Companies have always faced volatility, uncertainty, chaos and ambiguity as they navigate and strategize in a highly competitive world. The reality is that every decision is a choice under a degree of uncertainty.  That said, today’s marketplace dynamics are leading to more dilemmas for businesses and decisions that need to be made with limited data or clear implications.

The first reaction to any disruption in an established business is to view it as a threat, but successful organizations are able to reframe a crisis of threat into a crisis of opportunity. Teams that embrace uncertainty with the mindset of turning threats into opportunities are able to expand existing market spaces, create new solutions to solve for customer needs, and future proof business with sustainable long term strategies.

To help our clients confidently get to the best choices (with rationale) for their business, Simpactful has created a new methodology called Future Forces Scenario Planning.  It is a process that utilizes War-Gaming techniques to identify, then leverages the certainties and uncertainties of the future to imagine multiple possible worlds that are relevant, plausible, challenging, and divergent to guiding questions. This approach provides a stimulus to develop more actionable competitive strategies. Future Forces Scenario Planning is most often used to anticipate new competitive entrants, major changes in competitor strategies, significant change in consumer or retailer needs, economic marketplace changes, supply chain disruption, M&A activity options, or other significant market events. A client who recently leveraged this process commented, “the [Future Forces Scenario Planning] course provided time to think bigger, more external, and with real scenarios.  It allowed time to bond with team during ideation. It’s a great new framework and approach to war gaming and we are benefiting from the process of creating a narrative for the future.”

 So where to begin? For many, the most challenging part of strategy planning is defining the issue itself, but awareness of an issue can create even more uncertainty than action.  Simpactful’s Future Forces Scenario Planning provides a proven process to ensure your problems and challenges lead to change and action.  “The process of identifying key transformative trends impacting your business, exploring their consequences, and creating a strategy to create business opportunities takes a focused effort by the organization and proven process,” explains Jessica Hall, a Simpactful Partner who leads this work, “when we identify challenging business trends with clients, we don’t mean a passing fad in fashion or an iPhone app, but driving forces that will have powerful and long-term consequences.”

Simpactful’s Future Forces Scenario Planning can be scaled to fit any uncertain competitive situation across any diverse industry using any time horizon. It can be used at a company, business, customer, or single brand or product line level.  And the process is efficient, typically taking no more than 1-2 days of your organization’s time.

Simpactful’s Future Force Scenario Planning is here to enable scenario planning to turn your biggest threats into operative strategic plans.

 

Contact us if you are interested in learning more at contact@simpactful.com or 925-234-6394.

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About Simpactful

Proven | Connected | Results

Meet Simpactful – a CPG/Retail consultancy firm built for today’s challenges, with a team of experienced leaders from both CPG and Retail firms.

Our experience spans functions – Sales, Marketing, Consumer Research, Human Resources, Product Supply – and all retail channels including eCommerce, Food, Drug, Mass, Club, Dollar, C Stores, and more.