Guide to Scenario Planning for Functional Leaders | Gartner

Organizations continue to adjust their business strategies and strategic plans amidst the COVID-19 crisis. To support these efforts, many organizations are turning to strategic scenario planning (SSP)–an approach that helps envision, describe, and plan for possible–but alternative– futures an organization may face. While these plans are often developed at the enterprise/corporate level, functional leaders are increasingly asked to plan for a range of potential outcomes for their functions, particularly in light of the pandemic. However, many functional leaders have little experience in SSP and will need to expand there capability in this area. This eBook helps functional leaders understand the fundamentals of SSP, assess the implications of the scenarios for a function, and translate scenarios into function-based action plans. In essence, functional SSP converts high-level enterprise plans into functional implications (e.g. “at the corporate level, responding to a market turn might translate into efforts to attract new customers. But for a function, it might mean renegotiating with suppliers or increasing support for ad hoc workload surges.” This resource will enable functional leaders to build their capability in SSP well beyond the pandemic.