Bryan Hayday Change-Ability Inc Leadership and Planning Bryan Hayday Change-Ability Inc

Traditional Strategic & Operational Planning Process Vision Mission Values 1. Ends Stakeholders Stakeholders 2. Environmental Scan External Opportunities & Threats Internal Strengths & Weaknesses Strategic Priority Directions 3. Priority Directions Goals/ Strategies 4. Goals & Strategies 5. Operational Action Plan Action Plan 6. Monitoring & Evaluation Evaluation: Successes & ongoing Challenges

How do organizations plan during periods of great uncertainty? Specify intentions (both short- and long-term) Prepare reactions (mitigate risk, explore opportunity) Anticipate (readiness) Adaptation (timeliness) Vision (dream) Organize ( to make sense and order out of emerging patterns)

Strategy and Change in Practice Intended Strategy Deliberate A B D C Emergent Unrealized Performance Adapted from Henry Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning What we intend through our plans, What we actually implement, The impact of what we implement, our intended and unintended outcomes, And the actions of the larger world around us – these together bring art and humility to leadership.

STACEY MATRIX – Planning Implications Strategic Operational Anarchy Scenario Planning Far From Certainty Far from Agreement Close to

About Scenario Planning No organization can address everything that might be important for its future Predicting the long-term future is notoriously unreliable Scenario planning helps with conditions of high importance and high uncertainty Examining diverse scenarios built around a common issue or decision enables identification of robust (or repeating) elements Scenario planning helps to filter opportunities, risks, culture creation and key decisions Enables focus in areas of ‘high leverage’ Use scenario planning as tool for exploration and readiness not adaptation (contingencies) not reaction (accommodation) not prediction and mid-term planning (strategic)

Why use Scenario Planning? Test viability of current strategy Invigorate conventional strategic planning (exposing untested assumptions and uncertainties) Increase capacity to see change as opportunity Create robust strategies that can work in a variety of contexts or emergent futures Develop sensitivity to recognize new drivers of change and “signs” in environment as they unfold Leading with less fear and more finely-tuned sense of the possible Co-create preferred futures, in the tension of external adaptation, emergence and internal self-organizing

Starting Points We cannot predict the future Where strategic planning is the right tool in complicated times, scenario planning is the preferred approach for complex times Good decisions and robust strategies will do well across several possible futures

Characteristics of Scenarios Do not fall neatly into ‘good’ or ‘bad’ futures May seem more like caricatures than predictions Help us think outside the proverbial box Help us ‘rehearse’ our decision-making under the conditions of different but plausible futures

Developing Scenarios Identify focal issue or decision List key forces in the local environment Determine driving forces Rank by importance and uncertainty Select scenario logics Flesh out the scenarios Consider implications and patterns that repeat Select leading (versus trailing) indicators

Personally/ privately financed Sample Scenario 2by2 Matrix “What kind of health system will Canada have in 2014?” Emphasis on “Personal” Responsibility and Accountability Scenario “A” Scenario “B” Personally/ privately financed Publicly financed Scenario “C” Scenario “D” Emphasis on “Public” Policy and “Public” Responsibility Scenarios need memorable titles – Think headlines! The more diverse (yet plausible) the scenario stories, the more robust are any strategic elements which repeat across 3 or more scenarios

Discerning Robust Strategies Robust strategies are not tied to any one set of circumstances or “future” Robust strategies comprise the series of actions which maintains organizational viability while keeping preferred “ends” in sight Highlights essential competencies or activities that are key to organizational success or survival in a series of plausible and vastly different futures Robust strategies are based on key strategic elements “no matter what happens” Robust strategies lack the precision of strategic plans because their use is tied to conditions of greater uncertainty Important to refresh robust strategies by testing against any major changes in the political, socio-demographic, economic, environmental and technological domains