Strategy and Decision-Making
With the pace of change and complexity accelerating, many organizations find it more challenging than ever to recognize major growth opportunities. Reliance on traditional planning approaches — including linear forecasting models and conventional industry trends — often leads to blind spots and strategic surprises, exposing an organization to greater, unforeseen risk. It also leaves opportunities on the table, because it is precisely at these points of inflection that new possibilities in business models, products and services, and operational strategies emerge.
Building on our expertise in strategy and scenario planning, GBN helps you make clearer choices under conditions of uncertainty by:
- Making explicit — and then systematically challenging — your assumptions about external trends and industry forces in order to avoid denial and paralysis
- Rendering visible the hidden strategic assumptions — or conventional wisdom and beliefs — of your industry, and using this to create value from sources of uncertainty that your competitors are not fully taking into account
- Moving beyond traditional, linear forecasting models to explore a diverse set of plausible future business environments so that you can minimize threats, find new opportunities, avoid strategic surprises, and adapt to accelerating change
Our strategy engagements are both highly customized and highly interactive. They typically include one or more of the following components:
- Scenario workshops designed to identify the critical uncertainties affecting an organization's future, develop plausible and challenging scenarios, identify implications, strategic options, and early indicators
- War-gaming to test your options or product launches against competitor moves and potential surprises
- Learning Journeys to enable executives to experience firsthand the future as it is unfolding around us and draw strategic implications from what they see
- Rapid-fire scenario generation to inspire new thinking or test specific product development and launch strategies
- Strategic Choice Structuring to rigorously identify where you wish to play and how you will win — and the choices that will take you there
- Communication programs to engage stakeholders — within and outside of your organization — in your vision for or thought leadership about the future
- Official Futures Analysis to articulate — and then challenge — your organization or industry's deeply held assumptions about the future
- External networks of visionary thinkers and experts who can help you to co-create and test innovations and strategic options
For more information on GBN's offerings in strategy and decision making, please contact information at gbn dot com or click here.
Related Articles
Case Studies
The Future of Hardware Retailing: A Scenario Caselet
This hypothetical example highlights key outcomes of the scenario planning process and demonstrates how scenarios can inform strategic choices.