Scenarios - The Art of the Long View

Picking up on the idea that many useful business tools are frequently overlooked, inadequately explained, or completely ignored in higher education, my MBA finance class (MBA/540 Maximizing Shareholder Wealth) last evening started a spirited discussion about scenario analysis.

Perhaps the best known practitioner is Peter Schwartz, who wrote the leading book on the subject: "The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World".

I mentioned in the class that a simple explanation of this concept was available in an article by Lawrence Wilkinson, co-founder and, at the time, managing director of Global Business Network, in a special edition of Wired Magazine in 2001. I knew that Wired was one of the few publications that maintains a complete library of past issues online. While this is technically true, the publication must have changed computer systems or something, because the article about scenarios that is available online today contains a bunch of broken links, and lacks any of the helpful illustrations that appeared in the original print copy. (Note to self: Great idea! Poorly implemented.)

Not to worry! Technology to the rescue!

There is another wonderful tool that you should know about. It is called the "Way Back Machine", available at the Internet Archive, and this service preserves exact copies of many web pages that have sadly disappeared.

So... off I went on the Way Back Machine, and discovered a better copy of the scenario article, complete with all illustrations! By the way, sometimes the Internet Archive can be a bit slow to load, so if you don't see all the illustrations at first, fear not! Just hit the "Refresh" button on your browser to bring them up. I guarantee they are there...

Other examples of scenarios are available... such as the Internet 2050 video... five Tech Roadmaps.... and a Tampa Bay scenarios analysis which is quite wordy, pretty, the subject of a newspaper column, but ultimately doesn't have much "meat" in terms of who, what, when, where, how, and why...

Back to our story...

So... what do YOU think about scenario analysis?

How could you use the scenario analysis tool in your work... and in your personal life?