Scenario Planning Failure

Failure and cover up

Posted by Martin Oest on May 09, 2021


Scenario planning is one of the core activities in strategic workforce planning.

The ‘concept’ isn’t that difficult and it is with practice and experience it improves. One thing that can be really hard is to open up for seeing or accepting big changes and challenge the trend. Coaching is one way of speeding up this learning

Well, here is an example of how not to do #scenarioplanning, it’s from the Swedish public health agency and shows how:

  • 1/ they failed spectacularly to predict how bad the Covid-19 could be. Their worst case scenario was 43,566 cases of Covid-19 (over ca 13 months). Now, with nearly 4 months left in that period they have already passed 23 times that number with over 1 million (1,008,534 this morning 9/5/21) cases, and counting.

  • 2/ they then tried to tell the story that their scenarios didn’t “differ all that much” (“inte “diffar särskilt mycket”” is the original text) – the coverage, and link, is in Swedish but the learning is for everyone.
  • From an #SWP perspective, make sure you have real worst case scenario. I can teach you how to do this and not to mention including best case scenarios as you may lose out on £25,000 additional revenue per day from a small 5% improvement – imagine the best case. Seeing revenue not being captured because you don’t have the people to fulfil or sell, is not where you want to be.

    Also, when you try to rewrite what you did you are not accepting the failure. And this will in turn risk not delivering value in learning so limited if any positive changes will result. We look to change our behaviour in order to positively impact the future. Learning from mistakes is (certainly should be) normal practice and how we progress. If this is not normal practice in your organisation it can be a big cultural change of course. My approach includes setting up a tested governance structure that naturally makes it easier to be open about failures and use them for continuously improving your readiness for tomorrows opportunities (and challenges). Have you got other examples to share or need help I’m always keen to hear. Don’t let your #strategicworkforceplanning or lack thereof let you down, the benefits are too big for that.

    The link to the article on Omni.se - in Swedish

    And, to get in touch with me for more conversation, advisory or if you think you can benefit from building Strategic Workforce Planning as an Organisational Capability, then send me a message here

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