How do Scenario Planners respond to forces like these… ? Pandemic lockdowns, political maneuvers and widely varied human behavior are playing into a potential collapse in global economic activity and a rupture of the traditional arteries for foreign direct investment. Global economic activity has slowed substantially with supply chains upended and trade volumes crashing. Multinationals…
Read More
The world is inexorably changing, generally driven by technological, social and economic forces. But this process is rarely smooth and is typically punctuated by sharp intermittent shocks which catalyse existing slow-moving trends to force irreversible change. Covid-19 has catalysed quite a few of these underlying forces, with more likely to come. As we see it,…
Read More
Executive leadership around the world continues its new-world mandate to maneuver through the ever-changing pandemic. Sadly, the first green sprouts of a post-Covid world were summarily squashed last week with total coronavirus cases passing 10 million and health experts estimating the true number to be at least 10 times that. We do Scenarios to help…
Read More
Rule #1: Don’t choose a Scenario as your favorite, unless you want to end up deeply disappointed. The purpose of crafting alternative Scenarios is to have a broad view of the future to give you a much more robust strategy and detailed playbooks. Rule #2: Confirmation bias is your enemy and as data flows in,…
Read More
In our CV-19 Scenario Planning, we often talk about second order effects – the consequences that occur after the primary effect. For example, the initial practices of social distancing and business-constraining regulations had the consequences of airlines reaching a near standstill and sending their leased planes back to their lessors. Orders for new planes got…
Read More
Large resource development projects can often be held captive to decisions made in the early stages of development when outlook is most uncertain. Embedding optionality into the design of such projects allows for alternate development pathways when major assumptions change. Not only does this allow a business to adapt, but it can also bring about…
Read More
There are a few rather profound second order consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. By second order, we mean not readily visible, or in your face, or what the press and talking heads are going on about. Let’s look at 3 examples of second order consequences: Government Intervention The state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China’s war against…
Read More
The advent of COVID-19 in December 2019 saw governments, think tanks and business leaders rapidly fretting about the potential scale and scope of this novel pandemic. Soon the strategic conversation settled on projected rates of infection and the ability of healthcare infrastructures to cope with potentially surging demand. With these projections varying widely, we created…
Read More
Many of my professional and personal experiences have taught me that risk and opportunity are two sides of the same coin. The current covid-19 crisis will be no exception. I have learnt – often the hard way – that being prepared for major events is first about ensuring the resilience to survive, and having pre-considered…
Read More
With the advent of COVID-19, we have many executives getting overwhelmed daily by crisis issues. For example: Can I charge employees’ leave days against their stay at home orders? Does PPP include commissions? Can I dismiss someone who doesn’t show up to virtual work sessions? And so on. It’s easy to get paralyzed in considering…
Read More