Forecasting and Scenario Planning

Understanding or predicting the future is not easy, and one can never do this with perfection.  However, in this fast-changing world in which we live, every organization, consultant, and government agency must have a solid method to make reasonable forecasts of what the future will be like.  Shell Oil pioneered the Scenario Planning process that encourages people to brainstorm in organized ways to think up realistic future trends and events called scenarios.  When an organization is looking to the future, by using scenario planning, it can make small bets and see how they work before it makes a very large investment that will take years or even decades to pay off.

This course teaches you some of the key principles and mistakes that are often made in forecasting and scenario planning. All plans must depend on a solid view of what the future will look like, and merely looking at past trends will not provide a view of the future that is either accurate or even likely.  Every budget created for every organization is a forecast based on likely scenarios and we explore how forecasting can improve one’s ability to create accurate, future-looking budgets.