The Art of Scenarios and Strategic Planning: Tools and Pitfalls

The term strategy has been misused and even abused. Worse, the word scenario is often confused with strategy to the point that clarification is needed if we are to understand one another. As a prolongation of the work done by the Rand Corporation in the 1960s, strategic planning, management and prospective approaches have been developed to help organizations master change. Over the past 25 years, we have contributed by creating or further developing various methodologies and procedures such as the Mactor and MICMAC methods for use in scenario building. These tools are doubly powerful in that they stimulate the imagination, reduce collective biases, and promote appropriation. One of the main functions of the strategic futures exercise is to eliminate two errors that we usually describe as the “hammer’s risk” and the “nail’s dream.” In other words, we forget what a hammer’s function is when staring at a nail (the nail’s dream) or we know how to use a hammer and imagine that every problem is like a nail (the hammer’s risk). In our case, we strive to give simple tools that may be appropriated. However, these simple tools are inspired by intellectual rigor that enables one to ask the right questions. Of course, these tools do not come with a guarantee. The natural talent, common sense, and intuition of the futurist also count!  2000 Elsevier Science Inc. Introduction Anticipation is not widely practiced by decision makers because when things are going well, they can manage without it, and when things are going badly, it is too late to see beyond the ends of their noses. Fast action is already urgently required! Yet reaction is not an end in itself. Although desirable in the short term, it leads nowhere if not directed towards the firm’s long-term objectives. As Seneca said, “there is no favourable wind for the man who knows not where he is going.” Action becomes meaningless without a goal, and only anticipation points the way to action and gives it both meaning and direction. MICHEL GODET is Professor and holder of the Chaire de prospective industrielle du Conservatoire national des arts et métiers, Paris, France, Director of the Laboratory of Investigation in Prospective and Strategy (LIPS). See: [email protected], http://www.cnam.fr/lips/, where there is an on-line working paper Scenarios and Strategies: A Toolbox for Scenario Planning. Address correspondence to Michel Godet, LIPS, CNAM, 2 rue Conte, 75141 Paris, Cedex 03, France. Tel.: 33-01-4027 2530; Fax: 33-01-40 27 27 43; e-mail: [email protected]. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 65, 3–22 (2000)  2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. 0040-1625/00/$–see front matter 655 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10010 PII S0040-1625(99)00120-1