20 Oct 09 Looking at futures: The role of shaping events

One of the most powerful tools to help make your organization more resilient in uncertain times is to think about not just one future, but multiple futures, a process called scenario planning which I introduce here.

This helps you develop a new monitoring system.  We’re all used to internal performance measurement and management systems like the balanced scorecard, but what organizations now need is an external monitoring system to help managers predict, before the competition, which way the global business world is going.

To create this approach, you need to identify what I call “shaping events”.  Shaping events are, as the name suggests, events that we think will occur.  And when they do occur we can judge the world’s reaction.  The reaction will help to tell us in which direction the global business world is going.

Well, here is a potential shaping event.  Some commentators have called for the advanced economies (notably the US and UK) to move from a consumer “spend, spend, spend” basis to a more traditional export led structure.  This, very broadly, is at the heart of Ben Bernanke’s (The Chairman of the US Federal Reserve) call [1] to resolve “global imbalances”.  Basically it is a call to the emerging (or we should say “emerged”) economies to let us, the advanced economies who are in a bit of a mess, to export more whilst you export less and spend more on our goods.

It will be interesting to watch the reaction to this call.

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Reference
[1] Guha, K. (2009) Bernanke warns on imbalance risks. Financial Times. October 19

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