Scenarios

The only constants in the current business environment are turbulence and change. When initially developed at Royal Ditch/shell, scenario planning helped companies understand external change — change in markets, the competitive arena, technology, demographics and so on. In this book, Kees van der Heijden takes the art of scenario planning one giant step further. After showing you how to understand how the world around you is changing, he then shows you how to move your organization to the meet the future by linking scenario thinking and your Business Idea in an ongoing strategic conversation. The result is a learning organization with the finely honed ability to track the marketplace and business environment.

How Scenarios will help you think through the way forward, and keep you thinking as you move.

• Understand the basis of an organization's success — articulate its central business idea
• Break out the organization's restrictive 'thinking box' — take a wider perspective, scenaric view
• Develop scenarios as alternative ways of interpreting the present — see beyond current range of vision
• Become clearer about the many apparently unrelated developments — build a systemic framework using a story line
• Be more secure with the future — understand uncertainty
• Do it by using a practical methodology
• Nurture and sustain an ongoing strategic conversation throughout the organization

• Introduction: Why Plan?
• Part One: The Context
1. 1965 to 1990: Five Discoveries in Shell
2. Three Competing Paradigms in Strategic Management
• Part Two: The Principles of Scenario Planning
3. The Business Idea of An Organisation
4. Dealing with Uncertainty
5. Scenarios and The Business Idea
6. Scenario Planning Organisations
• Part Three: The Practice of Scenario Planning
7. The Practitioner's Art
8. Articulation of The Business Idea
9. Competitive Positioning
10. Scenario Development
11. Option Planning
• Part Four: Institutionalising Scenario Planning
12. The Management of Change
13. Planning Process
14. Guiding The Strategic Conversation

A good introduction to scenarios, but did it need to be so boring?