Lesson 7 - Scenario Planning

Develop ideas of where you could incorporate the use of Scenario Planning in your organization.

(posted by Leo)

In my school, scenario planning seems an important part in developing our organization plan. The function of scenario planning is to ensure long-term sustainable survival of an organization (Sevaguru and Safa, 2009).It is a way of understanding the forces at work in recent times, such as technological change and environmental sustainability that will shape the future. The first thing we need to do is to identify the focal issue. For my school, the most important thing is to ensure it can provide a place for all students to learn. However, if there is the disease outbreak, it will probably affect students' study. It is just like what the SARS happen in 2003. All the school need to stop its operation and the students can't go to school. Since the online learning is not so popular among the school at that time, the school can do nothing for motivating students to learn at home. So if this kind of scenario happened again, what can we do and what is our action plan? It is suggested our school should provide an online multi-learning platform for students to use. Although our school already have the exiting online platform "SOUL", it seem that it is just a place for teacher to upload the course materials and for students to download and see the notices posted by the school. There is no interaction between them and student can learn nothing from this platform. So a multi-learning platform hopes to provide a place for student to have online learning. They can attend the online lesson, have group discussion and do class exercise. Hence, if the disease outbreak happened again, students can still have self-learning at home with their computer.

Reference:

Sevaguru, N., and Safa, M.S. (2009). Scenario Planning Approach to Strategic Management of Small Travel Business in Malaysia. International Journal of Business and Management Sciences, 2(1), 61-77.

(posted by Steffani)

Scenario planning is a disciplined method for imagination possible futures that companies have applied to a great range of issues (Schoemaker, 1995). Nowadays, almost everyone can get a mobile phone, so do the students. Many parents will ask their children to bring their mobile phones with them for security reason. This is the driving force for the school to plan how to deal with the cases if the students use mobile phones during the lessons.  In fact, students may not be able to control themselves in using mobile phones. Some of the students may try to use mobile phone to chat with their friends, play games, etc. during the lessons. This will greatly obstruct their learning progress and reduce the effectiveness of the lessons. Nevertheless, teachers cannot confiscate students' mobile phones when they discover the students are playing the mobile phones as mobile phone is personal property. Therefore, the school has the following plan:

• Issue parent notice to talk about the use of mobile phones in school area - mobile phones should be used only with the teachers' permission and when emergency cases happen. Students who fail to comply with this rule, their mobile phones will be confiscated for 3 days in school  (SIM card will be given back to the students.) Parent letters should be submitted in order to get back the mobile phones.
• Plan the procedures- Once the teachers discover the students use the mobile phones, the teachers should warn the students first. If the teachers discover the students use the mobile phones again, the phones will be confiscated. After the lessons, the teachers should  immediately report to the Discipline teachers and contact students' parents about the issue.
• School will buy a safe to lock the mobile phones which are confiscated and place the safe in the Discipline Mistress's Room where will be locked when Discipline Mistress is not in the room.

With the above system, the school hope that the new rule will warn the students against using mobile phones in school. This can also help to deal with the future potential cases.

Reference:

Schoemaker, Paul J H. Scenario Planning: A Tool for Strategic Thinking. Sloan Management Review; Winter 1995; 36, 2; ABI/INFORM Global, pg. 25-40

(Posted by Angus)
Schoemaker (1995) provide a 10 steps guideline for developing the scenario planning and suggest the planning starts by dividing knowledge into two areas: 
(1) things we believe we know something about and 
(2) elements we consider uncertain or unknowable.

The ultimate goal of my organization is to delivery goods to client at the right time, right place and right quantity with minimized cost. However, the number of order is very fluctuate that we hardly arrange number of truck to delivery all the order accurately. The number of order fluctuate by many reason, like seasonal trend, global shift and the external economical environment. The overestimation of order will lead to truck resource wastage and underestimation of order will lead to failure of delivery on-time. Therefore, we identify the basic trend and identify the uncertainties. 

As suggested by Schoemaker (1995), it is not necessary to account for all possible uncertainty, thus, we simplifying the uncertainty of order number into three level (High, Medium and low) and decide some possible way to handle operation in these case. For example, we will use sub-contractor to help us to deliver some of the order when the number of order is in high level. And we will keep on evaluating different scenario as the environment is keep changing to make long -term plan like what if the government change policy. 

Reference:
Schoemaker, Paul J H. Scenario Planning: A Tool for Strategic Thinking. Sloan Management Review; Winter 1995; 36, 2; ABI/INFORM Global, pg. 25-40

(Posted by Marisa)
In the past, strategic plans have often considered only the "official future," which was usually a straight-line graph of current trends carried into the future.(wikipedia) After gaining the knowledge about the scenario planning, it is essential for an organization to develop in one direction or rehabilitate from a hardship.

My workplace--a media group as a platform which the communication and new concept should be generated. My intern company is a media group based in Hongkong. However,It's far behind to develop the business in one place. So the group decide to expand the business to U.S,Europe,and south east asia. 
As result, our group members generated the motivation, budget, incentive forces to develop the business.
And the researches are done in the area where the business should be formed.

As Schoemaker mentioned, a simple approach is to identify extreme worlds by putting all positive elements in one and all negatives in another.Therefore,Our group has drawn all the possibilities to expand the business:
the political problem can be the most difficult problem to set up a media branch is other regions. We have discussed internal and external aspect and got the support from government. We have responsibilities to take the communication task with foreign regions and we are a path to improve the relationship between Hongkong and other areas.
In terms of social problem, we TV group are representatives of common thought in people‘s mind. Hence,society  supported us to make the international development.
We have found such motivation to reach the accomplishment. The company formed groups distributed abroad to be the ambassadors,as well as develop double-loop benefit in different areas.In terms of in-depth analysis, we have set up coodinator groups to solute the conflicts happen by different culture background.
We have encountered difficulties in the process of dealing with the relationship with other countries, but we rely on our scenario planning with skillful communication to survive in the world.

Reference:paul.H.Schoemaker. Scenario planning:a tool for strategic thinkinghttp://zh.scribd.com/doc/4489850/Schoemaker-Scenario-planning

(Posted by Cyrus)
The most important event in my organization is the annual convention held in the AsiaWorld-Expo I have mentioned before. This annual convention consists of various activities, including health seminars, economic seminars, awards ceremony, logo merchandise store, product store and so on. Take a review for the product store in the previous year. The store occupied around over 20,000 ft. sq. in area, consisting 3 parts, namely 80 cashiers, 30 huge product shelves, and a stage for product seminar. In the purpose of marketing, products are displayed beautifully in the product shelves and attendees can understand more about the products by listening to the products seminar just next to the shelves. Attendees can shop around the shelves and pick up the products they want, then line up and pay at the cashiers. However, some of the attendees brought some unpaid items passing by the stage to the exit directly, resulting in approximately 0.5% of dishonest or false transaction from the total sales in the previous convention. Some of the cases were stopped by securities at the exit, but there were still some leakages out of attention.

The part of strategic planning that relates to the tools and technologies for managing the uncertainties and discontinuities of change in the future (Ringland, 2006) In this case, I wish to develop a scenario planning to reduce uncertainty about dishonest or false transaction. As suggested by here I have identified 4 scenarios below:
(Positive scenario 1) Keep the beautiful shelves; Hire more securities to patrol around the store; Misbehavior decreases.
(Positive scenario 2) Remove the beautiful shelves; Change to form-filling order; Misbehavior decreases.
(Negative scenario 1) Keep the beautiful shelves; Hire more securities means higher cost; If this cost is higher than the loss form misbehavior; Overall profits drops.
(Negative scenario 2)  Remove the beautiful shelves; Cost of the shelves move to the set up of a counter for collecting products after filling order form and paying at the cashier; If this cost is higher; Overall profits drops.

As driven by our company vision, our strategy is to make the need and experience of the attendees our top priority. Positive scenario 1 and Negative scenario 1 are then chosen to cater this focal issue, because beautiful shelves can bring enjoyable shopping experience to our attendees whilst filling order forms and collecting products separately create more procedures for our attendees. So, the key point of the scenario planning lies in the cost calculation. It is optimal if we can manage our cost of hiring more securities within a certain budget less than the loss in misbehavior. To further shape the future, we can put our focus on more innovative marketing ideas in products display and carry on-going evaluation.

Reference:
Ringland, G. (1998). Scenario planning: managing for the future. Chichester, New York: John Wiley.