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Scenario construction: the driving forces method 387
planning as a technique for dealing with uncertainty (we will discuss a
more formal approach to evaluating strategies at the end of the chapter).
Note, however, that there is an additional row in Figure 15.4, entitled
‘new strategy’, which the very act of scenario planning may incubate in
the mind of the decision maker as he or she ponders the set of plausible
futures encapsulated in the scenarios. This ability of scenario planning to
stimulate creative thinking is perhaps best illustrated by a ‘real’ scenario
contained in Figure 15.8. This scenario was one of several constructed
for a corporation which was involved in moving raw materials and
finished goods around the globe. 3 The company was concerned with
the (re)location of its major depots, so that they would be at the hubs of
future trading networks. It follows that the scenarios were constructed
to represent plausible future trading patterns in the EC and the rest of
the world. The corporation tested the robustness of choice of alternative
countries and cities against the scenarios. Several cities which were not
in the choice set prior to the scenario construction became favorites in the
subsequent decision process since they were found to be robust against a
range of plausible future world trading patterns. These trading patterns
were encapsulated and bounded by the scenarios that were constructed
to capture the range of plausible futures.
So far we have described one method to bound these futures – a simplified
method that uses an extreme positive scenario, an extreme negative
scenario, and a more neutral, status quo or ‘business as usual’ scenario.
Some practitioners of scenario planning caution against presenting the
decision maker with such extreme worlds since their very extremeness
may cause doubts among their clients – the business managers – about
their plausibility. Another way to construct scenarios that has found
favor among practitioners is described next.
Scenario construction: the driving forces method
This method shares much in common with the first method that we
introduced, in that the critical elements in the decomposition process
are predetermineds and uncertainties. However, in the driving forces
method, degrees of predictability and uncertainty are allowable and the
outputs of the scenario construction process are not, usually, extreme
scenarios. Nevertheless, the output scenarios from this method also
bound the perceived uncertainties in a similar way to the scenarios
produced in the extreme-world scenario construction method that we
discussed earlier.