By Rafael Ramirez, Steve Churchhouse, Alejandra Palermo and Jonas Hoffmann
Rather than trying to predict the future, organizations need to strengthen their abilities to cope with uncertainty. A new approach to scenario planning can help companies reframe their long-term strategies by developing several plausible scenarios.
This paper proposes that relating scenario planning with early warning scanning provides firms with synergic capabilities that help frame top management attention on possible future contexts and how they might unfold.
The article, written by Rafael Ramírez, Leo Roodhart and Willem Manders, describes the steps Shell managers took to keep their innovation innovative after the original establishment of the GameChanger system, by setting up its ‘innovation coalition’ as a network in its own right, and by reorganising its portfolio of 85 projects into half-dozen ‘domains’.