Step Two: Creating Scenarios Based on Megatrends, Part 2

Two weeks ago, in Step Two: Creating Scenarios Based on Megatrends, I continued a description of a Scenario Planning exercise my Board chair and I decided to conduct at our just completed Board meeting. I ended the previous post with a comment that, after a pre-meeting survey on the Megatrends facing our industry, our Board would have to select just two Megatrends and define two alternate futures for each in order to create the four scenarios that would make up the bulk of our exercise. To help them do that, we had provided them with a list of suggested Megatrends and futures, based on the common themes we saw in their survey results.

What followed was a lively discussion at our Board table. Several other Megatrends were suggested and put up on the screen. But when our Board chair called the discussion to a close, and asked each Board member to vote for the two that they thought would have the greatest impact on our industry in the next five years, two Megatrends and their alternate futures quickly rose to the top.

INTERNET OF THINGS (IoT)
1. Fluid power benefits from integration with IoT technologies.

2. Fluid power struggles to integrate with IoT technologies.

WORKFORCE
1. Fluid power has an easier time finding the skill sets it needs for growth and innovation.

2. Fluid power has a harder time finding the skill sets it needs for growth and innovation.

These are four possible futures that our industry may face, but remember, as I described in my previous post, Scenario Planning posits that the future our industry actually will face is not just one of the four futures described by the two Megatrends. It will instead be an unpredictable combination of those four futures. According to the Megatrends chosen, our industry will either benefit from or struggle with IoT AND our industry will have either an easier or a harder time finding the talent it needs. In other words, the two futures associated with each Megatrend can be combined in four different ways:

I put the labels on each of the Scenarios to make them easier to reference in future discussions. In case you can't read them on the chart, they are:

• Scenario A: “Connected Stagnation” - Fluid power integrates with IoT but struggles to find needed talent.
• Scenario B: “Isolated Stagnation” - Fluid power struggles to integrate with IoT and struggles to find needed talent.
• Scenario C: “Connected Growth” - Fluid power integrates with IoT and finds needed talent.
• Scenario D: “Isolated Growth” - Fluid power struggles to integrate with IoT but finds needed talent.

Obviously, everyone would want Scenario C to be the one that represents our future, but there is also obviously no guarantee of that. The whole point of the exercise is to create alternate and plausible future scenarios so that they can be planned for, and so the association can more effectively adapt to them.

So, with these Scenarios in hand, we were ready for Step Three of our process: Writing Snapshots for Each Scenario. A Snapshot combines summary descriptions of each future written as though it has already occurred. They describe the outside world our organization will face in each scenario, and provide a set of indicators whose occurrence will reflect that a particular scenario is unfolding.

I'll describe how our Board accomplished that in a future post.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.