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Strengthen your organisation against tomorrow

Your strategic decisions today will ultimately affect the performance of your organisation over the next 12 months and beyond – the more prepared for 'what might happen' you are the stronger your organisation will be.

This decision making process is ongoing, so an effective strategy must understand the current and future events that are shaping and are going to shape your business climate. Making sense of your business landscape, identifying the risks and opportunities you could face, and developing the ability to conduct an ongoing ‘strategic conversation’ with the surrounding environment - are all key to a more robust strategy.

Declutter your environment

The Oxford Scenarios Programme will provide you with a tools and frameworks to declutter, identify and extract relevant information from your surrounding environment, and help you develop an ‘early warning system’ for your organisation.

Under the guidance of Institute for Science, Innovation and Society's Director of Scenarios and Futures Research, Angela Wilkinson, and Vice-Chairman of the World Economic Forum’s global council on strategic foresight, Rafael Ramirez (also co-editor of Business Planning in Turbulent Times); you will review past and future factors relating to the present day, and consider the options you have for strategic success over the next 12 months and beyond.

At the end of this programme, you will have identified and expanded upon the ‘known’ and ‘understood’ factors of your business environment (things you know) together with plausible outcomes of unknown factors, and mapped out several futures to clarify and broaden your range of available strategic options to cope with several scenarios.

Participant benefits include:

• Effective application of Scenarios Thinking techniques
• Early identification of forces likely to impact upon your organisation
• Ability to construct several ‘futures’ to review and actively prepare strategies
• Development of relevant strategies to environmental challenges
• Development of robust strategies for long and short-term implementation
• Development of scenario planning abilities within the organisation

Who will benefit from this programme?

• Executives who have decision making responsibility at middle manager level
• Executives who are involved in, or have responsibility for, strategic planning
• High potential leadership candidates who might become part of - or who are interested in leading - strategic planning teams, functional heads or management holding bottom line accountability for business operations
• Experienced practitioners or consultants (10 years min) in organisational development and risk management who are interested in developing their capabilities in an approach to strategic planning that engages uncertainty 
• Experienced policy and research staff (within government jurisdictions, think tanks and not-for-profit agencies) interested in scenarios to engage with uncertainty