Scenarios for Success: Turning Insights into action

How can we look over the horizon of the known and commit ourselves to new courses of action? How do we bring together knowledge and creativity to make decisions that have far reaching impact for success, and even survival? How can we put the forces shaping our world into play with emerging possibilities and come up with a unique entrepreneurial insight? Scenario thinking has stood the test of time as a way to tackle these questions in every domain from long-range global public policy to the business plan of a start-up. In 2005 the Oxford Futures Forum brought together 70 leading futures practitioners to share their experience of how to use scenarios for organizational success: how to develop deep insight into the drivers of change, and how to turn that insight into effective action. The Forum revealed a vibrant practice that is developing many new approaches to extend scenario approaches to cope with the increasing demands for rapid response to a complex world. Where many management methods attempt to reduce decisions to some standardized process to deliver fixed results in fixed times, scenario thinking is still rooted in making space for the essential 'magic' of original insight to happen. These contributions, never published before, bring the newest thinking in the field of scenarios to a wider audience. Critical reflection on many case studies drawn from first hand experience has produced an invaluable resource for organizations aiming to achieve leadership in their strategic thinking and action.Sharpe, Bill is the author of 'Scenarios for Success: Turning Insights into action', published 2007 under ISBN 9780470512982 and ISBN 0470512989.