Woody Wade jumped off the corporate ladder to join the executive board of WEF before settling to preach the ‘gospel’ of scenario planning in 35 countries

Becoming redundant and being trashed in the bin like Woody’s nightmare needn’t be just a toy story but a reality in today’s fast-shifting market.

To stay relevant and in business in the future, the pixel pull-string protagonist’s namesake Woody Wade offers a strategic planning method called scenario planning that some organisations, including Sultan Qaboos University, are using to make flexible long-term plans.

Switzerland-based Wade was in Muscat recently to conduct a three-day scenario planning workshop for SQU. He guided over 100 participants through the process of visualising the university’s strategic future landscape, uncovering opportunities for growth and challenges in maintaining global competitiveness.    

The technique involves combining strategic thinking and creativity to visualise and understand how the conditions in which an organisation operates can change in the future, the objective of the exercise being better preparedness for the new environment that could take shape.

“I take them through the process of identifying the factors or the drivers that could have some kind of influence on the organisation in the future, which could be anything really, using a model called PEST (Political, Economic, Social and Technological) analysis,” Wade explained.

“So, I kind of break the workshop group into four smaller working teams and task one of them with listing all of the things that have a political origin – and likewise for the other three – that could have an impact on them in the future,” he said in a manner that appeared to oversimplify the process.

The make-or-break factors or critical uncertainties within each of the four broader PEST influences make up the axes of a matrix, the quadrants of which are the scenarios based on which businesses plan their future. 

Future explorer, not fortune teller 

Asked if he’s a fortune teller – just without a crystal ball – for corporates triggers an allergic reaction for Wade. “Oh! Not at all. I often get introduced by my host as ‘this guy who’s going to help us predict the future’. And I have to say, ‘No, we’re not predicting. We’re exploring possibilities; nobody can predict the future’,” he asserts. 

In fact, after the exercise is over, he says participants feel even less comfortable with the idea of predicting the future as he helps explore the possibility that there could be different futures – many alternatives and, maybe, all very contrasting – each of which could materialise. There isn’t just one future; alternative futures could arise and businesses need to think about options all the time.

“I can’t predict… nobody can. But scenario planning increases your flexibility to deal with uncertainty. You gain time because you’ve thought about the future; you won’t be caught by surprise. Five years in advance, you’ve put together a plan for succeeding in that future scenario. As soon as you feel confident that you’re going in the direction of Scenario No 1  – or 2, 3 or 4  – you can pull out the corresponding plan from the drawer and you’re ready to go.”

Considering the fact that the exercise relies on perceiving a future and perception is largely cultural conditioning, how objective is scenario planning? Wade described it as “Ninety-nine per cent subjective because what you’re doing is asking the opinion of people in the room. There are no facts about the future, right? But it’s very methodical in what you would choose as the axes – or the critical factors of influence – of the matrix.”

Wade emphasised the fact that it’s not about projecting the way things are now into the future. “If you just extrapolate the critical factors affecting your business out five more years and say, let’s make plans based on that, that’s kind of dangerous. Making big decisions today, like for example costly investments, based on nothing more than a projection, is a risk.”

He compared his role in scenario planning workshops for organisations to that of a music conductor directing musicians to play their part. “My job is to make them interpret what the scenario would look like. Their input is worth everything. A lot depends on the participants.”

Looking around the next bend in the road

After graduating from Harvard Business School in the 1980s, “as is often the case with young MBAs convinced that the world is their oyster,” Wade climbed the corporate ladder working in diverse sectors from pharmaceuticals to banking to publishing before being offered a position at the World Economic Forum. A year later, he became a member of its Executive Board.

During this stint, spending time in the company of C-suite and board-level executives, Wade became aware of how top decision makers of organisations eagerly sought insights about how the future might develop. Responsible for getting their businesses ready to exploit long-term trends and changes, which may only be dimly perceptible, they spend every waking moment at WEF picking each other’s brains for observations and perspectives that could help them see ‘around the next bend in the road’.

At the time, he was unaware of the existence of methodologies or techniques for gaining useful foresight into the future. But a few years later, when he was working as director of marketing at Ecole hoteliere de Lausanne, ranked world’s No 1 school of hospitality management, Wade stumbled upon ‘a fascinating but under-appreciated approach to this challenge – but one that clearly could open your eyes to realistic possibilities that might emerge in your company’s future landscape’.

Strategising in the middle of an air raid 

About 14-15 years and a book on scenario planning commissioned by Wiley – the US’ biggest business publisher – later, Wade has preached this ‘gospel’ in 35 countries, working with organisations to have this ‘enlightening foresight experience and gain a solid idea about how their future could plausibly turn out’. 

Not just universities and businesses, he has helped countries like Trinidad & Tobago, global humanitarian organisations like the International Committee of the Red Cross and think tanks strategise for the future.

In the middle of a workshop for an association of Ukrainian wheat producers he conducted virtually last year, there had been an air raid alarm. All the participants’ phones had gone off announcing an incursion of six Russian bombers. Wade had expected they would head straight to shelters. “But they said, ‘No, we’ve got half an hour. It’ll be fine!’ So, I asked, ‘What do you mean, you have half an hour’? They thought the bombers wouldn’t probably come as far, they’d get shot down or turn around. ‘So, let’s continue,’ they said.” 

And Wade did continue. But six or seven minutes later, there was another announcement and this time the participants decided to seek safety in shelters.  That air raid could have ended very differently, he pointed out, adding, “The only predictability is the unpredictability of the future.”