多维教程通达unit07课文原文

Unit 7 Scenarios for the FutureCharles M Perrottet1.The business environment, as we approach the end of the 20th century, is predictable only in its unpredictability. Managers, whose job it is to plan for this unpredictable future, have responded to the challenge in one of two ways: They continue to "plan" in the , same way they always have - using "Master Plan," which is usually 11 a rigid, long-range exercise based on rosy assumptions about the !I numbers. Or, they entirely abandon their efforts to address the future 11 and concentrate on putting out fires on a day-by-day basis.2.The most fundamental yet most consistently ignored aspect of the 11 future is its unknowability. The future has not yet occurred. However, when most managers take the time to plan at all, they continue to ignore the unknown and extrapolate the future from the known from what has happened in the past. This mechanistic approach assumes that businesses are governed by unchanging "equations" where the "variables" don't really vary at all. It ignores the fact thatreality has a tendency not only to change the values of the relevant 11 "variables," but to change the very "equations" on which the variables 'I are organized and the business is based.3.Could Johns Manville or Dow Corning have avoided bankruptcy by planning for the possibility of disastrous product liability claims in an increasingly litigious environment? Could Wang or IBM have planned for a fundamental change in the marketplace due to the shift of leverage from hardware to software as a result of increasingly powerfuland affordable equipment? Of course, no approach can assure that these shifts would have been adequately foreseen, but only a course that starts with potential shifts in the outside environmentwill even stand a chance.4.Few managers will be blamed for failing to anticipate massive, largescale changes in their markets, the odd John Akers aside. There are, however, those who have made a commitment to take the uncertainty inherent in the future explicitly into account. But how might this be done? How can a rational manager address a future full of terrifying uncertainty?From the Outside Looking in5.Scenario-based strategic planning, unlike many management tools currently in vogue, is an "outside-in" approach. Many businesses have done their best to squeeze costs out of their operations and to retool their internal business processes to accomplish tasks currently mandated by the market. After achieving this goal, however, managers have realized that the external environment is proneto sudden shifts which are difficult or impossible to forecast and that these shifts may render their internal efforts suddenly irrelevant. Scenario planning provides a set of tools managers can use to imagine the threats and opportunities the future will inevitably bring. As a general rule, scenarios ought to be employed by businesses whose external environments are prone to fundamental or sudden change and whose anticipation of these changes is of vital strategic importance. These conditions, of course, are beginning to apply with increasing urgency to more and more businesses throughout the world.6.Scenarios start with the assumption that much of the future is strictly unknowable and that even the most elementary assumptions must be questioned if an honest estimate of the possible variability of the future is to be obtained. Rather than beginning with certain first principles and attempting to "evolve" possible future worlds by applying accepted logic, scenario-based planning starts by assuming particular end states. This cuts through many of the hidden assumptions managers make about how the world works and about what is and is not possible.7.To arrive at these end states, managers must generate business "drivers," or external factors over which they have little or no influence and which are likely to affect the future of the business in question. These drivers usually include an array of macro-economic, social and political factors likely to have an impact on the business. But depending on the nature of the business, they might also include weather patterns or the savings, eating, driving or drinking habits of people around the world.8.The identification process begins with a brainstorming session involving the organization's key decision makers. Once a set of 100 or 150 drivers is generated, these drivers are boiled down to several major themes or overarching large-scale "dimensions." For example, a dimension into which a number of drivers might logically fall would be: Developing Countries' Economic Situations. Within each dimension, we push things to extremes to define sharply different conditions. For example, in the case of the developing countries, we might well imagine the emergence of a largely industrialized, democratic Third World, the ongoing creation of sweat-shop nations, the increasing impoverishment of underdeveloped countries leading to ruthless exploitation of natural resources, natural disasters that produce famine, mass migration and political instability, and so on. When all the dimensions are assembled, the result is a unique set of characteristics comprising a "world."9.In our experience, we have found that four worlds often provide the full range of threats and opportunities that need to be examined. More worlds, while feasible, may tax the resources (both intellectual and time) of the team and not provide sufficient planning differences to warrant the effort. Three worlds may push the organization to regard one world as the "middle" or "most likely" case - a view antithetical to the very philosophy of scenario planning.10.Scenarios start from the premise that the only thing we can know for certain about a point forecast is that it is wrong. Indeed, one of the great strengths of scenarios is the fact that they ignore the issue of probability entirely -- that is, no attempt is made to assign a numerical probability to any particular scenario. Adopting a single scenario as a "most likely case" allows the organization to fall back into the point-forecasting rut.Your World or Mine?Your World or Mine11.In general, if four worlds are agreed upon, and the choice of worlds is left to clients (as it inevitably will be in the end), three of the worlds will end up being "worst case," "best case" and "most likely case." The fourth world is generally left to us to choose, and we usually opt for the mostcontradictory world, the "least likely case." All our entreaties to the client about not regarding any particular world as "good," "bad" or "likely" having been ignored, we set about writing detailed scenarios that will confound their expectations about what is actually "good" or "bad" for their business.12."Take the regulators off our backs," requested a financial services company, "and we will be able to show you what we can do." A scenario was written in which radical deregulation was carried out. The result was a world of punishing competition in which marginswere razor-thin and financial institutions were engaged in a zerosum game - not a very pleasant "best case" at all. In fact, once they got a good look at this world, the company realized that over the years they had acquired critical skills in operating in a regulated environment - and that the complete removal of the regulated context might very well put them in a danger-ous and untenable position.13.The scenarios themselves are detailed, speculative, well-thoughtout narratives of "future history" that convincingly usher the concrete world of today through to the agreed-upon set of future circumstances, which will comprise the "future world" of 2005, 2010 or even 2015. They are designed to create in the client a striking picture of this possible future and to stimulate the client to make inferences as to how the business might be affected by the generalized social, economic and political forces that would define this "brave new world."A Group Effect14.The writing of the scenarios is a cooperative venture. Detailed knowledge of the industry from the company's managers is married to imaginative projections about how the future might look. The participants in this exercise begin to "live in" the worlds they are creating, to appreciate their particular independent logic. The result is a vivid, convincing and challenging set of assumptions about a scenario of the future and how it may unfold in sometimes surprising ways.15.The next stage is to face the challenges presented in the scenario world by developing independent strategies that offer strategy development by using a process called "Adopt-A-World."16.At this point, the fully developed worlds are turned over to teams ofmanagers at the client company, each headed by a high-level strategic executive. The teams read their scenario, any outstanding questions about the logic of the scenario are explained by the authors, and each team is tasked with preparing a strategy for their "future world." Each high-level executive is thus inaugurated as CEO of one of the worlds, and is ultimately responsible for developing strategies to prosper in his or her particular scenario world. Workshops are employed to introduce each team to its scenario and to evaluate the resulting strategies at the end of the "Adopt-A-World" process. During this last workshop, the final "Strategy Merge" process is undertaken.17.A "Strategy Merge" seeks first to evaluate the effectiveness of strategies developed within each of the different worlds. Those strategies that pass muster in each particular world are compiled in a master list; then their effectiveness is evaluated in the other worlds. Some strategies will be highly effective within their original "worlds," but will be ineffective or counterproductive when attemptedin other worlds. Others will be effective across all worlds. This latter group of potential initiatives comprises the "core strategy" - the set of actions that the company ought to take no matter what the future might bring.18.The core strategy, in and of itself, will be insufficient to carry the company to its desired future. It will be a "least common denominator" set of actions. Further strategies will have to be employed as contingencies arise. But many of these contingencies will have been anticipated by the scenario process.19.A final exercise is to identify indicators that will tell the company when one of the contingent worlds might SUddenly be on the verge of realization. If this occurs, the strategy developed for that world should be re-examined and perhaps implemented. Continuous monitoring of the external environment will provide the kind of early-warning intelligence a company will need to respond to unforeseen shifts.20.Scenario planning is designed to deliver concrete, practical results in the form of implementable strategic plans. In addition, the process offers the following value to companies:◎It encourages and supports creative and flexible thinking within the organization.◎It instills a "planning mind-set" in all participants.◎It builds consensus and, throuqh teamwork, assures buy-in to strategic solutions.◎It includes a training element in which young corporate leaders can be developed.◎It effects a fundamental cultural change.◎It can be used to stress-test current strategy against a variety of possible future conditions.◎It provides the basis for a flexible, contingent, ongoing planning process that includes a robust core strategy, a flexible shell to promote preparedness and a focused early-warning system.Changing the Future21.Scenarios are being used for a variety of reasons, but their use invariably changes the way the future is viewed. Rather than a vaguely threatening collection of uncertainties that must be somehow forecast (a thankless job, to be sure), the unknown future is organized into a boundary issue, which tends to make it more manageable. In late 1992, Fleet Financial Group was lauded as a highly successful, wellmanaged company. The company used scenarios to help it develop a strategy that would extend its successful run in new directions for the ensuing 10 years. In 1993, IBM's Large Scale Computing Division (LSCD) was being routinely panned for missing broad shifts in the marketplace. It used scenarios to help establish a strategy that could reinvigorate its business. In 1994, a leading airline used scenarios to help two divisions, fundamentally at odds with each other, clearly delineate areas of conflict and develop strategies to move aggressively ahead. Pfizer, one of the successful pharmaceutical companies in the world, is using scenarios to develop its global strategy.22.These companies are all responding to major unknowns in their futures. Some are responding from positions of great strength within their industry and others are trying to climb back from troubled times. They have all found that scenario-based planning provides them with a fresh approach and, thus, fresh ideas.。