Speaker: Paul Plotczyk
Date: October 21, 2009
Location: NEHRA Conference 2009 - 2010, Woburn MA
Regristration: www.nehra.org

Session Overview

Scenario Planning is an innovative technology which helps leaders take a long view in a world of uncertainty. It is a disciplined, structured method for imagining possible futures in a strategic thinking process. Scenarios are essentially "educated stories" about the way things might turn out tomorrow and how we might recognize and adapt to those changing aspects of our world - changes that we might otherwise miss or deny.

Workshop participants learn how to effectively use this powerful tool to make better decisions about the future by increasing the scope and quality of the thinking behind those decisions.

Participants will start by identifying a complex strategic organizational issue and are then guided through a process that helps them answer a series of critical questions:

1) What do we absolutely know about the situation?
2) What do we think we know about the situation?
3) What do not know but wish we knew?
4) What do we know we don't know?

Scenario Planning is used by many corporations, and used extensively by Royal Dutch Shell & is a key factor in keeping them as a leader in the global energy business.

LEARING OBJECTIVES

• What scenario planning is and is not
• The value and limits of scenario planning as a strategic planning tool
• How to use the results of scenario planning to create organizational success
• The value of creating cues and clues that act as "triggers" for initiating specific Action Plans

PARTICIPANTS WILL TAKE AWAY

• An understanding of of the effectiveness of the four questions in developing educated stories
• An outline for developing educated stories - scenarios - as a method to identify plausible and possible new outcomes or organizational responses to internal and external organizational upsets
• 4 Critical Questions of Scenario Planning
• 8 Step Agenda for Conducting a Scenario Planning session

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Paul Plotczyk is the President of Work Systems Affiliates International Inc. (WSA), and has over 25 years of experience in organizational and cultural change, supported by direct management experience.

He co-published a white paper on leading organizational change called the Courage to Change and has authored numerous articles on the organizational change including 4 Keys to Successful Change Management, How Changes Efforts Succeed, and Why Change Efforts Fail.