xi Scenario planning is a powerful tool for anticipating and managing change on an industry or environmental
level, and scenario thinking is the strategic perspective necessary in today's turbulent business environment.
xii strategic planning, or strategizing, without scenario thinking is more or less pointless.
p.1 scenario planning is what we do as human beings all the time. The healthy brain is constantly
writing scenarios, interpreting signals in the environment and reframing them into meaningful images of and trajectories into
the future. Healthy organizations do this too.
p.4 'How do you compete successfully in this endlessly changing world?'
p.5 Critical to success in fast-moving and complex business environments are adaptation
and speed.
p.6 Ashby's law of requisite variety... states that the only way to destroy variety (complexity) is through
variety (flexibility, adaptation, resilience).
p.6 strategic flexibility... the combination of speed and adaptiveness, is critical.
p.7 high performers are quicker to observe changes in the competitive landscape, quicker to orient themselves
in the new landscape, quicker to decide what to do, and to do it. They are quick responders.
p.8 According to Bettis and Hitt, the strategic response capability can be compared to
the stimulus-response paradigm of biology, where the capability of an organism to respond to stimuli in the environment is
the key determinant of its fitness for survival. Thus, it consists of two components: the ability to respond to threats
and the ability to search actively for better positions in the environment and to exploit new opportunities.
p.10 Scholars and practitioners rooted in complexity theory have explained that robust strategy in a complex
and turbulent business environments must be flexible and adaptive.
p.10 James Brian Quinn has pointed out the need for robustness: 'The essence of strategy... is to
build a posture that is so strong (and potentially flexible) in selective ways that the organization can achieve its goals
despite the unforeseeable ways external forces may actually interact when the time comes'
p.10-11 Robustness, or strategic robustness, was defined by Bettis and Hitt as
'the potential for success under varying future circumstances or scenarios'. Responsiveness, or
strategic responsiveness, was defined by Bettis and Hitt as the ability 'to rapidly 1) sense change in environment; 2) conceptualize
a response to that change; and 3) reconfigure resources to execute the response'.
p.11 strategic flexibility (the combination of robustness and responsiveness) explains
between 60 and 70 per cent of the performance differences between companies, and between 20 and 40 per cent of the differences
in financial performance.
p.28 there is a reason to use scenarios in the strategic process as soon [as] there is a significant amount
of uncertainty in the decision context.
p.29 Scenario thinking matches the way the brain functions.
p.39 the brain basically functions as a scenario generating organ. In that sense it constantly
scans the environment, tries to make sense of what it perceives, identifies alternative future developments, alternative goals
and actions, decides what to do - and makes sure that necessary steps are taken.
p.39 TAIDA is... the name of the framework we have developed and used for more than ten years in hundreds
of scenario planning projects... In short TAIDA stands for:
- Tracking: we trace changes and signs of threats and opportunities.
- Analysing: we analyse consequences and generate scenarios.
- Imaging: we identify possibilities and generate visions of what is desired.
- Deciding; we weigh up the information, identify choices and strategies.
- Acting: we set up short-term goals, take the first steps and follow up our actions.
p.40 Just as the antelope must continually prick up its ears and sniff the air to detect the sound or smell
of approaching danger in time, the organization must listen to small, perhaps unclear signals from its surroundings.
And like the antelope, the organization must learn to seek out the right signals, namely those that reveal danger
ahead.
p.168 Very often it takes some time before the really big effects of... an occurrence are felt... By working
with consequence chains and consequence trees it is often possible to identify these.
p.176 Systems analysis is built upon two basic assumptions. The first is
that the parts of a system can only be understood in context, by taking the totality into consideration. Second, in
order to understand the whole, it is necessary to identify the parts and their internal interplay.
p.178 The characteristic of a self-regulating system is that it swings towards a state of equilibrium.
p.179 What happens when you develop a model of your system is that you make your own mental models clear to
yourself.
p.180-181 By building a model of the system, linking the parts into the whole and specifying
the connections, you can obtain an understanding of the system that cannot be achieved in any other way.
By experimenting with different kinds of connections and similar aspects you get an understanding of the sensitivity of the
system.
