Strategic Scenarios: 6 Key Messages

Regular readers will probably know that I've spent a fair bit of time, over the last year or so, helping two SHAs develop 2 different sets of strategic scenarios, both concerning possible futures for healthcare and wellbeing systems in England. I've also been helping quite a number of  PCTs and Trusts to make use of them.

In doing this work I somehow seem to have managed to 'hold onto' 6 key messages about strategic scenarios and I thought I ought, for the record, to post them now, before I forget!.

Apologies to the vast majority of readers who I'm sure are not scenario 'junkies'. I promise to try and make the next post of much wider interest.

Btw, I'd be keen to hear from you if you know of other key messages that you think ought to be added to this list.

Here goes:

1. Strategic scenarios are deliberately not predictions. Neither are they statements of strategic intent. Essentially, they are stimulating and 'just plausible' stories that capture a set of artificially distinct futures

2. Strategic scenarios are designed to be used to help strategists discover strategic possibilities that otherwise they might not have so easily seen. They do this by providing people with a safe way to first, 'escape the present' and then secondly, return with new or more powerful insights.This is called 'back-casting'. The opposite of forecasting.

3. Back-casting works best after people have had sufficient time to 'escape the present'.

4. To be really useful the narratives need to be have a number of very creative, somewhat surprising 'plot lines' whilst also retaining sufficient credibility with senior healthcare professionals who are immersed, on a day to day basis, in the dynamics of the current system.

5. Most business strategy is formulated by a series of conversations between interested 'stakeholders'. Using strategic scenarios provides a way to change the nature and pattern of these conversations. The more this happens, the greater the chance that new, more powerful insights will be generated.

6. Strategic scenarios can be used in a number of ways including:

• to generate fresh, powerful insights that exert significant influence on the formulation of new strategy;
  
• on a more tactical level, to increase the chances of successfully executing current strategy;
• to test the robustness of a current strategy and identify the environmental 'triggers' that might cause this strategy to be heavily modified or abandoned;
  
• to rehearse how current strategy might be modified if certain environmental changes occurred.

Though, in practice, many strategic scenario workshops 'blend' some of these different uses.

scenariosnhs