Anticipating Strategic Surprise
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The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 is one of the great surprises of the 20th century. If you had been a corporate executive or world leader at the time, would you have been prepared to reorient your strategy and capitalize on such a fundamentally changed world?
GBN founder Peter Schwartz and Monitor Partner Doug Randall evaluate some of the key foresight methods they use to advise executives on future strategy decisions. Their chapter titled “Anticipating Strategic Surprise” appears in the newly released book by Francis Fukuyama, Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics(Brookings, 2007). In this chapter, Schwartz and Randall outline specific scenario-based approaches for analyzing strategic surprise and its implications on decision making. The authors argue that the goal of scenario thinking is not to predict the future—i.e., this event will happen at this time. Instead, the authors posit that a strategic approach to surprise requires the development of a number of plausible futures and identification of critical indicators for each one. Individuals and organizations that pursue this multi-variant approach will be better able to anticipate strategic surprises and thus better positioned than their competitors to adapt to changing business and political environments.
GBN founder Peter Schwartz and Monitor Partner Doug Randall evaluate some of the key foresight methods they use to advise executives on future strategy decisions. Their chapter titled “Anticipating Strategic Surprise” appears in the newly released book by Francis Fukuyama, Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics(Brookings, 2007). In this chapter, Schwartz and Randall outline specific scenario-based approaches for analyzing strategic surprise and its implications on decision making. The authors argue that the goal of scenario thinking is not to predict the future—i.e., this event will happen at this time. Instead, the authors posit that a strategic approach to surprise requires the development of a number of plausible futures and identification of critical indicators for each one. Individuals and organizations that pursue this multi-variant approach will be better able to anticipate strategic surprises and thus better positioned than their competitors to adapt to changing business and political environments.
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