Our Role Has Evolved to Include Strategic Foresight!

By Randall Rollinson, Founder/President, LBL Strategies

In today’s disrupted operating environment, a traditional approach to external analysis (i.e., PESTEL/SWOT) alone is not sufficient to provide the strategic foresight required to effectively inform today’s strategic planning processes.

Historically, the practice of strategic management has not included Foresight/Scenario-Based Planning as a core component, but rather as a rarely used intellectual exercise. These days are over.  The environment we now face is much too complex for traditional planning approaches to effectively guide strategic decision-making.

The strategy office must evolve to take on a significant, growing, and pivotal role in helping their leadership team explore alternative “plausible” alternative futures, and identifying key capabilities required to navigate within and across those possible environments.  These alternative scenarios must incorporate different assumptions about how the environmental factors may be realized. Plausible trends and other assumptions should be documented so recommendations can be reviewed periodically and theories re-tested and validated against the evolving situation.

It is important to keep in mind, scenario-based planning is not about the business of predicting the future, but rather it is a crucial discipline in identifying what can possibly occur under different scenarios.  This type of foresight adds valuable input into the “traditional” environmental analyses and evaluation processes. Strategy practitioners must play a major role in facilitating this important technique of looking forward.   If you or another strategy professional needs to build or hone your foresight/scenario-based planning skills and tools, we invite you to join us this fall for Mastering Foresight: Scenario-Based Planning Bootcamp. 

Mastering Foresight: Scenario-Based Planning Bootcamp is offered in association with the George Washington University’s Center for Excellence in Public Leadership, part of the College of Professional Studies, and the Baldrige Foundation.

Robin Champ is a senior consultant and trainer with LBL Strategies focusing on strategic foresight and strategy.  She previously served as Chief of the Global Futures Office at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). In this capacity, she developed a comprehensive methodology (to include stakeholder interviews, scenario based planning, SWOT analysis, policy analysis, and crowdsourcing) to facilitate development of the Agency’s Strategic Plan. She also spearheaded the introduction of Scenario Based Planning in the organization and is a frequent speaker on the subject at various Department of Defense (DoD) and Interagency venues. Prior to joining DTRA, Ms. Champ worked at the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), Office of Strategic Planning and Enterprise Transformation, where she was their Lead for the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review. While at DLA, she wrote their Transformation Roadmap and was the Program Manager for DLA’s Balanced Scorecard.