Chess or Go?
How Scenario Planning has helped organizations, over the decades, to be better prepared for crises.
Paul de Ruijter and Henk Alkema (ex-Shell strategist with over forty years of experience in scenario thinking) look back at Scenario Planning over the past few decades and look forward to the future of strategy and scenarios.
Scenarios are trend sensitive. Sometimes they are in vogue, and sometimes hardly anobody is interested. The authors, however, believe that scenario thinking is always useful. Short term thinking does not work, which has once more been proved by the credit crisis in the last decade. Thinking ahead, using scenarios, appears still to be as important as it was for the first oil crisis. The fact that the recent credit crisis came as a surprise for many stakeholders illustrates that many people over the previous years insufficiently looked and planned ahead. To stimulate scenario thinking De Ruijter and Alkema share their vision on the need of renewed action, drawing from decades of experience.