FUTURES & FORESIGHT SCIENCE最新文献

The integration of theory and practice is a significant aspect of modern academia. Prompted by Rowland and Spaniol's review and celebration of Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation, I reflect briefly on the impact of Kees van der Heijden and his contribution to the theoretical and practical development of scenario planning research.

Working with Kees as his apprentice scenario planner, I have been fortunate to have participated in many scenario workshops, both on the Strathclyde MBA program and with organizations. Alongside these workshops, I am also very privileged to have been an assistant to Kees on a number of scenario projects with organizations in a range of countries. I have learned many things in the time spent with Kees, and consider his book, “Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation” to be the definitive field guide to the art and craft of scenario planning, albeit there have been a plethora of books on the subject since. The objective of this commentary is to discuss from a practical perspective, three things I have learned from my years of experience with Kees which have proved useful in my scenario work with client organizations, namely the elicitation of client views and insights, the value of the “Business Idea” and the scenario development timescale

Business and management research on scenarios has been highly productive over the decades but led to a complex literature that is hard to oversee. To organize the field and identify distinguishable research clusters, we conducted a co-citation analysis focusing on the long-term history of research. We compare our findings with a previously published bibliographic coupling, focusing on the more recent research to trace its development over time. Our study revealed six research clusters: (1) Planning the Future with Scenarios, (2) Scenario Planning in Strategic Management, (3) Reinforcing the Scenario Technique, (4) Integration of Scenario Planning and MCDA, (5) Combination of Different Methods, and (6) Decision-making through Stochastic Programming, whereas the bibliographic coupling generated 11 clusters. Some former research clusters were divided into separate new clusters, while others were united. Additionally, completely new clusters emerged. Future research on scenarios is expected (1) to further differentiate into strategy and operations, (2) to be based on “behavioral futures” or “behavioral foresight” as a new research stream, (3) to advance the scenario technique methodically and include new specific scenario generation methods, and (4) to put forth new application areas.

Record amounts of money flowed into start-ups in 2020 and yet, founders are acting detached from the future. At the same time, the range of entrepreneurship-related programs has multiplied. Scenario-based planning must become a mandatory part of those programs. To keep the strategic conversation with and about scenarios going.

This commentary refers to the retrospective review by Rowland and Spaniol in Futures and Foresight Science (2021), which provides interesting insights into Kees van der Heijden's character and work 25 years after his famous book Scenarios: The art of strategic conversation was first published. The commentator draws on his own personal experience of Kees' work and book, including a seminar with him at the University of Oxford in 2011, as well as applying the book's fundamentals in his own research and advisory work over the past ten years.

This piece is a personal reflection on the work and impact of Kees van der Heijden as part of the retrospective book review by Rowland and Spaniol (2021).

October 9, 2021

The “it depends on the client” mantra highlighted by Matt Spaniol in this essay about Kees van der Heijden's approach to scenario planning brought me back to an experience, from 1986 to 1991, when Kees and the late Jaap Leemhuis were the clients with whom Richard Normann and I worked in the so-called “Shell Manufacturing Reorientation Project”.

The way Jaap and Kees acted as clients, with Richard and I as advisors, taught me a lot about how clients and advisors can collaborate effectively and work together in scenario planning and beyond.

My recollection of this intervention benefits from its having been written up already twice. The first write-up of that experience was by Peter Checkland and Scholes (1999). I find it fascinating how Checkland, who was a consultant to Shell alongside Normann and Ramirez, saw “the same” engagement so differently from how I remember seeing it. This difference is reminiscent of Gareth Morgan's excellent 1983 book “Beyond Method” (Morgan, 1983), where he contrasted 20 well-accepted methods in the social sciences with which to consider organizational phenomena, and where he showed how a given situation is seen uniquely with the lens of one method, while it is inescapably to be seen very differently with the lens of another. Importantly, for efforts in scenario planning to mix methods and to attempt to produce “hybrid” methods, Morgan found that as there is no meta-method providing a “neutral” (meta-)stance from which to assess different methods. Instead, he found that any comparison among methods must inevitably be from the stance of one single method. The one method whose stance is used to assess the other methods frames all of them, and this perspective in effect entails a “hostile” takeover of the other methods which are compared from its own specific stance. Morgan's conclusion was that all we can do is see a situation from the individual points of view afforded by different methods, and then seek to learn about the situation we are examining from and with these differences. Not coincidentally, this is also what scenario planning seeks to help its users to do—to see the here and now from the point of view of different and contrasting stances in the conceptual future.

My experience of this intervention was also about how difficult it is to work with soft systems and scenario planning concurrently (cf., Lang & Allen, 2008). But if anyone has the intelligence, skill, nuance, and patience to do so, Kees certainly would come top of mind as someone who can succeed—and indeed he adapted the CATWOE mnemonic from soft systems methodology in the second edition of his book, repurposing it into the VOCATE analysis as part of contracting with a client. My colleague Trudi Lang tells me that this emerged after a strategic conversation organized at Curtin Business School in Perth in which Kees and Peter were hosted to explore the two met

Rowland and Spaniol's (2021) in-depth piece on Kees van der Heijden's seminal text, Scenarios, cued several memories for me, sparked a bit of self-reflection on my learning journey as a scenario planner, and encouraged me to reconsider Scenarios in the context of Open Strategy.

I first met Kees in 2008. I was working on my PhD in foresight. George Burt recommended I take a well-known scenario planning course, noting that this would be the last time Kees van der Heijden would offer it. I do not recall if this actually was the case, but it, along with a modest PhD discount, convinced me to join this training in Glasgow, where Kees van der Heijden and George Burt were delivering the lessons as a team.

Of course, by then van der Heijden's work had already influenced my PhD research on foresight. Those descriptions of scenario planning practices at Shell (Schoemaker, 1993; Schoemaker & Heijden, 1992; Schwartz, 2004, 2012; van der Heijden, 1996) were not only essential for my research but, at that time, also for establishing credibility in the/my German context vis-à-vis the field of foresight—a context in which scenario planning had not been even modestly institutionalized.

While I was grateful to have attended this particular scenario planning training program, in retrospect, I now realize that I had not yet truly connected to many aspects of the training and will note that I was not actually able to apply the training for the next several years.

My journey with scenario planning did not start until some 2 years after the training. By then, I had completed my PhD and joined the strategy department in the global headquarters of an insurance company, Allianz, in Munich, Germany. At Allianz, I was asked to establish foresight processes. After several discussions, we collectively decided to conduct a scenario planning exercise, focusing on current trends in the organization.

This was the moment when I returned to my training materials, specifically, to Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation and The Sixth Sense (van der Heijden, 1996; van der Heijden et al., 2002). At this point, my applied learning journey began by applying scenario planning in Allianz and, subsequently, in other organizations, something that I have now been doing for more than 10 years. This included also working for Paul Schoemaker's consulting firm Decision Strategies International (DSI, later acquired by Heidrick and Struggles) and later with Felix Werle, a former member of the Shell Scenario Planning team, and his consulting firm the Institute for Innovation and Change Methodologies. Throughout the course of this ongoing learning journey, I have continued, without exception, to apply the practice of scenario planning in a manner that closely reflects the work of Kees van der Heijden.

While my first encoun