The art of scenarios and strategic planning: Tools and pitfalls

The term strategy has been misused and even abused. Worse, the word scenari o is often confused with strategy to the point that clarification is needed if we are to understand one another. As a prolongation of the work done by the Rand Corporation in the 1960s, strategic planning, management and pros pective approaches have been developed to help organizations master change. Over the past 25 years, we have contributed by creating or further develop ing various methodologies and procedures such as the Mactor and MICMAC meth ods for use in scenario building. These tools are doubly powerful in that t hey stimulate the imagination, reduce collective biases, and promote approp riation. One of the main functions of the strategic futures exercise is to eliminate two errors that we usually describe as the "hammer's risk" and th e "nail's dream." In other words, we forget what a hammer's function is whe n staring at a nail (the nail's dream) or we know how to use a hammer and i magine that every problem is like a nail (the hammer's risk). In our case, we strive to give simple tools that may be appropriated. However, these sim ple tools are inspired by intellectual rigor that enables one to ask the ri ght questions. Of course, these tools do not come with a guarantee. The nat ural talent, common sense, and intuition of the futurist also count! (C) 20 00 Elsevier Science Inc.