The development and analysis of realistic future scenarios provides an organization with a useful and pragmatic framework for making better, more flexible decisions concerning its own strategy or longer-term development issues, as well as, in some instances, shorter-range operational or market-oriented questions. While most business organizations carry out some kind of strategic planning, those that include a futures component in the process gain a decided advantage, as they will have considered alternative future landscapes rather than basing their plan on the assumption that one particular future will materialize. This approach involves not only understanding a range of outcomes that might plausibly develop a given strategic environment, but also, using this vision to formulate resilient strategies and bring about organizational alignment and buy-in. In this course, students will learn the methodology for building future scenarios and will apply them to real-life examples in order to develop a portfolio of realistic scenarios for a specific organization or industry.

This course focuses on integrating scenarios into strategy. Strategic planning requires – but sometimes fails to take fully into consideration – identifying and monitoring emerging issues, as well as understanding how current trends, already identified, could intensify, change, or dissipate. All of these changes could have a significant impact on the future business landscape. Scenario planning therefore offers a clear advantage to strategy/policy makers, since it helps them foresee this new landscape, and their plans can accordingly be more realistic, more flexible, and more credible. Working in teams, students will delve deep into the scenarios they have devised in the previous term and elaborate strategic recommendations for each one. They will then assess these strategies in terms of operational and financial planning.