Some decision problems benefit greatly from the incorporation of scenario thinking into the framing of the opportunity. In this unique scenario workshop, three applications will be explored:

• Scenario thinking for business strategy
• Scenario thinking for new venture stakeholder management
• Scenario thinking for development of de-risking plans

The goal is to use scenario thinking to change the mental map of critical decision makers and project teams. This allows them to see different possible futures and with that insight, develop more robust strategy and project management plans to monitor and direct decision making proactively rather than reactively.

Via case-based exercises, this workshop will address how to develop scenarios with different tools and workflows for different scenario thinking applications. For business strategy, the workshop explores how to identify the critical business environment uncertainties and from them, develop different worlds, and winning strategies for the different worlds. For new venture stakeholder management, attendees identify the above ground risks that will either create or destroy value if unrecognized or attended to. From those, they develop different venture business environments and winning stakeholder management plans. “Oracle trees” are introduced to describe the range of possible risk and uncertainty scenarios a project faces and the impact that perfect knowledge would have on the main project decisions.

Takeaways from the workshop:

• Knowledge of three different approaches to scenario thinking for various levels of decisions in an organization
• Practical application of at least one of the approaches most relevant
• Practice framing decisions using scenario thinking
• Selecting the key uncertainties from which to base the scenarios
• Describing the different scenarios
• Developing strategies for future scenarios
• Testing the robustness of each strategy in each world

(Workshop not included in conference registration. Please email or contact hilda at decisionprofessionals dot com to sign up — this workshop still has some spots open.)