization. The step by step model, for instance, requires a great dose of strategic thinking and the application of a pyramid to anticipate some problems and to make right decisions. Nevertheless, I considerer this model constrains creativity since incorporates exclusively analytic and logic skills on a mechanic process. The ability to reason logically, sequentially, and speedily cannot work for its own today. Creativity is a powerful source that must be integrated on any process. Creativity may make our life more enjoyable, or in a business world for example, transforms quotidian products into objects of desire. On top of that, step by step model is insufficient when it comes to facing uncertainty ten, twenty or thirty years ahead. By all means, I rather scenario planning.

Scenario planning is more demanding, challenging and helpful. It forces us to conjugate our beliefs, social patterns, experiences, common sense, culture, strategic skills and global perspective to deal with the forces that will impact our environment. Although those elements aren’t enough to predict the future, it certainty facilitate us to create conditions to influence on it. The fortune of thinking in advance is wisdom to apply it both in our personal life and business. Anticipate our responses in face of future treats might guarantee our survival. Anticipate our actions in face of those opportunities no one sees might make us success. Scenario planning provides us with the tools to protect us against uncertainty.

I particularly find appealing the fact that we may contextualize base on multiples plausible futures, demanding deep understanding of many topics and a great dose of creativity and imagination. Thus, scenario planning blends principles of the information age with those of the emerging conceptual age. In that sense, we really expand and stimulate our strategic thinking capacity.

In communications and marketing, we may provide the organization with a plan to prepare the company to confront communication crisis, to redesign an image, to know emerging audiences, to launch products and services, or simply to adapt them.

To summarize, I think scenario planning adjusts further to the challenges of today’s world, and especially, to the rising of the conceptual era. It also turns out more applicable to our personal life than step by step model. This model has not extent my strategic thinking capacity yet, but it did plant the seed to motivate a genuine interest on it.