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Scenario planning

JISC Portfolio for Senior Managers: Employing technology to support your business goals

Scenario planning is a strategic tool used to make flexible long-term plans. It is a method for learning about the future by understanding the nature and impact of the most uncertain and important driving forces affecting our world. While not a crystal ball, it is a creative yet structured approach, which has been successfully used in a variety of settings and circumstances from idea generation to ‘wind tunnelling’ proposals and risk analysis.

Scenario planning is about preparing for potential futures: you identify where you think the world may be heading and plan your response accordingly. This is critical for university managers who are constantly having to make important investment decisions, with a finite amount of resources, that affect strategic direction. It is vital to know that those resources are being put in the right place, and scenario planning can help with this kind of decision-making by exploring how likely it is that the scenario under consideration will appear and how well-placed the institution is to handle it when it does.

Through scenario planning you may realise that a major investment decision would only really work if one particular worldview, one particular scenario, comes to fruition and by taking it there is a danger of putting all the institutional eggs in one basket. However, it might be that taking a slightly different approach minimises the risk because it is more likely to be applicable in more potential scenarios.

Scenarios provide alternative views of the future. They identify some significant events, main actors and their motivations, and they convey how the world functions. Building and using scenarios can help us explore what the future might look like and the likely changes of living in it.

Being agile means having the ability to move in so many different directions, but you need to know if you are moving in a way that will allow you to progress, that is likely to give a good return on investment. Scenario planning means looking at whether you are making the right decisions for the future rather than just the right decisions for now.

How JISC can help

Scenario planning step-by-step guide

Get started on scenario planning with the JISC infoNet ‘how to’ guide that covers scoping, trend analysis, building scenarios, generating and testing options and action plans. It highlights different approaches to creating scenarios and suggestions for applying creativity to the process, from brainstorming to storytelling, visualisation and enactment techniques.

Strategy infoKit

The Strategy infoKit isn’t designed to tell you how to develop and implement your strategic activity. We don’t claim to have all the answers and yet, at the same time, we are firm believers in the notion that nothing is ever perfect and that even small improvements to the status quo can often yield big returns. If all this resource does is to encourage you to stop and question how you currently conduct strategic activity within your institution it will have performed an important function. Its framework is deliberately non-prescriptive and non-dogmatic. It does not require you to reject the way you currently do things and to ‘sign-up’ to our approach. Instead, it simply reflects what we believe to be the most important tasks and processes required to successfully articulate, coordinate and manage strategic activity within your institution. Every page of the Strategy infoKit has been peer reviewed by 15 experienced managers and business planning practitioners.

Impact Calculator

The Impact Calculator is a downloadable tool that can be used to demonstrate the impact of any change initiative by quantifying the tangible benefits or efficiency gains that can be derived from it. In doing so it allows you to: identify and measure as many benefits as you wish resulting from a process redesign; record the costs involved; determine if and when a return on investment is achieved and measure the improvement realised against baseline performance quantify benefits in both monetary and non-monetary terms.

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