1.3 Futures planning for the world today
In the last few years, all industry sectors including the higher education (HE) sector have had to react to unprecedented change and uncertainty, while being mindful of the impact on wellbeing of those within your organisation and wider community. The COVID-19 pandemic required us to adapt continually and rapidly, as restrictions and guidance changed between 2019 and 2022. The external environment is still uncertain, as economic, and social stability continue to fluctuate, and the cost of living rises.
How you lead your organisation and plan for business continuity and growth is critical to address your short-, medium-, and long-term needs, aims and objectives.
There are various approaches to foresight and futures planning, as shown in the figure below, and in this course, we only explore a few of these.
In the video below Dr Matt Finch (Associate Fellow, Saïd Business School) and Professor Rafael Ramírez (Professor of Practice, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford) provide an introduction to futures and scenario planning. As you watch think about your own understanding of this type of planning.
Download this video clip.Video player: Video 4
Transcript: Video 4 What is futures planning?
MATT FINCH
Scenario planning is a way of understanding the context that we're operating in, not just as it exists today, but looking at the uncertainties, the forces, the factors and trends which surround that context, and which might have the power to redraw that map in the future. So, in times of uncertainty, in times when we can't trust that tomorrow will be like the conditions are today or yesterday, we can map both the relationships which currently exist and the uncertainties which influence that little island of relationships, and then manufacture potential futures, look at the environment we might be operating in times to come. So, what we do is we create a small set of potential future contexts.
We do that for a particular reason. There's a particular issue or purpose, something we need to discuss, a decision that we need to take. And we try to ensure that set of alternative potential future contexts those in some way challenge or enhance our current assumptions and expectations about the future we might have to inhabit.
So, we have a sense of the future that we might live in or that particular issue might live in. But actually, because the future hasn't arrived yet, because we can't gather data or evidence from things which haven't happened yet, we need to stretch our frame and really challenge our understanding of what's going on around us and how things might play out in times to come. So, each scenario is like a little glimpse of a world that we might have to inhabit defined by its ability to get under our skin and encourage us to rethink and reframe what is currently going on.
And then what strategy is always about the choice or the decision or the conversation we need to have about what we're actually going to do. And that of course, is informed by our sense of what's going on and how it's going to play out in times to come. So, each scenario gives us a different vantage point on the present, and we can either use those scenarios to test or wind tunnel scenarios in the same way that aircraft are tested in a wind tunnel. We can build strategies that have options within them so that we can adjust and adapt to different scenarios as they emerge. And also, sometimes the mere act of looking at an imagined future which wasn't the one we anticipated or expected, that can show us new opportunities, new challenges, new threats, but also new positives that we haven't been able to see before through the current frame of reference.
During the pandemic it became clear that there was a great need for people to think differently about what was going on to understand how an uncertain future might play out and that had to be done very swiftly, often at very short notice. And I can give a brief example from just before the pandemic, working with Norwegian schools through the University of Oslo. We were looking at the future of schooling in Norway and we had three scenarios for the year 2050.
And one of these was very much about children taking responsibility for their own learning in remote virtual spaces. One of these was very much about the idea that an institution would monitor children's health via the algorithm when they were learning in virtual spaces, and that parents might take issue with this, and that parents might campaign against the algorithm deciding their children's health and care. And then the third one was about the idea that Norway, which is a very oil-rich nation, might suffer as a result of the climate crisis.
We might have to stop burning fossil fuels suddenly. And then if there was mismanagement or scandal or some other disruption, Norway might no longer be as wealthy as it has grown used to being in the 20th century. And what happened was these scenarios were published in late 2019, early 2020.
They were set 30 years hence. But actually, within months of publication, all of those issues came to the floor as part of the COVID-19 pandemic. Children taking responsibility for their own learning, online working from home via laptops, and various virtual platforms, parents battling with institutions over what was right for their children's health, should they go into school, should they be vaccinated, all those concerns, and Norway even dipped into its sovereign wealth fund as a result of the slowdown in the oil trade during the pandemic.
So, although we looked to the future, what it's really about is surfacing some of those issues that surround the environment that we've come to take for granted in the present and show us how those uncertainties could become real, concrete environments where we might have to make tough decisions, but where there might also be great opportunities.
We've just been through this moment that reminds us of how easy it is for us to be surprised, to be blindsided for our whole environment to be transformed. But the danger is we only learn from experience. There's always a tendency to plan for the crisis we've just been through rather than think about the next one.
So, I think one of the really important things is not just to learn from the pandemic and genuinely see how profound and radical changes were possible and embrace the changes which seem like they're going to be useful in times to come. But it's also saying, where's the place we're not looking now? Where's the thing that isn't being covered on the front page of the news that isn't being talked about in our meetings or over cups of tea with our colleagues? Where is our new blind spot?
And are there things we need to unlearn-- to unlearn from the pre-pandemic era and even from the era that has been affected by COVID-19? So, for me the challenge is that I don't want to create new blind spots by suggesting the uncertainties that people should attend to, but say that for each one of us there will be things that we don't see or that we can't see or that we don't let ourselves see. And part of the work is to recognise we're not omniscient, we don't have the time or the capacity, the resources, or the appetite to look at every single eventuality.
So, we always need to frame our work. There is always a limit or a bound to what we can understand in terms of scanning the environment, thinking about what it means for us, thinking through our capacities. But if you recognise that you always have a limit, at least you can try and map the contours of where the edge lies, where can I stretch things, how can I expand my sense of what is plausible so that I'm not just planning for yesterday, I'm not just building even on the experience of this enormous season of radical upsets that we've had through COVID-19 and all the surprises of the 21st century, but that I've genuinely become more resilient in the sense of preparing for a tomorrow that might still be uncertain, that might still come from an angle that I haven't considered fully.
And there's a great quote from an Oxford academic called Eleanor Murray, who says, "resilient entities don't bounce back, they bounce forward, they bounce forward into that changed context." So, my advice to everyone would be to think even just having been through this incredibly intense experience of the pandemic, which has the potential to totally redraw how we live and work. Just bear in mind that even that is only experience from the past. And finding ways to have an eye on tomorrow and to recognize the limits of the ways we are talking and thinking about tomorrow I think is fundamental to wise decision making in the times we find ourselves in.
RAFAEL RAMÍREZ:
So, what is scenario planning and how does it sit-in relation to strategic planning in some ways, it's very simple in principle. When you make a plan or a policy or an intent that is supposed to take place and be set into reality, you're making assumptions about the context in which that intent is going to live. You're making assumptions about the context in which the organisation or the team that is making a plan will live in.
And what scenarios are about is to pay attention to the context more than to the plan, at least initially. What if the context that you're planning to inhabit with your initiative fails to show up? What if you're planning to do something for a long war in Ukraine and suddenly peace breaks out? So, what we do is we look at the assumptions about the context that a certain plan or initiative has and then manufacture an alternative or two or three alternative futures to the one that is expected and see if the plan would still be robust and resilient, should a different future show up instead of the one that has been implicitly thought would be there once the plan is up and running. And so, scenario planning is about bringing those alternative futures to bear in present decisions and see if the strategy can be made more resilient should a different future show up compared to the one that you were planning for.
Why is it important for organisations to do scenario planning? Simply because you're not sure that the context is going to be there for you anymore. If you're planning to run in the Olympics next time, you don't need scenario planning because you know all the rules are there, you know the competitors, you probably train at the same altitude and humidity and heat as the setting.
So, the setting is given for you. All you have to do is train. But if you're going to be planning the next Olympic games, you do need scenario planning because you don't know what the financial set up for your country and how much debt and how much the debt will cost to run the games and to set up the equipment.
You don't know what political whims and winds will be blowing and who you need to exclude and include. You don't know what the security situation might be, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, if you are not sure that the context is going to be there for you, scenario planning is very helpful.
We look at how the bigger forces in the context, things like the demographics of China, the rate at which climate change is unfolding, the speed of greater inequality in the world, the debt that Western countries are taking on and financing through QE and then the rate of inflation and possibly a recession, all those aspects come together and shape the immediate environment of actors with whom you collaborate to produce value. And so, the scenarios set the context in which strategy happens. And it is designed for periods, such as hours of very turbulent, unpredictable, uncertainty, ambiguity, and novelty. So, it is designed to be adapted and adopted from everything from the IMF to very small NGOs.
Video 4 What is futures planning?
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To assist you as you move through the course and consider your approach to futures planning, the ‘Hybrid ways of working: a contextual sustainability framework’ illustrated below, has been designed for this collection of courses. It highlights the key areas you may wish to think about developing for your organisation while managing the expectations, needs and wellbeing of your stakeholders.
The framework helps you to consider and understand your organisational context and needs through a different lens, while being mindful of your own wellbeing.
- You and your ways of working should take account of the key stakeholders within your environment and their needs in relation to organisational development.
- You need to understand organisational requirements, the context, connections, and requirements for key areas of focus, and how these relate to the needs of your stakeholders.
- You need to consider your ways of working for the wellbeing of future generations.
If you are unfamiliar with the term ‘lens’ this term is used to encapsulate looking at things from different perspectives, with an empathic approach. By placing yourself in different situations or by looking at things from someone else’s perspective – considering those points of view and repeating this for the different elements/stakeholders/areas involved – builds a more holistic and consolidated view of the needs, support available and possible questions and solutions that may evolve.