Scenario Planning at FSG
What exactly does the Futures Strategy Group do? We help excellent organizations make better decisions under conditions of uncertainty — mainly through the use of scenarios.
Strategy
Seven Wrong Things People Think About the Future
All along the untrodden paths of the future I see the footprints of an unseen hand. – Sir Boyle Roche
We who inhabit the Land of Scenariotopia (as a former colleague termed our little realm) think that the best way to predict the future is not to.
Building Strategic Resilience in Emergency Management
For more than a year, FSG and its partner Hassett Willis & Company have been busy supporting a scenario-planning exercise sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), as part of its Strategic Foresight Initiative (SFI). Launched in 2010, the SFI is a community-wide effort to anticipate emerging challenges and opportunities in emergency management and disaster response.
McKinsey, Scenarios and Us
by Patrick Marren
The November 2009 issue of the McKinsey Quarterly includes an article by Charles Roxburgh entitled “The Use and Abuse of Scenarios.” It includes a number of good tips about scenario-based strategic planning, based on his experience in building scenarios over the past 25 years. It also highlights some important distinctions between his understanding of scenarios, and the way in which FSG has gone about creating and using them over the past few decades. And finally, it brings to the surface the urgent concerns of executives as they go about leading their organizations under uncertain conditions.
Scenario Planning Bookshelf: Chasing Black Swan Tails
by Patrick Marren
Much has been made lately of “long tails” and “Black Swans.” The latter is a formulation of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an options trader and academic whose book, The Black Swan, lays out what Black Swans are and why just about everyone but him in the financial world is a fool.
The Wisdom of Scenario Crowds
The strategic decisions that corporations have to make are of mind-numbing complexity. But we know that the more power you give to a single individual in the face of complexity and uncertainty, the more likely it is that bad decisions will be made.
— James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds
Coase Encounters
This month we salute an article that is a lifetime old, and use it to see where things might go in the next lifetime.