Turning Uncertainty Into A Competitive Advantage With Scenario Thinking
When the corona crisis started, my phone didn’t stop ringing. Many new clients called me to say, “Now we should think about the future and create future scenarios!” I have a process for that: Scenario Planning (or Scenario Thinking, as I prefer to call it). It was first applied by the US Air Force for strategic planning in the 1940s. Then, in the 1960s and 70s, a team at Royal Dutch Shell adopted it for business purposes.
With great success: Shell had already been prepared for an oil-shock scenario when others didn’t even dare to think about it. As a result, Shell was able to skyrocket from a rather weak market position to the top 2 of the world’s leading oil companies.
How was that possible? Shell had imagined various future scenarios, not only the one they thought might most likely evolve. Thus, they were able to prepare for the best, the worst, and all the uncertainties that lay in-between.
A crisis like the current one throws us into an ocean of uncertainty. That can make us feel utterly powerless and out of control. I cannot promise you control (because the desire to control comes from a place of fear), but I can promise you empowerment. Not power over other people, but coming into your own power by facing reality and taking inspired action steps from there.
In the Scenario Process, we face reality by diving deep into internal and external driving forces and learning about our true priorities and motivations. And that’s how we can turn uncertainty into a competitive advantage. But is it only for big organizations like the US Air Force or Shell? Not at all. I will tell you more about that in my next article.
Interested in running a future scenario exercise for your business? Head over to www.redswan.at or drop me a line at office‘at’redswan.at. I am happy to hear from you.
