Bryan HaydayChange-Ability Inc

Leadership and Planning

Traditional Strategic & Operational Planning Process

VisionMissionValues

ExternalOpportunities

& ThreatsStrategicPriority

Directions

Goals/Strategies

ActionPlan

InternalStrengths &Weaknesses

Stakeholders Stakeholders1. Ends

2. Environmental Scan

3. Priority Directions

4. Goals & Strategies

5. Operational Action Plan

6. Monitoring & EvaluationEvaluation: Successes & ongoing

Challenges

How do organizations plan during periods of great uncertainty?

Specify intentions (both short- and long-term)

Prepare reactions (mitigate risk, explore opportunity)

Anticipate (readiness) Adaptation (timeliness) Vision (dream) Organize ( to make sense and

order out of emerging patterns)

IntendedStrategy

DeliberateStrategy A

B D

C

EmergentStrategy

Unrealized Strategy

Strategy and Change in Practice

Adapted from Henry Mintzberg,The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning

What we intend through our plans,

What we actually implement,

The impact of what we implement, our intended and unintended outcomes,

And the actions of the larger world around us – these together bring art and humility to leadership.

Performance

Strategic

Stra

teg

ic

Operational

Anarchy

Scenario Planning

Far FromCertainty

Far fromAgreement

Close toAgreement

Close toCertainty

STACEY MATRIX – Planning Implications

About Scenario Planning

No organization can address everything that might be important for its future

Predicting the long-term future is notoriously unreliable Scenario planning helps with conditions of high importance and high

uncertainty Examining diverse scenarios built around a common issue or

decision enables identification of robust (or repeating) elements Scenario planning helps to filter opportunities, risks, culture creation

and key decisions Enables focus in areas of ‘high leverage’ Use scenario planning as tool for exploration and readiness

not adaptation (contingencies) not reaction (accommodation) not prediction and mid-term planning (strategic)

Why use Scenario Planning? Test viability of current strategy Invigorate conventional strategic planning (exposing

untested assumptions and uncertainties) Increase capacity to see change as opportunity Create robust strategies that can work in a variety of

contexts or emergent futures Develop sensitivity to recognize new drivers of change

and “signs” in environment as they unfold Leading with less fear and more finely-tuned sense of

the possible Co-create preferred futures, in the tension of external

adaptation, emergence and internal self-organizing

Starting Points

We cannot predict the future Where strategic planning is the right tool in

complicated times, scenario planning is the preferred approach for complex times

Good decisions and robust strategies will do well across several possible futures

Characteristics of Scenarios

Do not fall neatly into ‘good’ or ‘bad’ futures

May seem more like caricatures than predictions

Help us think outside the proverbial boxHelp us ‘rehearse’ our decision-making

under the conditions of different but plausible futures

Developing Scenarios

Identify focal issue or decision List key forces in the local environment Determine driving forces Rank by importance and uncertainty Select scenario logics Flesh out the scenarios Consider implications and patterns that repeat Select leading (versus trailing) indicators

Sample Scenario 2by2 Matrix“What kind of health system will Canada have in

2014?”Emphasis on “Personal” Responsibility and Accountability

Publicly financed

Emphasis on “Public” Policy and“Public” Responsibility

Personally/ privately financed

Scenario “B”Scenario “A”

Scenario “C”Scenario “D”

•Scenarios need memorable titles – Think headlines!•The more diverse (yet plausible) the scenario stories, the more robust are any strategic elements which repeat across 3 or more scenarios

Discerning Robust Strategies

Robust strategies are not tied to any one set of circumstances or “future”

Robust strategies comprise the series of actions which maintains organizational viability while keeping preferred “ends” in sight

Highlights essential competencies or activities that are key to organizational success or survival in a series of plausible and vastly different futures

Robust strategies are based on key strategic elements “no matter what happens”

Robust strategies lack the precision of strategic plans because their use is tied to conditions of greater uncertainty

Important to refresh robust strategies by testing against any major changes in the political, socio-demographic, economic, environmental and technological domains