Two weeks ago I wrote about the gathering dark, the situation that we are all having to deal with now.  You can ignore it, and if you are very lucky then luck may take you through. But not everyone in this world is lucky and it is always better to deal with reality, however messy that may be. You can waste a lot of time and effort hoping something will turn up, that the world will change.  The world will certainly change but not necessarily for the better.  Even if it is for the better you may have missed the future opportunities by focusing too much on today. Acknowledge reality and start to plan for it.  One of the six qualities that leaders need today is a focus on risk management and one of the most useful tools for risk management is scenario planning.  It’s a useful exercise at any time but at the moment it’s essential because when things get tough it is so easy to focus on navigating the present.  But what you must do it give time to the future – not to the long-term future but to the near future, the one that is just around the corner. The long-term future can wait, it’s the near-term that needs your focus now.  Scenario planning is:

• A tool for exploring the future not predicting it
• Imagining how will it be different?
• Thinking what challenges you are going to face?
• It’s a logical, step by step method for developing actionable insights

Margaret Heffernan, in her book “Uncharted” sums up scenario planning: “It is never possible to identify all the forces at work that will define the future. The best one can do is to identify a plausible variety of futures and identify them for implications and consequences.”

At Defy Expectations we believe that this is so important we have created a one-day course to take you through the process.  During that you will:

 1. Assess:

• The driving forces?
• The time horizons?
• The impact on your company?

 2. Plan your realistic scenarios

• The opportunities and the challenges

3. Make the action plans

• Manage the challenges
• Take the opportunities

Everyone who has done the course has found it both challenging but exciting and have gone away thinking about opportunities as well as threats.  If you want more information on the one-day course that we run on scenario planning please mail me at [email protected] 

One day spent thinking about your future may mean that you have a future to think about.