Editor's letter

Citation

Randall, R.M. (2003), "Editor's letter", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 31 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2003.26131aaa.001

Editor's letter

In this issue we look at innovative scenario methodologies for managing discontinuity in the near term. Five feature articles describe various ways of using decision-driven scenarios to gain foresight concerning the next few months and years.

• •

  "Scenarios for planning post 9/11: managing the impact of a catastrophic event'' by Charles Thomas, Peter Kennedy and Charles Perrottet.

• •

  "Decision-driven scenarios for assessing four levels of uncertainty'' by Hugh Courtney.

• •

  "Scenarios and strategies: making the scenario about the business'' by David H. Mason and James Herman.

• •

  "Competitor scenarios'' by Liam Fahey.

• •

  "Using scenarios to focus R&D'' by Gill Ringland.

By publishing this theme issue we join a long running debate over the proper answer to the question, "What are scenarios for?''. Traditionalists - practitioners of the art of the long view, a time horizon sometimes measured in decades - believe scenarios are group learning experiences and culture change exercises that ultimately promote better decisions. But critics complain that traditional scenario planners have "spent too much time going down paths that most of the organization didn't feel were the slightest bit relevant''. As a result, middle and senior managers often find that time-consuming scenario planning efforts are distractions that provide little insight into the crucial strategic decisions at hand.

Recently a few practitioners have begun to use scenarios as decision support methodology suitable for short-term strategy making and execution. In this context, I believe they are still a form of group learning, but the lessons are less about creatively imagining alternative business and social environments and changing cultural awareness and more about understanding the operational implications of devising and implementing strategy in a rapidly evolving business and societal environment. It also seems to me that long and short term scenario planning are complementary.

Keep in minds that the techniques described in this issue are experimental. It can be proudly noted that these articles present some of the first accounts of this new technology in practice. But research reports they are not.

However, the results of readers' experiments with these techniques should be known fairly soon - in months perhaps, and certainly in a few years. Managers practicing the techniques offered here can quickly observe whether or not they help ready the organization for discontinuity and speed up decision making. In contrast, the full value of traditional scenarios with a five-, ten-, or 20-year horizon cannot be determined during the tenure of most managers.

So we invite readers to put these experimental scenario practices to the test, and to let us know how they perform in your organization. Your comments and case studies are invited.

We will be publishing more articles on scenario planning in the next issue. A number of them are about using scenarios to enrich executive insight about the variety of potential medium- and long-term futures.

Robert M. RandallEditor