The established approaches and practices of traditional strategic planning have become obsolete. They have outlived their usefulness. Most effective in times of relative predictability, orthodox planning principles assumed that the world was relatively stable and orderly. In that world, change occurred gradually and was controllable.

This is no longer the case. We cannot predict the future. Our world is too complex, too ambiguous, too fast paced. The stakeholders are too diverse and their interests too different. We cannot understand fully their motives and powers.

And yet, to be successful, executives and managers must find ways to prepare for an uncertain future. How do you prepare for that which you do not know? How do you prepare for the future when every goal is a shifting target that can become obsolete from one day to the next?

In today's globally interconnected business environment, extraordinary companies develop ranges of multiple strategic options firmly grounded in the core competencies of the corporation.

Scenario-based planning can help develop these multiple strategic options and surface the requisite corporate core competencies. Scenario-based planning is the most versatile and powerful strategic thinking and action planning methodologies.

This program provides participants with the essential tools of scenario-based planning. It leads the participants from a careful consideration of the global environment of business to their industry key success factors, their organisation's requisite competencies and finally to the leadership mode required by the changing circumstances and strategic imperatives of globally engaged corporations. It enables participants to focus not only on general issues but on issues that are very specific to their industry, their organisation and finally their own roles within that organisation. The process emphasizes

• Identify global trends and uncertainties to better understand the competitive environment,
  
• Constructing scenarios to get telling glimpses of alternative futures,
  
• Identifying robust qualifying factors (key success factors) in their industry,
  
• Surfacing the organisation's core competencies (differentiators) to ensure a sustainable competitive advantage, and
  
• Developing certain of these core competencies to move the organisation or strategic business unit to the requisite skill base of tomorrow.