Scenario Planning and How to Take Advantage of Innovative Technologies

How scenario planning help organizations to take advantage of innovative technologies?

Planning in the relation of innovative technologies looks like a paradox. The complexity and uncertainty break the focus of the traditional planning. Organizations must answer the next questions:

• How to take advantage of innovative technologies?
• How do clients will accept innovative technologies?
• What will happen if governments and competitors change the environment?
• If organizations don't invest in technology, would the enterprise stay in the past and lose market?

The scenario planning offer innovative ways to make front to the complexity and uncertainty in an environment very volatile, helping to organize whole uncertainty underlying.

 An uncertain future.

Sometimes, managers know what will happen in the future and prepare all plans to face it. However, this fundamental assumption, underlying in the planning and the prognostication of the linear strategy, though, there is one problem: the future is totally uncertain.

Winston Churchill said, "the future is for the most a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside of an enigma."

Every organization must ask a question, what are the possible futures and how the organization could prepare to each one? Almost all time, experts and managers don't know towards where are going the technology and markets, and frequently, the most expert in technology and markets have mistaken totally about the future. For example, I can name some genius who have mistaken:

 "The phonograph... don't have commercial value" Thomas Alva Edison, inventor of the phonograph. 1880.

 "I believe exist a global market for five computers" Thomas J. Watson, IBM chairman. 1945.

In retrospective, these ways of thinking about the technology are failings, because both genius made affirmations about a future uncertain, instead of these declarations, they could have considered multiple scenarios for the future of these technologies. The challenge is not having a detailed image regarding a unique future, instead, we need to have a vision for each probable future, from this stage, we must prepare a set of plans to adopt the best strategy when we can recognize a clear future. The scenario planning help to provide to the corporative mind the way to recognize any opportunity more quickly than competitors and move fast. Good scenarios help too to overcome whatever limit in each current central business of the organization.

The Power of Scenario Planning

Scenario planning was designed to face each complex challenge and uncertain. It is used to try to solve any technological, political, demography and economic change, and how each market could grow or decline, helping to improve the way of thinking of every organization.

Scenarios face with three major challenge, inside of the innovative technologies which overcome whatever technic of strategy planning:

1. Uncertainty: Scenario planning has the uncertainty like the main element in the process, owing to let us identify quantifiable risks using objectively probabilities.
2. Complexity: Scenario planning is focused in the confluence of a group of forces, analyzing how each one to blend in a dynamic way and how each one influence over the others in the time line creating a complex system.
3. Paradigm change: Scenario planning challenges the current mentality to discover any assumption and creating an innovative approach to see the new things amplifying each weak signal.