Innovative Leadership has been developing and has refined a scenario planning process that provides a cutting-edge approach to exploring regional, community, and organizational futures.

• What is Scenario Planning?
• How our scenario planning process works

What is Scenario Planning?

This technique has been used effectively in the corporate and military settings to generate of one or more plausible scenarios about the future, using information about dimensions such as socio-political, environmental and economic trends.

Innovative Leadership Australia has been working to transfer this powerful visioning and planning tool into the regional and rural community planning context. The strength of this approach is that allows participants to explore a range of plausible futures and to assess their implications and consequences.

How our scenario planning process works

Traditionally, scenario planning processes are run over several weeks or even months. Our condensed form of scenario planning session is completed in a two day (or two-half day) workshop. This shorter design allows busy and committed people to participate in an effective and efficient manner.

Key features:

• It convenes a large group of local stakeholders, typically between 50 -100 participants with great diversity of knowledge and experience;
• The process assesses various future outcomes holistically against the triple bottom line of economic, social and environmental impacts;
• It is based on solid analysis prior to and during the convening workshop. Sources include local knowledge and aspirations, as well as national and international trends and forecasts;
• The process produces a ‘shared vision’ of the future that can be shared with a broader audience, to bridge the gap between the analysis and action;
• It provides a robust framework to test proposed strategies and assumption, and a ‘testing ground’ for project planning, particularly in volatile economic conditions.

The workshop process is designed to be highly participatory and engaging.

The key elements include:

• Review of important global, national and local trends • Identification of key drivers shaping the future
• Clustering of critical sets of drivers
• Formulation four different plausible scenario ‘spaces’
• Developing detailed narratives and descriptions about each of the plausible scenarios
• Identifying preferred future and critical actions steps

This process provides an opportunity for people to produce new insights about the future, and to identify important actions to move a region, community or industry towards a preferred future.