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Decision making and problem solving


LEARNING FROM THE FUTURE

How to make robust strategy in times of deep uncertainty
by
 * J. Peter Scoblic

by
 * J. Peter Scoblic

From the Magazine (July–August 2020) · Long read
Gary Hershorn/Getty Images
Spotlight Series / Emerging from the Crisis

01
Learning from the Future
02
“What Is the Next Normal Going to Look Like?”
03
Helping Your Team Heal
Summary.    In times of great uncertainty, it’s difficult to formulate
strategies. Leaders can’t draw on experience to address developments no one has
ever seen before. Yet the decisions they make now could have ramifications for
decades. The practice of strategic foresight...more
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IDEA IN BRIEF

THE CHALLENGE

Good strategy creates competitive advantage over time, but the uncertainty of
the future makes it difficult to identify effective courses of action,
particularly in the midst of a crisis. As a leader, how can you prepare for an
unpredictable future while managing the urgent demands of the present?

THE PROMISE

The practice of strategic foresight provides the capacity to sense, shape, and
adapt to change as it happens. One important element of the practice is scenario
planning, which helps leaders navigate uncertainty by teaching them how to
anticipate possible futures while still operating in the present.

THE WAY FORWARD

To make effective strategy in the face of uncertainty, leaders need to
institutionalize strategic foresight, harnessing the power of imagination to
build a dynamic link between planning and operations.

How can we formulate strategy in the face of uncertainty?

That’s the fundamental question leaders must ask as they prepare for the future.
And in the midst of a global pandemic, answering it has never felt more urgent.

Even before the Covid-19 crisis, rapid technological change, growing economic
interdependence, and mounting political instability had conspired to make the
future increasingly murky. Uncertainty was so all-encompassing that to fully
capture the dimensions of the problem, researchers had devised elaborate
acronyms such as VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) and
TUNA (turbulent, uncertain, novel, and ambiguous).



EMERGING FROM THE CRISIS: SERIES REPRINT

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In response, many leaders sought refuge in the more predictable short term—a
mechanism for coping with uncertainty that research has shown leaves billions of
dollars of earnings on the table and millions of people needlessly unemployed.
By the start of 2020, the sense of uncertainty was so pervasive that many
executives were doubling down on efficiency at the expense of innovation,
favoring the present at the expense of the future.

And then the pandemic hit.

Now the tyranny of the present is supreme. A lot of organizations have had no
choice but to focus on surviving immediate threats. (There are no futurists in
foxholes.) But many business and political discussions still demand
farsightedness. The stakes are high, and decisions that leaders make now may
have ramifications for years—or even decades. As they try to manage their way
through the crisis, they need a way to link current moves to future outcomes.

So how best to proceed?

Strategic foresight—the history, theory, and practice of which I have spent
years researching—offers a way forward. Its aim is not to predict the future but
rather to make it possible to imagine multiple futures in creative ways that
heighten our ability to sense, shape, and adapt to what happens in the years
ahead. Strategic foresight doesn’t help us figure out what to think about the
future. It helps us figure out how to think about it.

To be sure, a growing body of research has demonstrated that it is possible to
make more-accurate predictions, even in chaotic fields like geopolitics. We
should use those techniques to the extent we can. But when predictive tools
reach their limits, we need to turn to strategic foresight, which takes the
irreducible uncertainty of the future as a starting point. In that distinctive
context, it helps leaders make better decisions.

The most recognizable tool of strategic foresight is scenario planning. It
involves several stages: identifying forces that will shape future market and
operating conditions; exploring how those drivers may interact; imagining a
variety of plausible futures; revising mental models of the present on the basis
of those futures; and then using those new models to devise strategies that
prepare organizations for whatever the future actually brings.

Today the use of scenarios is widespread. But all too often, organizations
conduct just a single exercise and then set whatever they learn from it on the
shelf. If companies want to make effective strategy in the face of uncertainty,
they need to set up a process of constant exploration—one that allows top
managers to build permanent but flexible bridges between their actions in the
present and their thinking about the future. What’s necessary, in short, is not
just imagination but the institutionalization of imagination. That is the
essence of strategic foresight.


THE LIMITS OF EXPERIENCE

Uncertainty stems from our inability to compare the present to anything we’ve
previously experienced. When situations lack analogies to the past, we have
trouble envisioning how they will play out in the future.

The economist Frank Knight famously argued that uncertainty is best understood
in contrast with risk. In situations of risk, Knight wrote, we can calculate the
probability of particular outcomes, because we have seen many similar situations
before. (A life insurance company, for example, has data on enough 45-year-old,
nonsmoking white men to estimate how long one of them is going to live.) But in
situations of uncertainty—and Knight put most business decisions in this
category—we can only guess what might happen, because we lack the experience to
gauge the most likely outcome. In fact, we might not even be able to imagine the
range of potential outcomes.

The key in those situations, Knight felt, was judgment. Managers with good
judgment can successfully chart a course through uncertainty despite a lack of
reference points. Unfortunately, Knight had no idea where good judgment came
from. He called it an “unfathomable mystery.”

Of course, in something of a catch-22, conventional wisdom holds that to a large
extent good judgment is based on experience. And in many uncertain situations
managers do, in fact, turn to historical analogy to anticipate the future. This
is why business schools use the case teaching method: It’s a way of exposing
students to a range of analogies—and thus ostensibly helping them develop
judgment—much more quickly than is possible in the normal course of life.

When situations lack analogies to the past, it’s hard to envision the future.

But Knight’s point was that uncertainty is marked by novelty, which, by
definition, lacks antecedents. At the very moment when the present least
resembles the past, it makes little sense to look back in time for clues about
the future. In times of uncertainty, we run up against the limits of experience,
so we must look elsewhere for judgment.

That’s where strategic foresight comes in.


“STRANGE AIDS TO THOUGHT”

In the United States, strategic foresight can be traced back to the RAND
Corporation, a think tank that the U.S. Air Force set up after World War II.
Rather than plumbing the mystery of judgment, RAND scholars hoped to replace it
with the “rational” tools of quantitative analysis. But as they grappled with
the military demands of the postwar world, they could not escape the fact that
nuclear weapons had fundamentally changed the nature of warfare. Two countries,
the United States and the Soviet Union, had acquired the ability to destroy each
other as functioning civilizations. And because no one had ever fought a nuclear
war before, no one knew how best to fight (or avoid) one.

One RAND analyst, who approached the problem of a potential apocalypse with a
glee that made him a model for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, was a
mathematician named Herman Kahn. In the atomic age, Kahn realized, military
strategists faced uncertainty to an absolutely unprecedented degree. “Nuclear
war is still (and hopefully will remain) so far from our experience,” he wrote,
“that it is difficult to reason from, or illustrate arguments by, analogies from
history.”

How, then, Kahn asked, could military strategists develop the judgment crucial
to making decisions about an uncertain future? It was the very question Knight
had posed, but unlike Knight, Kahn had an answer: “ersatz experience.” What
strategists needed, he suggested, were “strange aids to thought,” in the form of
multiple imagined futures that could be developed through simulations such as
war games and scenarios.

Marc Piasecki/Getty Images

In 1961, Kahn left RAND to help found the Hudson Institute, where he eventually
shared his ideas with Pierre Wack, an executive from Royal Dutch Shell. In the
early 1970s Wack famously applied Kahn’s ideas in the business world, by
devising scenarios to help Shell prepare for what might take place as the
oil-rich nations of the Middle East began to assert themselves on the world
stage. When change did come, in the form of the price shocks induced by the 1973
OPEC oil embargo, Shell was able to ride the crisis out much better than its
competitors. (In 1985, Wack chronicled Shell’s efforts in two articles for this
magazine: “Scenarios: Uncharted Waters Ahead” and “Scenarios: Shooting the
Rapids.”)

The Shell exercises marked the birth of scenario planning as a strategic tool
for business managers. In subsequent years, Wack’s successors at the company
refined his method, and scenario planners from Shell went on to become some of
the most prominent scholars and practitioners in the field. Nonetheless, few of
the organizations that have conducted scenario-planning exercises in recent
decades have institutionalized them as part of a broader effort to achieve
strategic foresight.

One of the rare exceptions is the U.S. Coast Guard, which describes its work
with scenario planning as part of a “cycle of strategic renewal.” As such, it
offers a model that many organizations can learn from.

One might ask how relevant the Coast Guard’s experience is for businesses, but
in fact it constitutes what social scientists call a “crucial-case test.” As a
military service, the Coast Guard has less organizational flexibility than most
private firms, with a mission mandated by statute and a budget determined by
Congress. What’s more, for a long time its need to react daily to numerous
emerging situations—from ships in distress to drug interdictions—forced it to
focus almost exclusively on the short term, leaving it with little bandwidth to
formulate strategy for the long term. Nevertheless, in recent years it has
managed to leverage scenario planning to its advantage, reorienting the
organization in an ongoing way toward the future. And that, in turn, has allowed
it to respond and adapt to disruptive changes, such as those that followed the
September 11 terrorist attacks.


FUTURE-PROOFING THE COAST GUARD

On that tragic morning, hundreds of thousands of people found themselves trapped
in Lower Manhattan, desperate to escape the burning chaos that was Ground Zero.
While some were able to walk uptown or across bridges, which officials had
closed to vehicles, for many the best way off the island was by water. So over
the next hours, an impromptu flotilla—of ferries, tugs, private craft, and fire
and police boats—took clusters of people away from the wreckage of the World
Trade Center and across the water to safety.

Although many vessels operated on their own initiative, a significant part of
the evacuation was directed by the Coast Guard, which had issued a call for “all
available boats” and coordinated the chaotic debarkation with remarkable poise,
creativity, and efficiency. The effort reminded many of the storied British
evacuation across the English Channel of several hundred thousand troops that
Nazi forces had trapped in Dunkirk, on the coast of France.

That the Coast Guard rose to the challenge is no surprise. Although it has a
broad set of responsibilities, ranging from search-and-rescue to environmental
protection to port security, the organization’s motto is Semper paratus, or
“Always ready,” and it prides itself on responding to emergencies. As one
retired captain told me, “Our whole idea is, when the alarm goes off, to be able
to fly into action.”

But September 11 ended up being more than a short-term challenge. In its
aftermath, the Coast Guard found its mission quickly expanding. Within a day it
was tasked with implementing radically heightened port-security measures around
the country: Port security had previously accounted for 1% to 2% of its daily
operational load, but it soon consumed 50% to 60%. In March 2003 the Coast Guard
was integrated into the new Department of Homeland Security, and that same month
it was given the job of securing ports and waterways all over Iraq, following
the U.S.-led invasion. In subsequent years the service’s budget would double and
its ranks would swell. A new future had arrived.

The Coast Guard adapted to this future nimbly—and did so in part because in the
late 1990s it had conducted a scenario-planning exercise called Project Long
View, which was designed to help the organization contend with “a startlingly
complex future operating environment characterized by new or unfamiliar security
threats.” Its aim, in effect, was to future-proof the Coast Guard.

The service ran Long View in 1998 and 1999—and then, in 2003, in response to the
shocks of September 11, renamed it Project Evergreen and began running it every
four years. Ever since, the organization has relied on Evergreen to help its
leaders think and act strategically.


ROBUST STRATEGY—NO MATTER WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS

When the Coast Guard decided to launch Long View, it enlisted the help of the
Futures Strategy Group (FSG), a consultancy specializing in scenario planning.
FSG maintains that uncertainty precludes prediction but demands anticipation—and
that imaginatively and rigorously exploring plausible futures can facilitate
decision-making.

Working with FSG, the Coast Guard identified four forces for change that would
have a significant impact on its future: the role of the federal government, the
strength of the U.S. economy, the seriousness of threats to U.S. society, and
the demand for maritime services. By exploring them and looking forward some 20
years, the team came up with 16 possible “far-future worlds” in which the Coast
Guard might have to operate. Of those, Coast Guard leaders selected five that
were as distinct as possible from one another (while remaining plausible) and
represented the range of environments the service might face. FSG then wrote
detailed descriptions of those futures and the fictional events that led to
them.

Each future world was given a name intended to capture its essence. “Taking on
Water” described a future in which the U.S. economy struggled amid significant
environmental degradation. In “Pax Americana,” a humbled United States had to
contend with a world rent by political instability and economic catastrophe.
“Planet Enterprise” was dominated by giant transnational corporations.
“Pan-American Highway” featured regional trade blocs oriented around the dollar
and the euro. And “Balkanized America” presciently warned of a divided world in
which “terrorism strikes with frightening frequency, and increasingly close to
home.”

NurPhoto/Getty Images

Using those scenarios, the Coast Guard convened a three-day workshop, which FSG
facilitated. Teams of civilians and officers were assigned to different future
worlds and charged with devising strategies that would enable the Coast Guard to
operate effectively in them. At the end of the workshop the teams compared notes
on what they had come up with. Strategies that appeared again and again, across
different teams, were deemed “robust.” In their final report the organizers of
Long View listed 10 of these strategies, ranging from the creation of a more
unified command structure to the development of a more flexible human-resources
system to the establishment of “full maritime domain awareness”—which the Coast
Guard defines as the “ability to acquire, track, and identify in real time any
vessel or aircraft entering America’s maritime domain.” All of these strategies,
they argued, would help the Coast Guard carry out its mission, no matter what
the future held.

Many of the strategies weren’t novel. But Long View allowed participants to
think about them in new ways that proved crucial in the post–September 11 world.
In effect, Long View allowed the Coast Guard to pressure-test strategies under a
range of plausible futures, prioritize the most-promising ones, and socialize
them among the leadership—which meant that after the attacks, when the
organization found its mission changing dramatically, it was able to respond
quickly.

Launching Long View and subsequently establishing Evergreen as a continuous
process wasn’t easy. It took exceptionally strong leadership—in particular from
admirals James Loy and Thad Allen. The program has also faced challenges in
implementing ideas; there is a difference between strategic foresight and
strategic execution. But once established, the program developed significant
momentum, fueled in part by a growing cadre of alumni who saw the value of a
dynamic relationship between the present and the future. The Coast Guard had
institutionalized imagination.


EXPLORATION ENABLES EXPLOITATION

Long View and Evergreen weren’t designed to bring about a wholesale
organizational shift from the operational to the strategic or to train the Coast
Guard’s attention primarily on the long term. Instead, the goal was to get its
personnel thinking about the future in a way that would inform and improve their
ability to operate in the present.

That was no small challenge. Management scholars have long noted that, in order
to survive and thrive over time, organizations need to both exploit existing
competencies and explore new ones. They need to be “ambidextrous.”

The problem is that those two imperatives compete for resources, demand distinct
ways of thinking, and require different organizational structures. Doing one
makes it harder to do the other. Ambidexterity requires managers to somehow
resolve this paradox.

Long View and Evergreen helped the service’s leaders do that. The programs
didn’t reduce the organization’s ability to attend to the present. If anything,
the opposite occurred. Exploration enabled exploitation.

The Coast Guard members I interviewed for my research reported that Long View
and Evergreen accomplished this in several ways. At the most explicit level,
they identified strategies that the Coast Guard then pursued. Take maritime
domain awareness. The scenarios made it clear to Coast Guard leaders that in any
plausible future, they would want the ability to identify and track every vessel
in U.S. waters. Although this may seem like an obvious need, it’s not a
capability that the service had in the 1990s. As one retired admiral explained,
“Ships could come in 10 miles off or even three miles off the United States’
coast, and we might not know it.” That was in part because U.S. agencies had no
integrated system for gathering and disseminating information.

Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
About the art: During the quarantines in March and April of this year,
photographers in cities around the world captured images of deserted tourist
sites.

 

Even though the Coast Guard didn’t have the organizational and technological
infrastructure to establish full maritime domain awareness immediately, Long
View built consensus about its value among top leadership, which helped the
service implement it more quickly after 9/11. In fact, the Coast Guard captain
who had managed Evergreen led the interagency effort to develop the first
National Strategy for Maritime Security, which ultimately prompted the creation
of the Nationwide Automatic Identification System—a sort of transponder system
for ships.

The strategies that emerged from the scenario-planning exercises also enabled
personnel who participated in them to act with a greater awareness of the
service’s future needs. For example, the first iteration of Evergreen stressed
the importance of building strategic partnerships at home and abroad. With this
in mind, one senior Coast Guard leader prepared for threats that might emerge in
the Pacific by developing bilateral relationships with island nations there;
sharing information, coordinating patrols, and holding joint exercises with
counterparts in China, Russia, Canada, South Korea, and Japan; and finding ways
to work more closely with other U.S. agencies, from the FBI to the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

At the most basic level, Long View and Evergreen simply got the service’s people
to think more about the future. The master chief petty officer of the Coast
Guard Reserve described how Evergreen had changed his thinking, citing a recent
conversation with a colleague: “He and I were here in my office this morning,
talking about, ‘Twenty-five years from now, what is the Coast Guard Reserve
component going to look like?’” Before taking part in Evergreen, he added, “I
just wouldn’t understand how to think that way.”

Perhaps most interesting, however—and most important in resolving the supposed
paradox between exploration and exploitation—is the way that Long View and
Evergreen helped participants understand the demands of the past and the future
not as competing but as complementary. The exercises changed the very way in
which participants thought about time.

Humans tend to conceive of time as linear and unidirectional, as moving from
past to present to future, with each time frame discrete. We remember yesterday;
we experience today; we anticipate tomorrow. But the best scenario planning
embraces a decidedly nonlinear conception of time. That’s what Long View and
Evergreen did: They took stock of trends in the present, jumped many years into
the future, described plausible worlds created by those drivers, worked backward
to develop stories about how those worlds had come to pass, and then worked
forward again to develop robust strategies. In this model, time circles around
on itself, in a constantly evolving feedback cycle between present and future.
In a word, it is a loop.

Once participants began to view time as a loop, they understood thinking about
the future as an essential component of taking action in the present. The
scenarios gave them a structure that strengthened their ability to be strategic,
despite tremendous uncertainty. It became clear that in making decisions, Coast
Guard personnel should learn not only from past experience but also from
imagined futures.


GETTING STARTED

The prospect of organizing a scenario exercise can intimidate the uninitiated.
There are distinct benefits to enlisting one of the individuals, boutique
consultancies, or even large firms that specialize in scenarios to provide
helpful direction. However, regardless of who runs the process, managers should
follow these key guidelines:


INVITE THE RIGHT PEOPLE TO PARTICIPATE.

One of the chief purposes of a scenario exercise is to challenge mental models
of how the world works. To create the conditions for success, you’ll need to
bring together participants who have significantly different organizational
roles, points of view, and personal experiences. You’ll also need people who
represent what Kees van der Heijden, one of Wack’s successors at Shell, has
described as the three powers necessary for any effective conversation about
strategy: the power to perceive, the power to think, and the power to act.

The best scenario planning embraces a decidedly nonlinear conception of time.


IDENTIFY ASSUMPTIONS, DRIVERS, AND UNCERTAINTIES.

It’s important to explicitly articulate the assumptions in your current strategy
and what future you expect will result from its implementation. Think of this
scenario as your projected scenario—but recognize that it’s just one of many
possible futures, and focus on determining which assumptions it would be helpful
to revisit. Rafael Ramirez, who leads the Oxford Scenarios Programme, advises
that in doing this you disaggregate transactional actors, which you can
influence or control, from environmental forces, which you cannot. How might
those forces combine to create different possible futures?


IMAGINE PLAUSIBLE, BUT DRAMATICALLY DIFFERENT, FUTURES.

This can be the most difficult part of the exercise, particularly for those used
to more analytical modes of thinking. Push yourself to imagine what the future
will look like in five, 10, or even 20 years—without simply extrapolating from
trends in the present. This takes a high degree of creativity and also requires
the judgment to distinguish a scenario that, as the Coast Guard puts it, pushes
the envelope of plausibility from one that tears it—an inherently subjective
task. Good facilitators can both prime the imagination and maintain the
guardrails of reality.


INHABIT THOSE FUTURES.

Scenario planning is most effective when it’s an immersive experience. Creating
“artifacts from the future,” such as fictional newspaper articles or even video
clips, often helps challenge existing mental models. It’s also a good idea to
disconnect participants from the present, so hold workshops off-site and
discourage the use of phones at them.

Next In
Emerging from the Crisis
“What Is the Next Normal Going to Look Like?”



A roundtable with five top executives




ISOLATE STRATEGIES THAT WILL BE USEFUL ACROSS MULTIPLE POSSIBLE FUTURES.

Form teams to inhabit each of your far-future worlds, and give them this
challenge: What should we be doing now that would enable us to operate better in
that particular future? Create an atmosphere in which even junior participants
can put forward ideas without hesitation. Once the groups develop strategies for
their worlds, bring them together to compare notes. Look for commonalities,
single them out, and identify plans and investments that will make sense across
a range of futures.


IMPLEMENT THOSE STRATEGIES.

This may sound obvious, but it is the place where most companies fall down.
Using scenario planning to devise strategies isn’t resource-intensive, but
implementing them requires commitment. To couple foresight with action, leaders
should set up a formal system in which managers have to explain explicitly how
their plans will advance the firm’s new strategies. Realistically, foresight
will not drive every initiative, but scenario exercises can still be valuable in
several ways. First, they can provide participants with a common language to
talk about the future. Second, they can build support for an idea within an
organization so that when the need for implementation becomes clear, it can move
faster. Finally, they can enable participants to act at the unit level, even if
the organization as a whole fails to link the present and future as tightly as
it should.


INGRAIN THE PROCESS.

In the long run you’ll reap the greatest value from scenario exercises by
establishing an iterative cycle—that is, a process that continually orients your
organization toward the future while keeping an eye on the present, and vice
versa. This ambidexterity will allow you to thrive under the best of
conditions—and it’s essential for survival under the worst. Moving in a loop
between the present and multiple imagined futures helps you to adjust and update
your strategies continually.


CONCLUSION

This last point is critical. As the current pandemic has made clear, needs and
assumptions can change quickly and unpredictably. Preparing for the future
demands constant reappraisal. Strategic foresight—the capacity to sense, shape,
and adapt to what happens—requires iterative exploration, whether through
scenario planning or another method. (See “The Future: A Glossary.”) Only by
institutionalizing the imaginative process can organizations establish a
continual give-and-take between the present and the future. Used dynamically in
this way, scenario planning and other tools of strategic foresight allow us to
map ever-shifting territory.

THE FUTURE: A GLOSSARY

Managing the uncertainty of the future requires many tools, some of which have
similar or even overlapping functions. To ...



Of course, strategic foresight also enables us to identify opportunities and
amplifies our ability to seize them. Organizations don’t just prepare for the
future. They make it. Moments of uncertainty hold great entrepreneurial
potential. As Wack once wrote in these pages, “It is precisely in these
contexts—not in stable times—that the real opportunities lie to gain competitive
advantage through strategy.”

It takes strength to stand up against the tyranny of the present and invest in
imagination. Strategic foresight makes both possible—and offers leaders a chance
for legacy. After all, they will be judged not only by what they do today but by
how well they chart a course toward tomorrow.

A version of this article appeared in the July–August 2020 issue of Harvard
Business Review.
Read more on Decision making and problem solving or related topics Risk
management, Strategic planning and Managing people
 * JS
   J. Peter Scoblic is a cofounder and principal of Event Horizon Strategies, a
   foresight consultancy, and a senior fellow in the International Security
   Program at New America. He has just completed a doctorate at Harvard Business
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