In order to make any kind of prediction of what might happen in the future it is important to have an understanding of what is happening now – within the sector, the country or globally. The best way to do this is to monitor and analyse trends and scan the current environment.
There are a number of tools available to support you in this activity – a particularly useful one is Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental (PESTLE) analysis to help you to identify the different forces in play in a particular situation.
The PESTLE approach can be known by a number of different acronyms including PEST, STEP and SEPTED (socio-cultural, economy, politics, technology, ecology, demographics) but generally they all follow a similar framework and identify similar issues. The analysis can prove to be a very useful tool as it offers a wide ranging framework from which to build the scenarios.
It is important that the analysis and scanning activities are as thorough as possible in order to identify and measure the impacting factors that need to be considered and to provide the best possible conditions in which to generate the scenarios.
Hold comprehensive interviews/workshops about how participants see big shifts coming in society, economics, politics, technology, etc. Assess to what degree these trends will affect your situation. Describe each trend and how and why it will affect the organisation. You may find that using a technique such as brainstorming works well in recording group thinking and generating quantities of ideas in this type of analysis exercise.
Once the forces have been identified it is useful to rate them in order to gauge their potential influence and impact – it may be that your organisation cannot influence what is happening but it may well feel the impact when it does.