How multi-scenario planning is helpful in disruptive times

Last month’s post Getting Caught in the Obstacle Rather Than the Opportunity it Provides tickled many positive responses from Clients, colleagues, and friends.

Thank you! So I thought, I’d build on the concept a little further.

Whether your obstacle is uncertainty about tariffs, labor shortages, union negotiations, reductions in federal or state funding, or simply concern about the VUCAA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, anxious) world we live in, multi-scenario planning can be extremely helpful to you in dealing with the realities you are facing.

How you perform the multi-scenario planning process is essential. First a helpful definition: multi-scenario planning is envisioning and analyzing multiple potential future scenarios to better understand and prepare for these possibilities.

In starting this process, I’ve found it helpful to identify specific plausible future states that will result from the specific uncertainties or complexities (VUCAA) you are experiencing in the marketplace. A simple Google search will provide you with the helpful breakdown in the steps you can take.

However, there is something that Google, ChatGPT, and other associated AI databases can’t do for you. That is to check in your brain.

As a leader in your organization, you know your organization, department, functional area better than anyone else, let alone a database or artificial interface.

You might be the kind of person who can put your hand on the hood of your car (your organization in this case) and tell if something is running well or needs a slight adjustment.

In multi-scenario planning, YOU and YOUR TEAM, are the key ingredient that will make all the difference in your planning. Multi-scenario planning takes intentional listening, thinking, and learning together in order to create helpful roadmaps to the potential futures you envision.

Earlier this year a Client approached me to help them think through the future of their organization. They were being significantly impacted by the reductions in USAID funding and the complexities and uncertainties of what was happening in the new administration.

Significant change of this nature is not new in the marketplace. Whether you are a non-profit, for profit, religious denomination, associational system, or the federal government itself, change happens every day and to every person. Let’s not act like it doesn’t.

Whether you recognize and deal with the change occurring around you is an entirely different matter.

Over the course of the next six weeks, we developed several different future scenarios that were based on descriptive future states and analysis. We started by describing these future states as best we could and began asking ourselves some really hard questions.

Questions such as, what funders (Clients, customers, etc.) need modifications to our current services in order to continue their relationship with us? What new or current customers do we want to approach with innovative ideas to address the emerging challenges they are experiencing? What new partnerships do we want to create (and how long will it take to develop them) that will further enhance our delivery of humanitarian aid? Given the challenges being experienced by other aid organizations, is there a component of our programs and services that could be expanded with the right investment of time and resource to meet the emerging needs they are experiencing and is present in the marketplace?

You might notice something in the questions being posed. They are all top line revenue questions that deal in some way with the value being offered by the organization.

Unfortunately, we often start in the opposite direction, with costs and expenses. Many leaders first instinct is to cut, then cut some more, and then cut even further. Recognizing what costs need to be cut is important, but we must first start with the next revenue coming towards our organization. If we don’t our eyes will be looking backwards and not forwards.

What are the three future scenarios you have for your organization? What are the external and internal factors influencing the revenue in each of these scenarios? What contingency plans do you have in case something doesn’t go according to plan?

Remember, in times of significant disruption there will always be unintended consequences. Some of which will be positive and helpful. I wonder what your positive unintended consequence will be.

Mind how you go,

Lon

Lon L. Swartzentruber

Design Group International

Managing Partner & CEO 

Along with a notebook and my favorite fountain pen, what’s in my backpack?

I Stand With The Soul of America, by Sir Addison Witt

Right Kind of Wrong, by Amy Edmondson

Rereading The Essentials of Theory U, by C. Otto Scharmer

If you’d like to go deeper in your leadership style, please schedule a call. I’d be honored to listen and learn more about your journey as a leader and where you’d like to go next.