With the increasingly complex dynamics of societal, economical and technological changes, scenario planning has become a best practice for many organisations. Scenario planning allows you to deal with uncertain futures and outcomes. How will our world and business environment look like in 10-20 years? And how do we, as an organisation or corporation, prepare for these unknown and uncertain outcomes?
Today, however, there is more to scenario planning than meets the eye….
The (high) level of uncertainty on how our world will look like post-Covid-19, warrants the application of scenario planning on a very short term horizon.
Strategic and business plans made before the Covid-19 era will disappear in the bin as soon as the world comes out of lock down, if it has not yet been done. Therefore the Covid-19 global crisis adds a totally new dimension to the relevance of scenario planning. Who claims to know how the world, and business context, will look like in the next year, even in the next 6 months?
Hence, scenarios will help organisations think through alternative near-term societal changes, and devise both immediate and mid-term actions for organisations to adapt to this new environment.
Who claims to know how the world, and business context will look like in the next year, even 6 months?
Stress-test your service and business models for the ‘new world’.
Mapping the possible impact on your environment, will beg the question whether your service or business model is geared for dealing with the new reality post Covid-19.
Are today’s value propositions able to stand the test of the new economy and the new consumer? If you need to adjust, what resources will be required and where to commit these to? Which value chain activities need to be re-engineered? How does this affect your ecosystem?
Build resilience into your organisation through adoption of innovative technology.
Driven by a clear and present burning platform, the adoption curve of new, promising technological innovations will be dramatically shortened. Being confronted with our limited ability to deal with this type of unexpected seismic events on our well-being, new technologies in healthcare and medicine will scale much faster than initially anticipated.
But the increased rate of adoption of innovation will extend well beyond the healthcare domain. Technology provides the opportunity to build more resilience, scalability and efficiency into any organisation. Not just in the back-end, but also in the interaction of your organisation with customers, employees and partners.
It is clear that the Covid-19 crisis will have ramifications in every aspect of our society. In today’s context, scenario planning is an essential exercise that every organisation or corporation needs to start with today, in order to be ready of the new world ‘tomorrow’.
Forget everything you always assumed, open up the horizon for challenges and opportunities that you never considered an option, and explore the ‘unimaginable’. Stress-test your business model but also build resilience into your organisation to deal with the unexpected. Today this innovation thinking is more critical to the long-term sustainability of your business or organisation than ever before. Because tomorrow is today.
Interested in scenario planning? Or curious how TomorrowLab can help you reinvent your business in these volatile times? Get in touch!