Challenge

With the transition to a new Board, our client, the organisation’s CEO, wanted to refresh and reinvigorate the Board’s conversation about the current operational challenges and potential future pathways of the organisation.

A specific focus of the project was aligning the Board and Executive Team’s 10-year aspirations for the organisation using a set of futures scenarios to stress test the organisation’s current strategy and the Board’s risk appetite.

 
Approach

We conducted an environmental scan of the organisation’s industry and adjacent industries to identify a set of probable, plausible and possible futures trends. We used these trends to create a set of four future scenarios that were increasingly disruptive to the organisation’s current strategy and risk profile. Each futures scenario was then validated by independent industry experts.

Finally, the Board engaged experientially with each futures scenario to establish a cognitive and emotional understanding of the impact of each scenario on the organisation.

Outcomes

• The Board and Executive Team developed greater alignment of the preferred future directions for the organisation, including a set of guidelines for how the organisation would further refine its immediate, mid-term and longer-term strategic horizons.
• The Executive Team refined the organisation’s risk profile to better align with the Board’s expectations, and improve its operational decision-making efficiency.
• The organisation used the four scenarios to stimulate different thinking regarding current and future products and services.