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Are You Using Scenario Planning To Improve Decision Making?

As the business and macro-economic environment continue to change at rapid paces and increasingly getting complex, the pressure on the finance organization to support the core business by strategically addressing volatility, uncertainty and risk is also intensifying.

This fast changing environment is making it extremely difficult for organizations to forecast business performance with a greater degree of certainty. What we used to consider extraordinary is now the ordinary and the previously unthinkable is now reality. In this environment, organizations need to become more proactive, flexible, adaptable and not reactive. Traditional planning cycles such as the static annual budget are no longer ideal for this dynamic economy.

Past Performance is Not a Predictor of Future Performance

Despite significant evidence indicating this rapid change, many organizations are still relying on the annual budget for planning and evaluation purposes. What we tend to forget is the fact that the annual budget gives a false view of a stable future. By the time the annual budgeting process is over, the majority of the assumptions used to compile the budget are outdated. Additionally, most budgets solely use historical performance as a baseline for predicting future performance. Again, this ignores the fact that past performance cannot be used to mirror future performance.

Most budgets prepared by companies only have a financial focus, normally adding or deducting a percentage to previous year’s numbers. They lack specific consideration of the forces driving the business and value creation. The link between the strategy, planning, resource allocation and performance reporting processes is broken.

With the current volatility, uncertainty and complexity in today’s environment, companies need to adopt an agile mindset and new ways of planning. Working together with the other business functions, Finance can drive this process and lead its success. Taking advantage of the function’s analytical and risk management strengths, finance executives can use scenario planning to help decision makers identify and understand possible future events and their impact on strategy execution and business performance.

Scenario Planning

Instead of taking a static view of the future and basing key decisions on gut feel, scenario planning helps business leaders understand their business environment (any significant emerging threats and opportunities), identify the critical drivers of value and correlate their impact on performance, both operationally and strategically. It achieves this by enabling decision makers frame a number of questions on the strategic intent of the organization.

Regardless of your business’s industry sector, scenario planning is useful for getting different views of the future that reflect volatility, uncertainty, and complexity thereby helping you identify gaps in your organization’s ability to respond to threats and opportunities. Once you have identified the blind spots and gaps in your company’s response capabilities, you can then start building a dynamic risk management framework and gain knowledge of the risks you have direct control of or influence and those that you do not have.

When conducting a scenario planning exercise, organizations must:

  • Define the purpose and scope of the exercise.
  • Examine the internal and external environment for emerging trends and issues.
  • Identify possible realistic future scenarios and evaluate their impact on the business.
  • Formulate strategic and operational responses to each scenario.
  • Monitor performance related triggers and regularly challenge assumptions

Scenario Planning is Not About Predicting the Future Accurately

Instead, it is about understanding the environments in which your business operates, discovering new insights, and increasing adaptability to changes in these environments. By constantly taking uncertainty into account when making decisions and also encouraging alternative thinking, you will be able test and evaluate the robustness of your company’s strategies against a range of possible futures. This in turn will assist you broaden your perspective and develop robust response plans.

Critical to note is that scenario planning is a continuous process rather than a once-off exercise and must be incorporated into processes for managing the business on an ongoing basis. The macro-economic environment is constantly changing and as such, an ongoing review of the drivers of performance and trigger points is necessary.

You need to constantly ask questions on the social, technological, economic, environmental, political and legal influencing factors and indicators.

Examples of questions that you might ask include:

  • If you are an automaker, what is the impact of autonomous and electrical vehicles on our current business model? Are self-driving cars the future and how should we respond?
  • If you are consumer company, how would the organization respond to growing emerging markets and the rise of the middle class workers?
  • How would the organization respond to unexpected loss of a major contract that has sustained the company for a long time to a competitor?
  • What are the short-term and long-term implications of a major product recall on your market position, reputation and the organization’s ability to meet strategic performance?
  • What is the range of likely impacts on our brand, customers and supply chain, if one of our key suppliers files for bankruptcy?
  • What competing products or disruptive forces will have the potential of threatening and forcing us out of business?
  • What is the impact on our quarterly and annual performance targets of material short term changes in key external variables such as commodity prices, inflation rates, interest and exchange rates, GDP and consumer spending?
  • How would the organization respond to unexpected external events such as a major natural disaster, political or regulatory actions, or occurrence of a pandemic?
  • What are the likely advantages and disadvantages of moving our enterprise systems to a cloud-based platform versus retaining them in-house?
  • What are the global business implications of UK leaving the European Union, and how would our organization react to such a move?
  • What are the implications to the business of a data breach on key account information?

By systemically monitoring a series of performance related triggers, the organization will be able to anticipate major trends and changes in the industry or broader business environment, respond dynamically, gain competitive advantage and seize growth opportunities in both developed and emerging markets.

Scenario planning is more than a business threat analysis tool. It also helps you identify emerging opportunities, improve your business model and proactively address industrial and environmental uncertainties.

Thanks for sharing:

Related posts:

  1. 7 Steps to Scenario-Based EPM
  2. Producing Reliable Forecasts That Improve Decision-Making
  3. Risk Decision Making in an Interconnected World
  4. Risk-Based Decision Making
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The Art of Risk Management

This is the title of the article by BCG published a few years ago. The article discusses the principles that should govern the approach to risk management by companies of all shapes and sizes.

The authors make several points with which I agree. Here are some excerpts:

  • Risk management is essential in today’s volatile economy. In a continuously changing economic environment, companies cannot assume a stable risk landscape.
  • Stop thinking of risk management as primarily a regulatory issue. Embed risk management in the mindset of the broader organization.
  • Risk management is a value-creating activity that is an essential part of the strategic conversation inside the company. The goal of that discussion should not be to eliminate or minimize risk but to use it to create a competitive advantage.
  • Risk management starts at the top. The organization needs to demonstrate that it has made risk management a high priority and an integral part of the decision-making process by appointing a dedicated risk leader who reports back frequently to the CEO and the board to discuss the latest trends and any changes in the company’s risk scenarios.
  • Risk cannot be managed from an ivory tower. Risk Management should not exist in isolation from the rest of the organization, with an insufficiently granular understanding of the actual business-specific risks the company faces. To avoid this outcome, integrate risk management into the company’s entire routine management processes, including planning, capital allocation, controlling, and reporting.
    • Understand the scope of the risks the company faces.
    • Plan for how the company will manage those risks.
    • Act to mitigate the risks or take advantage of strategic opportunities.
  • Avoid relying on black boxes. Although sometimes appropriate, over-reliance on complex metrics or models can muddy the risk management process, turning it from a transparent management activity into a frustrating black box. The appropriate level of complexity is company-specific and depends on the industry, business model, availability of data, level of experience, and mandatory legal requirements.
  • Align risk management with a company’s overall business strategy. Companies need to identify all relevant risks – not just those that can be easily quantified. Some of the relevant risks for a company may be those that are qualitative and especially difficult to quantify.
  • Risk management is more than a policy; it is a culture. The objective of a company’s risk-management system should be not only to enforce new policies but also to create a risk-aware culture that addresses risks proactively, not reactively, and manages them to create new sources of competitive advantage.
  • Effective risk management depends on the free flow of information throughout the organization. Unless employees at all levels of the organization are actively involved in the risk management process, it will be difficult to maintain the unrestricted flow of information. This can result in the most important data getting buried in one part of the organization unavailable to other parts of the business.
  • Risk management deals with uncertain futures. As a result, the goal should not be to develop precise metrics or future outcomes but to strive for a general understanding of the probabilities and potential impact of various trends or scenarios on business performance and enable decision-makers to confront the uncertain nature of risk and act accordingly.
  • Risk management is never about finding “the answer.” Rather, it is about continually refining the organization’s assumptions about the future and its understanding of the implications of those assumptions for the company’s business. Assumptions about risk often change quickly, so the relevant parameters, probabilities, impacts, and correlations should be revisited frequently.
  • It is possible to prepare for unknown risks by building an organization that so excels at crisis management that it is resilient even in situations in which it is blindsided by unprecedented challenges. For example, through developing the ability to detect, capture, and exploit information patterns as well as to think outside existing frameworks and risk landscapes.
  • Avoid the downside, but don’t forget the upside. Companies should use risk management also to identify new opportunities and to exploit them systematically. For example, scenario planning should be used to define not only worst-case scenarios but also best-case scenarios. Think in advance about how a company can make the best use of the latest market developments and trends and ultimately make the right decisions.

I enjoyed reading the article and highly recommend it.

Thanks for sharing:

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Leading in Uncertain Times

One of the biggest challenges facing business leaders today is making the right decisions that will ensure their organizations succeed, survive, and remain competitive in an increasingly uncertain and complex environment.

A recent post, The best way to lead in uncertain times may be to throw out the playbook, by Strategy+Business has several good points.

The article is about the COVID-19 pandemic, how global companies navigated through the crisis, and how best to prepare for future disruptions. Here are some key points and my comments.

  • Rather than follow a rigid blueprint, executives must help organizations focus on sensing and responding to unpredictable market conditions.
    • Comment: Senior leaders play a vital role in providing clarity about the organization’s strategic direction, creating alignment on key priorities to ensure the achievement of enterprise objectives, and ensuring the business model is continuously evolving to create and capture value in the face of uncertainty. They must not rest on their laurels and stick to the beliefs and paradigms that got them to where they are today and hope they will carry them through tomorrow. Regulatory changes, new products, competition, markets, technologies, and shifts in customer behavior are upending many outdated assumptions about business success. Thus, the businesses you have today are different from the ones you will need in the future hence the importance of continuously sensing changes in the global economy. Employees and teams often feed off the energy of their leaders and tend to focus their attention where the leader focuses attention. If the leader is comfortable with current business practices and rarely embraces the future or challenges the status quo, then the team is highly likely to follow suit.
  • When it became clear that supply chains and other operations would fracture, organizations began scenario planning to shift production sources, relocate employees, and secure key supplies.
    • Comment: Instead of using scenario planning to anticipate the future and prepare for different outcomes, it seems most of the surveyed organizations used scenario planning as a reactionary tool. Don’t wait for a crisis or a shift in the market to start thinking about the future. The world is always changing. As I wrote in The Resilient Organization, acknowledge that the future is a range of possible outcomes, learn and develop capabilities to map out multiple future scenarios, develop an optimal strategy for each of those scenarios, then continually test the effectiveness of these strategies. This does not necessarily mean that every change in the market will impact your business. Identify early warnings of what might be important and pay closer attention to those signals. In other words, learn to separate the signals from the noise.
  • The pandemic forced the organization’s senior management team to re-examine how all decisions were made.
    • Comment: Bureaucracy has for a very long time stood in the way of innovation and agility. To remain innovative and adapt quickly in a fast-changing world, the organization must have nimble leadership and an empowered workforce where employees at all levels can dream up new ideas and bring them to life. Identifying and acting on emerging threats and potential opportunities is not the job of the leader alone but every team member. To quote Rita McGrath, in her book Seeing Around Corners, she writes, “Being able to detect weak signals that things are changing requires more eyes and ears throughout the organization. The critical information that informs decision-making is often locked in individual brains.” In addition to the internal environment, the leader must also connect with the external environment (customers, competitors, regulators, and other stakeholders), looking for what is changing and how.
  • It’s worthwhile for leaders of any team to absorb the lessons of sense-respond-adapt, even if there is no emergency at hand.
  • Sensing: Treat the far-flung parts of your enterprise as listening stations. The question leaders must ask is, “What are we learning from our interactions beyond the usual information about costs and sales?” Train your people to listen for potentially significant anomalies and ensure that important information is not trapped in organizational silos.
    • Comment: Cost and sales data are lagging indicators that reveal the consequences or outcomes of past activities and decisions. Although this information can help leaders spot trends by looking at patterns over time, it doesn’t help understand the future and inform what needs to be done for the numbers to tell a different story. In addition to lagging indicators, pay attention to current and leading indicators and understand the relationship between these indicators and outcomes.
  • Responding: Improve communication across intra- and inter-organizational boundaries. Leaders should view business continuity as an essential function that acts as connective tissue for the enterprise.
    • Comment: In addition to creating mechanisms that allow the free flow of information both inside and outside the organization, decision-makers should also be comfortable receiving information that challenges their personal view of the world, even if it’s not what they want to hear. Create a culture of psychological safety where people are not afraid to share bad news for fear of getting punished, but rather are acknowledged and rewarded for speaking up. Leveraging the diversity of thought enables leaders to anticipate the future as an organization, decide what to do about it collectively, and then mobilize the organization to do what’s necessary.
  • Adapting: Challenge assumptions, and question orthodoxies. There’s always the temptation to mitigate threats simply by applying existing practices harder and faster. One way to get at those deeper issues and encourage double-loop learning is to ask, “What needs to be true for this to be the right approach?”
    • Comment: In an increasingly uncertain environment, it’s difficult to survive and thrive with an old business model or outdated technologies. Many businesses fail because they continue doing the same thing for too long, and they don’t respond quickly enough and effectively when conditions change. As a leader, stay curious and connected to the external environment, look for market shifts, understand what needs to be regularly refreshed and reimagined, adopt new technologies and capabilities, and adapt in ordinary times but also during times of transition. Unfortunately for many leaders, it’s just more convenient for them to continually downplay the fact that conditions are changing than take the appropriate course of action that drives business success.

How are you preparing your organization for potential future disruptions?

Thanks for sharing:

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The Collaborative Organization

These days the term collaboration has become synonymous with organizational culture, creativity, innovation, increased productivity, and success.

Let’s look at the COVID-19 pandemic as an example. At the peak of the crisis, several companies instructed their workers to adopt remote working as a health and safety precautionary measure.

Two years into the pandemic, they are now asking their employees back to the office full time or are planning to adopt a hybrid model.

The need to preserve our collaborative culture and accelerate innovation are two of the top benefits being cited by organizational and team leaders for bringing workers back.

Collaboration is indeed essential for the achievement of team goals, functional objectives, and the overall success of the organization.

Today’s breakthrough innovations are emerging from many interacting teams and collaborative relationships.

When teams, functions, and organizations collaborate, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; group genius emerges, and creativity unfolds.

But, what makes a successful collaboration? What are the key enabling conditions?

  • It extends beyond the boundaries of the organization. Business success is a function of internal and external relationships. Instead of viewing your business in vacuo, understand that you are part of an ecosystem. External to your organization, who do you need to partner with to enhance your value creation processes, achieve/exceed your objectives, or successfully execute your strategy?
  • Ensure the objectives are clear and there is shared understanding by everyone. Unclear objectives are one of the topmost barriers to team and organizational performance.
  • Foster a culture that encourages opinions and ideas that challenge the consensus. People should feel free to share their ideas and not hold back for fear of others penalizing them or thinking less of them. Collaboration is hindered when one or two people dominate the discussion, are arrogant, or don’t think they can learn anything from others.
  • Groups perform more effective under certain circumstances, and less effective under others. There is a tendency to fixate on certain topics of discussion amongst groups which often leaves members distracted from their ideas. To reduce the negative effects of topic fixation, members of the group should be given periods to work alone and switch constantly between individual activity and group interaction.
  • Effective collaboration can happen if the people involved come from diverse backgrounds and possess complementary skills to prevent conformity. The best collective decisions or creative ideas are often a product of different bodies of knowledge, multiple opinions, disagreement, and divergent thought processes, not consensus or compromise.
  • New technologies are making collaboration easier than ever, enabling us to increase our reach and broaden our network. Although new technology helps, it will not make your organization collaborative without the right culture and values in place. First, define what you want to achieve through collaboration then use these tools to promote creative collaboration.

How else are you championing collaboration within your organization to create value and succeed?

Thanks for sharing:

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