Scenario Planning: Strategic Foresight and Uncertainty [EN]

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

You cannot predict next year. You can be ready for four versions of it. Those are different skills, and only one of them is taught.

Why one plan is not a plan

Most annual planning produces a single future with numbers attached to it. Everyone knows it will not happen exactly, nobody builds an alternative, and when the year turns out differently the response is improvisation dressed up as agility. The uncomfortable part is that the alternatives were usually visible in advance. Somebody had the data, somebody had noticed the signal, and there was no method for turning either into a version of the plan. I have run that annual cycle and called the improvisation afterwards a strategy.

What this course actually covers

Six blocks, following the steps of building scenarios. First, reading signals: telling a durable shift from a cyclical swing and from hype, and the filter that decides whether something enters a plan at all. Second, the quantitative base — ten lessons of analytics through segmentation, correlation, multiple regression, trend lines, forecasting and experiments with a control group. Third, modelling capacity under different futures: demand forecasting, gap analysis, norming, optimisation and the arithmetic of what each option really saves. Fourth, judging your own reasoning — the biases that write a scenario before you look at any data, and decision models for genuinely unclear situations. Fifth, the scenario nobody plans for and everybody eventually meets: operating with the budget gone, including hiring, hard choices, communication and a contingency plan. Sixth, converting all of it into a strategic plan with owners, metrics and dates.

A note on the material

Twenty-eight of the forty lessons use workforce data and workforce scenarios. That is deliberate rather than incidental. Headcount is the largest cost line in most organisations and the slowest one to change, which makes it the sharpest thing to model scenarios against. The methods do not depend on it: regression, experiment design, gap analysis and the decision models behave identically whatever the rows contain.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike Pritula. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, planning capacity through a period when the plan changed every quarter, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 40 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working material: the trend filter, regression and experiment design, gap analysis, capacity models, OODA and Cynefin, the contingency plan, the two-day session agenda

• Practical work on your own data rather than on a case study

Where to start

Take this year's plan and write down the single assumption that, if wrong, breaks the most of it. Then ask what you would do if it were wrong. That question is the whole discipline in one line. Enrol now and start today.