Random Musings:

Storytelling As Scenario Planning

The Chronicle of Philanthropy has an article on the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough, TN, that characterizes stories about desired futures as a form of scenario planning. Many forms of scenario planning are based on projecting quantitative models into the future, each projection based on a different set of assumptions. Other forms of scenario planning string together event sequences, each event sequence constituting a different scenario. "This happens then that happens" is the basic form.

As developed by NCRI, Future Mapping [also see Art Hutchinson's 5 part series on scenario planning that begins here.] entails scenario as narrative. It's about storytelling with characters, plots, and key events. The characters might be companies, governments, markets, industries, and even well-known industry leaders as representatives of their companies. Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Larry Ellison (Oracle) come to mind as exemplars.

Stories are among the key scenario planning ingredients because the narrative form makes the scenario more understandable; everyone loves a great story. Stories also bind together the diverse actors, forces and events that comprise a scenario.

 

New Orleans Scenarios

The WorldChanging web site has a useful article with several post-Katrina NO scenarios. Check out the 6 "thumbnail" scenario summaries. Snippets:

Executive Risk Handbook

Fortune Magazine has an article by columnist Geoffry Colvin addressing risk management. Many companies have failed to learn the key lessons of risk management, including the need to build scenarios. Colvin writes:

Cities Are Not Forever

Sunday's Washington Post has an article by Joel Garreau that addresses the rise and fall of  world-class cities. One highlight:

How a city responds to disaster is shaped both by large outside forces and internal social cohesion. Chicago rebuilt to greater glory after the fire of 1871 destroyed its heart. San Franciscans so transformed their city after the earthquake and fire of 1906 that nine years later they proudly hosted the Panama-Pacific International Exposition to toast the Panama Canal and their own resurrection.

Not long ago, I co-taught a team of George Mason University students in a semester-long scenario-planning course aimed at analyzing which global cities would be the winners and losers 100 years from now. The students were keenly aware of the impact that climate change might have on their calculations, among hundreds of other factors. Yet in the end they could not bring themselves to write off such water cities as New York and Tokyo. They simply wouldn't bet against the determination and imagination of New Yorkers and the Japanese. As someone put it at the time, "If it turned out New York needed dikes 200 feet high, you can just hear somebody saying, 'I know this guy in Jersey.' "

The Failure of Planning and Its Political Consequences

In business failure to plan and failure to execute can have catastrophic consequences.  In a business environment driven (for public companies) by quarterly expectations, longer term planning has fallen from favor in many, perhaps most, large companies. No time to plan. No budget for planning. We're too busy making our numbers to plan. We're too busy selling. Can't afford to bring the management team off site for 2 or 3 days. Nobody cares about plans.

Someone else (I think), said, "Each day of planning will save two days of execution." I can't prove it, but I strongly believe it.

A failure to plan and execute as in the case of Katrina will have myriad political consequences in addition to human and economic consequences. On Friday (9/2), a portion of The NewsHour was devoted to a conversation among David Brooks, Tom Oliphant, and Clarence Page that addressed the possible political consequences of the many failures regarding the responses to Katrina. The video, audio, and transcript are here. Brooks was particularly eloquent. Here's a snippet:

DAVID BROOKS: This is -- first of all it is a national humiliation to see bodies floating in a river for five days in a major American city. But second, you have to remember, this was really a de-legitimization of institutions.

Our institutions completely failed us and it is not as if it is the first in the past three years -- this follows Abu Ghraib, the failure of planning in Iraq, the intelligence failures, the corporate scandals, the media scandals.

We have had over the past four or five years a whole series of scandals that soured the public mood. You've seen a rise in feeling the country is headed in the wrong direction.

And I think this is the biggest one and the bursting one, and I must say personally it is the one that really says hey, it feels like the 70s now where you really have a loss of faith in institutions. Let's get out of this mess. And I really think this is so important as a cultural moment, like the blackouts of 1977, just people are sick of it.

When Planning Fails

Few lessons seem to have been learned from past disasters, including the inescapable conclusion that unthinkable outcomes do happen despite their being highly unlikely. Apparently the planning for New Orleans only took into account a Category 3 hurricane, not a Cat 4 or Cat 5.

Regardless of plans that may have been made, experienced disaster relief organizations were unable to provide services in New Orleans. The article by Ann Rogers of the Pittsburg Post-Gazette describes a little of what has happened. Snippets:

Scenario Planning: An Irish Perspctive

The Derry Journal (Ireland) has a longish article (registration required) that deals with scenario planing and strategic management. Snippets: