Woody Wade on Scenario Planning
In the introduction to my book on scenario planning, I make a bold claim on behalf of managers everywhere:“Managers live for the future!” I exclaim.If you think about that for a moment, you’ll see it’s not at all an exaggeration. That’s because if you are a manager, i.e. someone responsible for making and carrying out business decisions, then almost everything you decide today – and certainly all the really big decisions you make – are not about today, but rather about improving your company’s chances of success in the future.Investments, expansion plans, marketing campaigns, hiring decisions – all these may be decided today, but the improved competitiveness or greater profitability you are hoping to achieve thanks to those decisions may be months or even years down the road.The consequences of your decisions will only bloom in some future landscape. But in the meanwhile, that landscape will have changed from the way things are today.Do you think about this future landscape? How it could be different? Surprisingly, wonderfully, amazingly, dangerously, disastrously different?You ought to!
