by Nice to be back in the saddle after a spectacular honeymoon in beautiful St. Thomas. Hopped right over to Brussels Belgium to teach in our week-long certificate program in Strategic Foresight. Which means plane time and reading, which presented the opportunity to explore Tom Chermack’s Scenario Planning in Organizations: How to Create, Use, and Assess Scenarios, recommended to me by super-networker and UH Futures Program Advisory Board member and GBN co-founder Napier Collyns.
Chermack is an Asst Professor at Colorado State and has established a Scenario Planning Institute there. The point of his book is to introduce what he calls performance-based scenario planning. The key contribution is his proposal to apply qualitative (interviewing) and quantitative (surveys, estimates, etc) evaluation criteria to scenario planning. He offers three types of results to be assessed (1) satisfaction: for participants and stakeholders (2) learning: knowledge and expertise gained (3) performance: systemic and financial.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out in the “real world.” We futurists often talk about the “problems” with measurement and evaluation–and I include myself here, as this is a topic in my dissertation–but it’s often trick to get clients to participate. They often don’t want to be bothered with it. This does not mean that it’s not important, just that it’s time-consuming. Will clients be willing? I suspect some will and that it could build momentum if it proves useful. (Again, note, I personally think it’s important).
Another fresh contribution was in highlight the gap in scenario theory. He found that the scenario planning literature talked a lot about six areas: dialog, learning, mental, models, decision-making, leadership, and organizational performance, but didn’t link the theoretical contribution of scenario planning to them. How, for instance, does scenario planning influence mental models? Interestingly, when we did our comprehensive review of scenarios, “The Current State of Scenario Development” we found at an even more basic level that there is a lack of knowledge about the wide range of scenario techniques themselves.
I will happily add this book to the handful we offer to students in our Futures Research class to read and report on in class. It is solid on the scenario basics: great for those who are new with lots of meaty detail as well as lots of good tips for those with more experience. The gaps he identifies in theory and evaluation make sense for a relatively new method in a relatively new field. It’s a stage in evolution. Thankfully, Chermack has sped up the journey on these two fronts of scenario theory and scenario evaluation. Andy Hines
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