What will my industry look like five or ten years from now? What products will customers buy in the future? What strategies are best for entering a market or addressing a policy problem? In our complex and volatile world, such questions are not easy to answer: Trends are no longer reliable and change direction quickly. And traditional long-range planning tools completely fail to give useful advice, as we have experienced rather painfully during the recent crisis.
As a consequence, we have to think and plan differently today. Instead of using simple correlations of the past to predict the future, we need to account for complexity, volatility and trend disruptions. This is where scenario planning comes in: By developing and describing different pictures of the future, the method enables realistic and flexible strategy planning and management. Superior to old scenario approaches, modern scenario planning uses innovative analytics and communication tools that make scenario planning fast and focused.
The HHL Center for Scenario Planning, jointly run by HHL – Leipzig Graduate School of Management and Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, brings together internationally renowned experts in the fields of strategic management and planning from both academia and practice. The Center's activities focus on four areas:
1. Research: We advance scenario knowledge by developing new methods and tools for strategic planning, researching the cognitive and behavioral effects of using scenarios in strategic decisions and developing new scenarios in a broad range of areas.
2. Teaching: We teach scenario planning to corporate managers and strategic planners in executive education seminars and workshops, PhD candidates in summer seminars and MBA and MSc students at HHL studying strategic management.
3. Consulting: We advise corporate, public and civil organizations on how to set up scenario planning structures and processes, review and adapt existing planning processes and communicate effectively to all stakeholders in times of uncertainty.
4. Networking: We provide a platform and act as a facilitator to bring together scenario experts from all over the world, bridge the gap between theory and practice and share ideas on what the future will look like.
The following pages introduce our innovative approach to scenario planning, present recent scenario publications and provide information about how to contact and collaborate with us. Enjoy exploring our website!
Prof. Dr. Torsten Wulf Prof. Dr. Burkhard Schwenker