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Scenario Planning using the Matrix Method
 Continuing from last month’s article on the benefits of scenario planning, we now introduce one way of scenario planning, the matrix method. The matrix method involves exploring your Environment Scan to identify key variables in the job group's future and placing alternate outcomes of each at opposite ends of a matrix’s axes. Then break up your management team to explore and describe the future in each of the resulting quadrants, incorporating relevant environment scanning factors to expand on the possible consequences of actions and decisions.
By discussing and developing each scenario, and presenting it as a story back to the whole team, management can explore possible futures and decide on the preferred results, which interestingly in many instances is often a combination of factors from more than one quadrant. That is to say that often it is not the ‘story’ of any one quadrant but a combination of multiple quadrants that is used to form a targeted future view. The discussion the scenario matrix approach generates often prompts management to discover their own biases and assumptions, and often come up with an approach to the workforce which is different to the paradigm of today.
These are outcomes that forecsts, no matter how varied, can not hope to achieve. This is strategic workforce planning, and this is one of the many techniques you can learn in our Strategic Workforce Planning workshops.
If you’d like to know more, read the whitepapers in our workforce planning knowledge center, or contact us. | 
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable”, a sequel to his 2001 book “Fooled by Randomness”, is an engaging read about predicting the future.