Scenario planning

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What is scenario planning and why should we use it?

Sometimes it's helpful to involve stakeholders in thinking laterally about your shared future: five, 10 or maybe 15 years from now.  Scenario planning is a tool to help stimulate new thinking and explore uncertainties. Instead of focusing on what you know, you invest time on what you don't know. You paint some pictures and tell some stories...you'd be amazed where you might end up! Often you end up being a little more certain about the future.

People who have used scenario planning before

Simon Blake talks about Brook's use of scenarios. He talks about their rationale for using scenarios, an overview of the process and a summary of the scenarios they used to feed into their strategy. The interview also has links to their 10-year strategic framework.

The process of scenario planning

Picture This (Pdf, 7.97MB): this guide to scenario planning for voluntary and community organisations takes you through the process of using scenarios to help inspire board, staff and volunteers to create challenging and relevant plans.

Useful links

• If you are excited by the notion of doing scenarios work and want to investigate even more complex approaches, take a look at the Horizon Scanning Centres toolkit, and explore such things as visioning and windtunnelling!

(Help with reading PDFs - Adobe conversion tool is a free way to convert PDFs to web pages so you can read them online.)

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