Using dialogue to deal with major change outside participants’ comfort zone, explore alternative futures, broaden perception, and help to manage risk and uncertainty.
When “business-as-usual” decision-making is not enough, Strategic Dialogue provides a powerful way for organizations to understand and deal more effectively with major changes outside their usual comfort zone.
In a Strategic Dialogue, participants work to:
- Fully understand the change and its implications
- Question familiar and comfortable responses
- Expand the range of available options
- Bring a wide diversity of points of view to bear
- Create a strong sense of ownership for future decisions
- Do all of this quickly
Scenario Development
Scenario Development uses Strategic Dialogue to create plausible alternative futures — based on different assumptions — which we can use to broaden our perception, try out different perspectives, and develop a shared context and language for decision-making.
The process of creating scenarios uses strategic dialogue to explore issues through different lenses, rather than just extended and deeper analysis of a single viewpoint. Because it involves using multiple perspectives to explore problems, scenario development can help us to see the significance of issues we might otherwise dismiss as unimportant, or just not see at all.
Scenario construction combined with strategic dialogue is a proven methodology for connecting the dots, challenging assumptions about what the future holds, broadening frameworks, exploring uncertainties and managing risks.