About Scenario Planning
McREL, as a strategic partner of KnowledgeWorks Foundation, offers Scenario Planning
to help education leaders achieve these things:
- Make use of the Map of Future Forces to prepare for the future in the context
of their own educational organization and community.
- Spark valuable conversations about the future challenges facing them.
- Identify the organization’s preferred direction(s) for the future.
- Inform sets of responsive strategies and contingency plans to be prepared for
any future.
- Build support for change across the school, district, state agency, organization,
and community.
The future is not predictable, yet we make decisions every day based upon our perceptions
of what will happen tomorrow, next month, or years from now. Forward Thinking: A
Structured Response to Uncertainty is McREL’s series of workshops and consulting
services that uses the innovative process of “scenario planning,” adapted from the
Global Business Network’s model, to help education
leaders anticipate the future and take action today to survive and thrive decades
from now.
Scenario planning is the process of creating stories about possible futures in
order to anticipate and prepare for changes beyond one’s control. Scenarios do not
predict the future, but they do provide a way to identify and manage uncertainties.
Scenario planning challenges the current mode of thinking, bringing new insights
that drive transformation in organizations and institutions. The process involves
eight steps:
- Select the focal issue and timeframe
- Explore the external world
- Clarify uncertainties
- Develop the scenario framework
- Write the scenarios
- Identify implications and strategic options
- Take action
- Monitor Trends
Get detailed instructions for each of the steps by downloading
Instructions for Scenario Planning. (0.3MB PDF)
Once all steps have been completed, the consequences of certain actions within
different possible future contexts become clearer, and leaders.
About McREL
Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) is a Denver-based nonprofit
organization that draws upon decades of education research to develop practical,
user-friendly products that help educators across the nation create classrooms that
provide all students with opportunities for success. McREL has analyzed key education
trends and worked with school districts and other education organizations to help
them understand how these trends are shaping education, now and in the future. Through
workshops and other consulting services, McREL helps school leaders anticipate what
lies over the horizon and plan actions they can take now to ensure that their organizations
and students not only survive, but thrive, in the future.