p.13 Peter Schwartz (1991) points out that individuals and even organizations
have little control over environmental forces that cause change. Most of us get our leverage for dealing with them from recognizing
them and their effects.
p.24 Scenario-driven planning is a systematic approach to an increasingly
important responsibility of general management: positioning today's business firm in a rapidly changing and complex global
environment.
p.24 Because of their proprietary nature and for reasons of confidentiality,
only a few corporate planning scenarios get published.
p.41 Scenario-driven planning has an overriding goal and an underlying mind-set
to help companies confront looming challenges and render themselves efficiently adaptive... In times of rapid and
unexpected change... scenario-driven planning has leverage and can make the difference between good and poor decisions...
Scenario-driven planning offers a fresh perspective and provides the ability to reperceive reality.
p.69 Shifts in strategy occur when pressure for change overcomes resistance
to change
p.103 Plan or be planned for. -Russell L. Ackoff
p.134 Weick... argues that the environment we see ourselves is mainly enacted, conjured up by our perceptions
and imagination. In stable times, a reasonably good match can be had between this mental model and the unfolding reality...
In times of rapid and unexpected change, however, one's mental model by itself is not as helpful. It is in
such situations that scenario-driven planning has leverage, making the difference between good and bad decisions.
p.146 People who described themselves as practical... proud to be uncontaminated by any kind of theory,
always turned out to be the intellectual prisoners of the theoreticians of yesterday. -John Maynard Keynes
p.260 Kahn & Wiener (1967) define scenarios as the hypothetical
sequences of events built to focus attention on causal processes and decision points.
p.278 Being the product of our daily contact with reality, mental
models determine how we deal with what we don't know and how we employ what we do know.
p.278 Modeling a strategic situation entails discovering and studying
the intended rationality that is usually embedded in a firm's decision functions. Often, it requires capturing the unknown
and unknowable aspects of a social system that may be neither easy to observe nor easy to measure... Modeling strategic
situations is... the admission of a firm's strategic limitations and of environmental complexity and turbulence. Modeling
and computed scenarios can help today's modern organizations understand what they don't know.
p.280 The following section presents a modeling process that can be used
in a wide range of modeling efforts. [JLJ - Ok, let's take a look...]
p.280-281 in the early stages of modeling, it is preferable to start
with a description of a system's dynamic behavior pattern and then proceed with the identification of underlying
causes.
p.281 The modeling process itself is recursive in nature... An effective
formal model can only be produced through effective conceptualization, which focuses the modeling effort by establishing both
the time horizon and the perspective from which a strategic situation will be framed. Typically, strategic situation
models require adopting a long-term horizon, over which the likely effects of changes in policy and in the environment are
assessed by computing strategic change scenarios.
p.284 [Peter Schwartz (1991)] We sit around talking for a day, developing
ideas in response to these questions:
- What are the driving forces?
- What do you feel is uncertain?
- What is inevitable?
- How about this or that scenario?
p.288 To function as useful learning tools, scenarios must relate to the success
of focal decisions.
p.289 The goal in modeling a firm's strategic situation is to link system structure and behavior. Modeling
and computer scenarios can help today's modern organizations understand what they don't know, if they model what they don't
know as opposed to what they do know. The modeling process provides a different way of seeing business problems, a
different mind-set for thinking about strategic situations and for learning faster from their experiential ramifications.
p.289 Ultimately, the value of scenario-driven planning stems from its ability to determine what changes
in a firm's strategy can make it adaptable and productive if the desired future does not show signs of materializing.
p.292 Actually, ambiguity may be desirable during the initial phases of problem framing through causal
mapping, which the participants are still searching for those elements they would like to include in their framing
of the situation under consideration.
p.301 The first consequence of systems thinking is that a system cannot be properly understood simply
by dissecting it, that is, by analysis alone. To understand a system fully, one must identify the whole in which
the system is a part, explain the behavior of the whole, and then explain the behavior of the system in this light. A
systems inquiry must proceed synthetically as well as analytically.
The second consequence of systems thinking is the interconnectedness of the parts
of a system. Interconnectedness renders the simple binary cause and effect relationship insufficient for
explaining the behavior of either the system or its parts.
p.308 In practical applications, the analysis of relationships among variables frequently rests on simplified
or heuristic procedures.
p.335 The basic approach and fundamental techniques of system dynamics simulation modeling,
from rough-cut influence diagramming (ID) to comprehensive situation mapping (CSM) to the sensitivity analysis afforded by
full-fledged computer models can indeed be applied fruitfully to problematic decision situations...
It is the process of modeling that stimulates intuition, creativity, and institutional learning. In the process of
modeling a strategic situation, mental models and computed scenarios become an integrated part of debate and dialogue.
