Crafting Scenarios
These combinations and permutations of fact and related social changes are called "scenarios." The scenarios usually include plausible, but unexpectedly important situations and problems that exist in some small form in the present day. Any particular scenario is unlikely. However, future studies analysts select scenario features so they are both possible and uncomfortable. Scenario planning helps policy-makers to anticipate hidden weaknesses and inflexibilities in organizations and methods.
When disclosed years in advance, these weaknesses can be avoided or their impacts reduced more effectively than if similar real-life problems were considered under duress of an emergency. For example, a company may discover that it needs to change contractual terms to protect against a new class of risks, or collect cash reserves to purchase anticipated technologies or equipment. Flexible business continuity plans with "PREsponse protocols" help cope with similar operational problems and deliver measurable future value-added.
Read more about this topic: Scenario Planning
Famous quotes containing the words crafting and/or scenarios:
“Some days your hat’s off to the full-time mothers for being able to endure the relentless routine and incessant policing seven days a week instead of two. But on other days, merely the image of this woman crafting a brontosaurus out of sugar paste and sheet cake for her two-year-old’s birthday drives a stake through your heart.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)