Thinking the Unthinkable

The New Leadership Imperative

by Holly G. Green

People ask me all the time what I consider to be the biggest challenge facing today's business leaders.

I don't even hesitate on this one. It's the automatic assumption by most business leaders that we still live in a fairly predictable world.

Think about it. Six months ago, who would have thought that Toyota would be in the position it is today?

Here we have one of the largest, most successful, most respected companies in the world. And now it faces a crisis that is not just destroying its hard-earned reputation, but could well put it out of business.

That's unthinkable! And yet it's happening right before our eyes.

Sales of Toyotas are plummeting. The U.S. government is launching a full-scale investigation into the company's business practices. And a tidal wave of lawsuits around the faulty floor mat/throttle issue is about to be unleashed.

If Toyota is found to be at fault, and if it turns out they had knowledge of the defective design and did nothing about it, punitive damages could run into billions of dollars. Not even Toyota could withstand that kind of a financial hit and still survive.

I'm not saying the unthinkable will happen. But the possibility that Toyota could go out of business in the near term is very real. And that's the kind of world we now live in.

Leading a business in this kind of environment requires a new way of thinking. Considering that most business leaders still view the world as fairly predictable, the question becomes:


How do we train ourselves to think differently?


The answer is simple - pause, think, focus, run.

• Pause. Make it a habit to back away from the day-to-day and evaluate what is happening outside your industry as well as inside.


• Think. Constantly challenge your beliefs and assumptions about what you know to be true about your customers, your markets, your industry and the way you do things inside your organization. Take nothing for granted.


• Focus. Identify opportunities to add value to your customers in ways that nobody else is doing. Identify significant initiatives that support leveraging those opportunities, and get and keep everyone in your organization clear on achieving them.


• Run. Implement quickly, with focus and flexibility, knowing in advance that your new initiatives will not unfold exactly as planned.
  Then repeat this process.

During the think phase, develop the habit of engaging in scenario planning. Ask questions like:


"What would happen if our biggest competitor suddenly went out of business? What is taking place in other industries or other parts of the world that we could use to transform our industry?"


Many companies do this once a year during the strategic planning process. In today's world, that will no longer suffice. When a company as large and seemingly invincible as Toyota can have the rug pulled out from under them so quickly, it's clear the old rules no longer apply.

Pondering the imponderable should become an everyday occurrence in organizations. To be a successful leader today, thinking the unthinkable must become a way of life.


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Holly is the CEO of THE HUMAN FACTOR, Inc. (www.TheHumanFactor.biz) and is a highly sought after and acclaimed speaker, business consultant, and author. Her unique approach to creating strategic agility, helping others go slow to go fast, will change your thinking.

Scenario Planning Back in Fashion

Developing Robust Strategy with 'Wild Card' Scenarios

by Idris Mootee

Every executive wants to know what the future will be like or what will likely to happen to their industry and what the most disruptive forces are that will impact their bottom line or even survival. That's why we use 'Wild Card' to paint scenarios. Wild card scenarios are in theory, things that are not likely to happen, but most likely to create the highest impact and disruption should they occur. The idea of wild card scenarios is not to predict or calculate which scenario will occur, but to identify, where possible, important surprises that could occur.


I wonder how many banks had the current financial crisis as part of their wild card scenario. Did someone paint this scenario in advance of the actual financial crisis? Or did anyone ever paint a scenario of an African American US President the last 20 years? Or the influence of social networks? Any good forecasters and long-range planners recognize that there are innumerable plausible futures to consider in any industry context. No finite set of future scenarios can ever hope to completely cover all possible surprises. You can develop a set of wild cards, but might be missing the 'wild wild cards'. So how do we do this? Here's a 5-minute crash course.



The art of generating scenarios must include assumptions about what will (and won't) occur - what trends are likely to continue, what changes are likely to occur, what events are not likely to take place, etc. From a small, reasoned set of assumptions, a set of scenarios can be developed to address the remaining uncertainties and can be used for their intended purposes. Whether you apply it in the media industry or auto industry, it is by nature a strategic creative exercise. In the long range planning arena, assumption-based scenario exercise is basically built on the notion that a set of wild card scenarios should be developed for purposes of making more robust the plans that have been developed. It is a mechanism to test your strategic plan. Those plans have made assumptions about the future, not all of which are certain to come depending on many external factors.



The number one purpose of the wild card scenarios is to help strategic planners develop signposts for indicating that an assumption is being violated, shaping actions to keep the assumption from failing (to the extent possible), and hedging actions to prepare the organization in the event an assumption fails. Remember that wild card scenarios are highly unlikely to happen. But, what makes a wild card scenario useful is when the future it describes would produce disproportionately dire consequences. The classical case of an unlikely scenario with dire consequences is H1N1 pandemic virus mutates into a 'Superbug' and killing millions of people. The combination of its extreme unlikelihood and horrific consequences make its risk worth worrying about and planning for. It is not a dry academic exercise but an effective way to plan for the future. Most people don't realize there is an opportunity side of the equation, and that these exercises usually help unfold a lot of new opportunities too. So it is not only for planning for the big disasters.

According to Meyer and Miller:

• The world moves into the future as a result of decisions (or the lack of decisions), not as result of plans


• All decisions involve the evaluation of alternative images of the future, and the selection of the most highly valued offeasible alternatives


• Evaluation and decisions are influenced by the degree of uncertainty associated with expected consequences


• The products of planning should be designed to increase the chance of making better decisions the result of planning is some form of communication with decision makers

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Idris Mootee is the CEO of idea couture, a strategic innovation and experience design firm. He is the author of four books, tens of published articles, and a frequent speaker at business conferences and executive retreats.