As we enter the final quarter of the year, it’s time to start thinking about your strategy for next year. How do you decide what to change and what to keep? How do you develop a future-proof strategy?

It can start with developing scenarios. Start right now. Take a moment to think about what could happen to your organisation in the next 12 or 24 months. Will inflation have an impact? What about future staff hires – will they be in the office or online? How difficult will they be to attract? Where will you get your key supplies? How will your supply chain change? These are scenarios you can work on and come up with responses to.

This wider thinking allows you to consider a higher level strategy. More like ‘How do we build a high performing team and deal with the higher cost of attracting talent’ rather than dealing with specific situations (like: ‘what do we do about Bill?’)

You may want to consider developing a range of scenarios with your team to test out potential strategies to respond to or prepare for situations you may encounter. EG if COVID had major issues on your supply chain (and it has for most people) what could be your response?

How do you get prepared for these business scenario sessions:

1. Get the right team together – find the people most open to change and to others’ ideas.

2. Define your scope – what’s in and what’s out.

3. Get the data together – how often do you start a planning session with no real data to work with? You dont need every bit of data as continuous data gathering can be a trap but you need some to confirm your suspicions or intentions.

4. Identify key change drivers which could influence your future scenarios which are uncertain, impactful, and relevant to your scope. You can use customer feedback, market research or industry reports to help you identify them. That supply chain example, what happened last year and what could happen next year?

5. Create your scenarios based on your key change drivers and consider the perspective you’ll take. Are you looking at things through a customer service or a technology lens for example?

6. Test them. Test out their plausibility and their likelihood to make an impact. Pull them apart and test them with relevant audiences.

Once you’ve made some progress you can communicate your scenarios to your team and consider what, if anything, you want to put in to action. Then take action. Don’t leave everything sitting on the procrastination shelf after all that hard work. Take action learn from that and keep developing new scenarios.

Enjoy your future proofing.