Those not involved in the process struggle to internalise the stories created to explain it, argues Gary Bowma

Bowman, Gary

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4/21/2016Plans for future scenarios are hard to communicate toemployeesblogs.lse.ac.uk /businessreview/2016/04/21/plans-for-future-scenarios-are-hard-to-communicate-to-employees/Scenario planning is a well-known and commonly used strategy tool. Despite such widespread use (and itspresence in business school curricula), there exists little consensus over what it actually involves, how and when itis done (or should be done), and how it can help organisations. My research attempts to address these issues anddevelop a more thorough understanding of what scenario planning entails.In the broadest terms, I follow the Anglo-American traditions (scenarios were created at RAND and Royal DutchShell) and think of scenario planning as a way for organisations to use a structured process to explore hypotheticalfutures, and in doing so consider the greatest challenges they face and thus expand their cognitive and decision-making capabilities.Unfortunately, much of the literature is practitioner-focused and heavy on anecdotal tales of success; the toolsdevelopment (and thus its efficacy) has been hampered by a weak theoretical underpinning. Attempting to addressthis shortcoming, I used Ian Colville’s concept of simplexity to understand the application of the tool in a moretheoretically rigorous manner.Simplexity is an awkward (yet appropriate) portmanteau for using simple actions or activities (like workshops,discussions, analysis of data) to process complex thoughts (like how the future will unfold, or how a change in theenvironment might affect public needs). Critical to simplexity is the coming together of sensemaking (how weinterpret and understand information about the world around us), storytelling (how we share knowledge andinformation with others), and organising (how we structure and provide structure to what we do).Figure 1. Simple, sequential practices help reduce the complexity in considering the long-term future1/4Academic research has tended towards for-profit, single organisation settings. I wanted to expand this and sought tostudy how scenario planning was applied in a multi-organisational public policy setting. Multi-organisationpartnerships have become a critical part of public sector work, and scenarios have become increasingly common inthe public arena, particularly in the UK, Netherlands, US and Australia. Bringing these two aspects together provideda way to enhance understanding of an important strategy tool both in terms of practice and application and in termsof our theoretical knowledge.I chose the case of ‘Northshire’ (a horribly unoriginal pseudonym), a collection of public sector organisations in theUK employing 35,000 people with an annual budget of £1.6 billion that used scenario planning to underpin its maincorporate strategy work.Conceptualising scenario planning as a practice of simplexity, where complexity of thought combines with simplicityof action, the case of ‘Northshire’ demonstrates the importance and interaction of ‘sensemaking’, ‘storytelling’ and‘organising’ in creating meaning within strategic activities at the inter-organisational level. In other words,participation in the process at the highest level (the inter-organisational level) yielded positive results particularly interms of integrating strategy and thinking at the corporate level.However, the study also demonstrated the relative weakness of the output of the scenario planning process (thestories) as an object capable of transferring knowledge and meaning to the intra-organisational level. In other words,the actual scenarios proved to be quite ineffective at communicating the corporate priorities to within the individualorganisations, which had their own priorities and agendas.Combining theoretical and empirical findings from the case, I developed a model to capture the flow of knowledgethat illustrates the way sensemaking practices and storytelling artefacts are organised within the strategic activitiesat both the inter- and intra-organisational level.2/4Figure 2. The clutter of intra-organisational strategising The activities involved in scenario planning – what are often called the practices (things like analysis of data,powerpoint presentations, discursive workshops) – offer a lot of subtle benefits to organisations, particularly thingslike aligning thinking, processing complex inter-organisational issues, and allowing ‘strategists’ to rise above theclutter of daily work to be able to focus on the most important issues facing the organisation.The weakness of scenario planning is that the stories developed during this process struggle to penetrate themindsets of those not involved in that process. The stories become just another part of their daily clutter – this wasparticularly evident when attempting to distil the outcomes from a high-level inter-organisational scenario processdown to the intra-organisational level. The scenarios were lost amidst the day-to-day pressures of the intra-organisational infrastructure and the overwhelming number of other ‘strategy’-type documents and initiatives.The challenge for scenario planning practitioners (and indeed the researchers working in this area) is how toconnect the meaning that comes from participation in a process to those who are disconnected from the process butstill involved in strategic decisions that the scenarios are supposed to inform.3/4♣♣♣Notes:This article is based on the author’s paper The Practice of Scenario Planning: An  Analysis of Inter- and Intra-organizational Strategizing, in  British Journal of Management, Vol. 27, 77–96 (2016) DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12098This post gives the views of its authors, not the position of LSE Business Review or the London School ofEconomics.Featured image credit: By Alex Rio Brazil  CC BY-SA 3.0, Gary Bowman is Assistant Professor of Global Strategy at Bond University in Queensland,Australia. His research spans the risk and strategy domains, focusing on the application andimpact of strategy tools and the role of risk analysis in strategic planning. Gary completed hispostdoctoral research in systemic and catastrophic risk management at the University ofCambridge and holds a PhD from the University of St Andrews in strategic management. He hasconsulted for a number of leading organizations in both the private and public sector on risk andscenario-informed strategic planning.Copyright © 2015 London School of Economics4/4

Plans for future scenarios are hard to communicate to employees

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