ix Scenario work always involves a conversational process among people involved.

xi in a fast moving situation, where there is a lot of uncertainty, success is more related to having a good process than to having found the "optimal strategy".

xi People are unconscious of their paradigm, and therefore unaware of the fact that others may work from a different one.

xiv The team... while engaging with the world they will quickly find out where adjustments need to be made.

xvi The essential medium of any strategy process is the strategic conversation that goes on in any organisation. It has a formal part, designed by managers, and an informal part, which consists of the casual conversation about the future that spontaneously emerges.

p.1 the ultimate purpose of the scenario planner is to create a more adaptable organisation, which first recognises change and uncertainty, and second uses it creatively to its advantage.

p.5-6 the first objective of scenario-based planning became the generation of projects and decisions that are more robust under a variety of alternative futures... Better quality thinking about the future became the second objective of scenario-based planning... a third powerful effect was observed... people who practised scenario-based planning found themselves interpreting information from the environment differently from others around them.

p.15 Significant competitive advantage does not require perfect and total foresight and prescience.

p.15 What is it that we are ultimately after in scenario-based planning? In the final analysis the organisation needs a good and unique fit with its ever-changing environment if its aims are to be achieved. The purpose of strategising is to develop policies guiding personal behaviour of individuals in the organisation such that the total system achieves and maintains a good and unique fit.

p.16 In a situation of uncertainty planning becomes learning, which never stops... Scenario-based planning... assumes that there is irreducible indeterminacy and ambiguity in any situation faced by the strategist, and that successful strategy can only be developed in an ongoing dynamic response to this.

p.19 Rather than a "tool" scenario-based planning is a paradigmatic way of strategic thinking that acknowledges uncertainty with all the consequences this entails.

p.31 A successful competitive strategy must be an original invention.

[JLJ - I disagree. The market simply prices what you offer, and for demand-driven products sales either happen or they happen elsewhere.  The street merchants in Bangkok hardly presented an 'original invention' - they simply presented for sale what the people wanted, on my 1999 visit. Original 'inventions' have a unique leverage in the market, but nothing stays original long. Perhaps a successful competitive strategy involves coming up with 'tricks' or schemes which result in customers selecting your product over that of the competition, for perceived value or whatever reason.]

p.32 Stewart Brand suggests that nature evolves away from constraints, not toward goals (Brand 1999).

p.33 complexity theory has impressed on the world the view that many phenomena taking place in nature are unpredictable not just because we lack the requisite analytical knowledge and capacity, but because they are unpredictable in principle.

p.33 Emergence is defined as the appearance of unpredictable or incalculable behaviour resulting from the interaction of many simple components that cannot be derived from knowledge of what each component of the system does in isolation.

p.36 Any inventive idea directed towards improving the match between the organisational competencies and the business environment needs to be surfaced and considered, wherever these may originate in the organisation.

p.36 The strategist looks at evolution not so much in terms of the survival of actual organisms, but the survival of ideas.

p.37 we need to get into a loop linking action, perception and thinking towards continual learning. An effective strategy is one that triggers our successful launch into that learning loop.

p.38 the learning model projects integration of experience, sense-making and action into one holistic phenomenon. It suggests that for things to go right we need to:

• Perceive weak signals,
• Remember lessons from the past, and
• Adapt quickly if these have not prepared us for what actually happens.

p.39 Emergent behaviour is the outside behavioural manifestation of the internal mediating processes. In systems terms the higher hierarchical level guides and constrains the actions of the lower levels. It is the constraints on the lower-level members that create the emergent behaviour of the total system (Checkland 1981). By imposing the appropriate "rules of the game"... the upper level steers the emergent behaviour in a desirable direction.

p.40 most organisations develop a way of acting in the world aimed at their own survival and development. These organisations therefore can be seen as living organisms in "Stern" terms [systems that are continuously directed towards dual objectives of survival in a hostile environment and self-development in a benevolent environment].

p.40 in double-loop learning the system does not only attempt to make adjustments such that a predetermined preferred condition can be maintained, but also modifies its preferred condition in line with the fit with the environment (see Argyrus & Schon 1978).

[JLJ - This aligns well with the concept of critical success factors - we make strategic adjustments to our activities to score well on diagnostic tests related to the individual success factors, and also periodically re-visit the appropriateness of the success factors themselves to remain aligned when our environment itself changes.]

p.47 De Geus has suggested that speed of organisational learning is the ultimate competitive weapon (De Geus 1988).

p.49 Scenario-based planning makes sense of the situation by looking at multiple futures, which are treated as equally plausible, reflecting the inherent uncertainty in the situation, but also what is considered predictable.

p.51 We will then consider the business environment... We will find it riddled with uncertainty and ambiguity. We will then introduce scenario-based planning, which does not attempt to predict what is unpredictable, but copes with uncertainty by considering multiple, equally plausible futures.

p.53 we will consider strategy invention and development as part of a wider integrated mental activity of which perception and real world action are also fundamental parts. Strategising along this definition is portrayed as a loop, i.e. it is never finished. Reality is always different from from expectation and behaviour therefore always needs to be adjusted.

p.54 Navigation management... involves matching behavioural routines and recipes to situations. The system must be capable of learning, which means reflect on feedback, and express this as adaptation of behaviour in terms of its routines... The routines... need to adapt to what the system finds in its environment. the strategic thinking process becomes addressing a sequence of questions, "what are we doing?", "what could we be doing?" and "what should we be doing?" (Normann 2001).

p.55 We will argue that underlying every successful organisation lays an idea acting as the driving force for success.

p.55 The Business Environment can be interpreted as a system. Insight means perceiving the connections and finding the sensitive points of maximum leverage.

p.59 the moment of invention cannot be forced... Invention is not a step-by-step algorithm and it does not fit in with any of the business and planning processes that the organisation engages in. The only thing management can do is recognise the need for depth and persistence to arrive at "new seeing". This means proactively select an appropriately skillful group thinking process, keep it going, keep the attention on it and work towards gaining the new insight.

  This is the purpose of scenario work... You must spend time hunting for surprises.

p.60 Strategy development starts with understanding the organisational "self". The word "self" stands here for the unique formula of capabilities and activities that the organisation believes underpins its success. The description of this in its simplest form, which nevertheless identifies all essential elements, is called the "Business Idea", an expression of the success formula of the organisation.

p.61 Good scenarios are thinking and perception devices. They are not about forecasting highs and lows but about making a new reframed perspective visible.

p.62 good strategy cannot be simple (if it were everyone would be going down that path and a strategy that everyone is following cannot be a good one).

p.63 The Business idea... depicts what is fundamental for success in specific terms in one holistic representation... The Business Idea must be a rational explanation of how it [the organisation] will be successful in the future. The Business Idea needs to be built up from first principles.

p.78 The company needs to consider whether these [barriers to entry] are high enough for sustainable competitive advantage.

p.89 Strategy has as its main aim the continuation and growth of the organisation.

p.91 Strategic management is about exploiting opportunities within a context of uncertainty about the future... Thinking about strategy only makes sense in conditions of uncertainty.

p.108 The starting point [for the scenario planner] is "the main uncertainties facing this organisation". Perceptions of areas of concern in the management team are the agenda setting questions for the scenario planner... questions... will quickly move... into more fundamental driving forces.

p.119 An effective strategy laboratory requires understanding key environmental variables and their interlinkages... In practical terms, scenario development requires understanding of the nature of the Business Idea in order to decide what are suitable "test conditions". By using the scenarios as a strategy test bed the managers are forced to articulate what they consider really important in the environment.

[JLJ - More importantly, your business scheme is a kind of 'disturbance' in the environment as customers come to you to meet their needs. The bypassed businesses are going to react to that with a scheme of their own, which they are betting their time and money, will work, to some degree. They would not be doing what they do, if they did not foresee an acceptable degree of success of their own. Now what?]

p.119 the manager uses the scenarios to test strategy proposals in order to find ways to improve them, i.e. make them more appropriate and robust against the futures which might arise... Scenarios are policy development tools... they present the organisation with the means to iteratively build/ develop better policy. They need to stretch the range of the organisation's vision beyond what is traditionally seen as relevant

p.120 It is the ultimate aspiration of the scenario planner to develop the process into an ongoing learning experience in the organization.

p.149 the test... for the scenario set... is the degree to which these prove helpful... in conceptualising a previously unstructured area of concern, leading to new action that ultimately proves beneficial.

p.150 Scenario planners need to study carefully how strategic decisions are made, and infiltrate the high leverage points in that process.

p.151 The most effective early warning system monitors variables that are central in the underlying structure. By identifying such variables the institutional attention can be directed to where manifestations of structural differences become evident first.

p.153 the scenarist... helps the organisation recognise, articulate and understand the relevant driving forces and their inter-relationships in its business environment. This information is a launching platform from which multiple scenarios of the future business environment are developed.

p.155 Scenario-based planning always ultimately aims for the invention of strategy... Scenarios are always a testbed for something... scenarios must always be focused on a strategically relevant area if they are to be productive.

[JLJ - Strategy emerges from a grappling with imagined futures. The ultimate aim is the intelligent creation of a posture in the present with an imagined adaptive capacity to whatever the future might bring.]

p.157 The world is very large, and much of it is of secondary importance to the organization and its strategy.

p.206 It is the domain of generative scenario-based planning, aiming for new and unique insights in what is happening in the business environment, on which a new Business Idea for the future can be based.

p.209 In competitive positioning... knowing what is strategic is the key question. The focus must remain on the fundamental driving forces of success as expressed in the Business Idea.

p.219-220 Scenario-based planning is the methodical thinking of the unthinkable. Rather than trying the impossible task of guessing exactly what is going to happen, people building scenarios head in precisely the opposite direction. They look for uncertainties.

p.221 The scenario team's task, once selected, is to look for rich data about the external environment that might illuminate the agenda, and subsequently structure this for further use.

p.225 [Ted Newland]

If you want to get answers frustrate very intelligent people and they will find them.

p.225 How to create the necessary structures around the data collected? The principle of the scenario method is to interconnect this data in various ways in a number of causally organized "stories".

p.225-226 How can this category clustering be done? ...

• The number of scenarios in the set will be 2, 3 or 4...
• Each of the scenarios must be plausible...
• They must be internally consistent...
• They must be relevant to the issues of concern to the client...
• The scenarios must produce a new and original perspective on the client's issues.

Except for these general rules the scenario planner has flexibility in deciding how the stories will be built, what ends up in the story, and what organizing principles will be applied to cut up the territory into individual storylines.

p.235-236 In the previous section we touched upon the question of the level of detail of the analysis. A significant challenge in this work is hitting the optimal level of granularity... One must lean towards a fuzzy fit of a somewhat imprecise generalisation, with enough validity to be useful in understanding structure... And as we have seen, the more complex and uncertain the problem, the simpler the causal models that prove most useful.

p.260 the scenarios also represent different views on how underlying driving forces shape the system

p.274 Scenarios, of course, cannot be proved or disproved... as a set they represent our current understanding of the "sort of thing that could happen" and the range of uncertainty... they represent our current best knowledge of the situation and outlook, our current process theories, and thereby lead to better strategies.

p.327 Once the scenarios have entered the corporate language they start having a major influence on corporate strategic thinking by triggering multiple equally plausible futures in conversations about strategy. This constitutes a major evolution in the thinking process in the organisation, from an episodic activity of trying to find the "one right answer" to an ongoing activity of trying to steer the organization closer to a robust "high ground", where it will be less vulnerable to whatever business environment comes about.

p.342 to quote Arie de Geus... "The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable advantage".

p.344 We have concluded that if there is uncertainty there is more than one feasible future, and we have introduced scenario-based planning, which uses a set of different but equally plausible futures, as a suitable way to characterize the environment and understand the uncertainty. We have discussed practical ways in which the environment can be captured in a set of scenarios.

p.346 If there is one element essential to success it is being able to develop new and unique insights about the world. Without this no strategy can succeed.