Scenarios:

The Art of the Strategic Conversation

Van der Heijen, K. (2005). Scenarios: The art of strategic conversation, 2nd ed.  West Sussex, England: John Wiley & Sons.

The need for effective and efficient strategic thinking is more critical now is today’s business environment than ever before.  Accelerating changes in the business environment reduce reduce the reaction time of the organization – and strategic thinking becomes crucial to survival and growth.

Van der Heijen outlines his thesis that through strategic conversations, organizations can make more rational decisions than can individuals as decision makers.  He begins his explanation by delineating three primary strategy schools of thought: the rationalist school, which was championed by Michael Porter and aims and finding the “optimal strategy;” the evolutionary school, which assumes that strategy emerges and can only be understood in retrospect; and the processual school, which assumes that managers can intervene in the process and improve the chances of success in the future.  Scenario-based planning falls in the processual strategy school of thought.

The purposes of scenario-based planning are then outlined:
- To address a specific problem or question
- To install a permanent capability
- To open up minds
- To create closure around a strategy
- To make sense of a puzzling situation
- To produce ideas for action
- To develop anticipatory skills
- To turn participants into experiential learners.

Van der Heijen admits the future is not predictable and that it contains irreducible uncertainty.  However, he argues there is an underlying causal structure in events, and thus it is possible to develop a “process theory” of why things happen as they do.  He then advocates using multiple storylines to encapsulate learning.  He considers scenarios and stories powerful for the following reasons: (1) they reflect the uncertainty inherent in the future; (2) they allows coherence to be created across knowledge from many separate disciplines in new and unique multi-disciplinary theories about the world; (3) they present findings in a tangible real-world context, illustrating theory rather than espousing it; and (4) they use a causal mode of thinking, which is intuitively comfortable

In comparison to Peter Schwartz’s The Art of the Long View, Van der Heijden’s work is considerably more detailed and thorough, and it provides a good follow-up to Schwartz’s treatment of scenario-based planning.  While some may find this book too theoretical or academic, most readers will find this book quite useful in developing both perspectives on the present state of the environment and strategic plans for the future.  

“The idea of strategizing for the future is fundamentally based on the unpredictability of the future, of which some aspects, we assume, can be foreseen.”   - Van der Heijen

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