Alternative futures (scenario) planning has traditionally been the tool of choice for leaders concerned about potentially disruptive long-term challenges in their future operating environment. Alternative futures has always been about building robust strategies and plans that would work no matter how the future turned out. That’s still the case, but in recent years increasing numbers …
FSG believes there’s only one way to properly learn how to do scenario planning, and that is to actually do it, in a real strategic context, and not as a generic business case from outside the organization.
Since 2012, Futures Strategy Group has been deeply involved in exploring the future of health care and medicine in the US. This work has evolved in partnership with the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), a relationship that continues to the present day.
What will be the social-political-cultural-economic backdrop for sports and recreation in 2025? This was the big question facing planners at a global marketer of consumer products and services facing both competitive challenges and uncertainties in a rapidly changing marketplace.
Across diverse business sectors, many of FSG’s clients have effectively adopted scenario-based strategic planning as a tool to spur creative and innovative thinking. But equally impressive are the firms, often in mature sectors, which have embraced scenario planning primarily as a means of strategic prioritization and alignment, with break-out thinking a secondary priority.
In a pilot exercise, FSG helped a division of a major life insurance company both critically evaluate its current direction and identify some potential new business ideas in what is now a mature market segment.
For the past several years, FSG has provided strategy and long-term planning support to a range of administrators, managers, and operators challenged with building preparedness in the face of increasingly complex and impactful emergency- and disaster-management situations.
NASA Aeronautics has the responsibility to provide high-risk, high-payoff technology capabilities and research infrastructure to support the nation’s aeronautics sector. This meant anticipating the needs of a huge and vital national economic sector – and further, anticipating the potential desires of the consumers, businesses, and government of the future.
In 2002, the Chief of Staff of the Coast Guard invited us back to reassess “Long View” in light of the events of 9/11 and the imminent migration of the Coast Guard to the new Department of Homeland Security. FSG succeeded in reuniting most of the former Long View Core Team for this exercise.
In 1998, the U.S. Coast Guard hired us to develop a long-range strategy using our scenario planning methodology. The project became known as “Long View.” Five scenarios were developed to evaluate both current and potentially new missions and strategic options for the Coast Guard, across a range of plausible national security and maritime transportation environments.