Future Scenarios Program
Leadership
How Will You Plan in an Uncertain World?
We live in a fast-changing world, with more external pressures than ever before, and many outside our control. If we didn’t know it before COVID-19, we definitely know it now. And a global pandemic is just one of the many disruptions we will face in the short, medium, and long term. Yesterday it was COVID, today AI, and tomorrow – who knows?
In a fast-changing world, it’s impossible to predict the future, especially beyond the short term. So you make a plan, but even as you’re doing it, you worry that it’s already out of date.
As boxer Mike Tyson said,
“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
So do you just keep on making unrealistic plans, knowing something will come along to punch you in the face?
No! There’s a better way.
The things you don’t know WILL hurt you!
Change and disruption affect us all in different ways, and the only certainty is we’re facing more uncertainty.
And uncertainty changes everything. Some people become paralysed by fear, others cross their fingers and hope for the best, and others march on with a false sense of security. But the best people, leaders, teams, and organisations roll up their sleeves and take action.
The solution is not to give up planning for the future. It’s about better understanding of the future, being more flexible with planning, and engaging your people on the journey.
You don’t know exactly what the future holds (nobody does), so you aim for flexibility rather than accuracy. You imagine multiple futures, assess their plausibility, and keep your options open.
That’s where scenario planning comes in.
Scenario planning is a structured process to help build your foresight – that is, your ability to look at, over, and far beyond the horizon.
When you get this right, you’ll be significantly more productive because you and your team understand the risks and opportunities in the future, and you have created an organisation (and culture) that’s positioned to leverage those opportunities to stay ahead of the game.
The scenario planning process was first developed by Shell in the 1960s and 1970s, when senior management realised many external factors could significantly affect the company’s strategic direction. So they created a ‘department of long-term studies’ (three people!) to explore and rank a series of alternative futures (scenarios), and present them to Shell management to feed into their strategic planning.
Now, more than 50 years later, the world is changing even faster, and we have to be even better prepared for future shocks and disruptions. We need scenario planning more than ever.
Who Is This For?
This program is all about understanding external pressures, so it’s ideal for leaders who want to build that skill for themselves and their team – for example:
- A senior leadership team doing strategic planning
- A board of directors to improve their governance
- Department leaders who want to collaborate, innovate, and share ideas with each other
- A leader (and their team) who wants to build foresight and flexibility in their team
- A business owner (and their staff) who want their staff to be more innovative, flexible, and open to change
Key Messages
- Understand external factors that could have a significant impact on your short-term, medium-term, and long-term plans
- Help leaders and managers expand and broaden their thinking to have an external perspective
- Engage the diversity and different perspectives of the entire team
- Be more relevant, flexible, and resilient in your strategic planning
- Foster a culture that embraces change and innovation
Program Outline
The core component of the Future Scenarios program is a workshop with four modules: Scan, Track, Assess, Guide, and Engage. This is a broad outline, which we tailor for your specific needs – based on available time, participants’ roles in your organisation, and strategic objectives.
MODULE 1: SCAN the environment
I help the group conduct an environmental scan to help you identify the external pressures that could affect you. I do some of this for you in advance, and then facilitate a discussion where you continue to scan wide for key trends, opportunities, and threats. This is the session where you get the most value from me as a futurist, because I draw from the research I’m constantly doing – from different experts and across many industries. It will broaden your perspective, which is especially important for the rest of the program.
Sample activities and outcomes:
- Identify external trends and forces using PESTLE analysis
- Consider elements outside your organisation and sector for early signals of change
- Use diverse and credible sources, including your team, experts, and AI tools
- Think in scenarios – consider both likely and unlikely but high-impact events
- Prioritise by deciding who will be the champion for each scenario
MODULE 2: TRACK the future
As part of the scanning process, you inevitably identify some trends that are too vague or nascent now, but could become important in the future. Rather than ignoring them, in this module you create a plan to track and monitor them. This is typically the shortest module in the program, but is still one of the most important.
Sample activities and outcomes:
- Define clear triggers that would prompt a change in direction
- Choose how often you will review progress (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly)
- Use tools, dashboards, and AI assistants to automate data collection where possible
- Keep tracking light and flexible – enough to see trends early, but not overwhelming
- Decide what you need to ‘let go’ to create space for managing future scenarios
MODULE 3: ASSESS the impact
In this module, the group takes the key future trends identified in the environmental scan and assesses their impact on the short-term, medium-term, and long-term strategy. This is where you narrow down the trends to those that matter most to you.
Sample activities and outcomes:
- Challenge assumptions with disruptive questions (“What if…?”, “How might we…?”)
- Weigh decisions using multiple perspectives – urgency, risk, stakeholders, resources, ethics
- Explore alternative options and combinations – avoid thinking only of A vs. B
- Step back and be more objective – beware sunk costs and hidden agendas
- Consider both short-term consequences and long-term ripple effects
MODULE 4: GUIDE the journey
Now we start taking the insights from the strategic foresight above and turn them into actionable plans. This is the implementation and planning module, where you consider how to integrate these trends into the workplace, not just as standalone activities but as an integral part of your everyday work.
Sample activities and outcomes:
- Acknowledge and address resistance to change – understand the “Yes, but…” mindset
- Use storytelling and scenarios to explain why change is needed
- Start small (“ooch”) – test, learn, and scale rather than forcing large shifts at once
- Adapt your leadership style to the situation – sometimes decisive, sometimes exploratory
- Use “pre-mortems” to anticipate failure and build preventive measures
MODULE 5: ENGAGE the team
Finally, we address the people side of the plan, because the best-laid plans will fail unless you engage your people and bring them along on the journey. In this module, each leader identifies their own role and the team’s participation in turning the impact of these trends into action.
Sample activities and outcomes:
- Assess the Five Minds for the Future for yourself and your team
- Tap into your team’s diversity of thought, skills, and perspectives
- Encourage reverse mentoring to bridge generational and knowledge gaps
- Create opportunities for collaboration across roles and disciplines
- Recognise and amplify individual strengths in your team members