2007 Authentic Leadership Summer Program

Scenario Planning: Preparing for Unknown Futures with Art Kleiner and special guest Napier Collyns

Learning to think clearly about the future means being willing to examine disturbing trends without becoming overwhelmed by them. This module is based on a sixty-year-old method of seeing past personal and professional blinders to recognize the dangers and opportunities around us, and to choose options now that will be robust no matter how the future turns out.

In this module we will use the impact of climate change as a focus while moving through the steps of scenario planning. We will identify the factors we know for sure, describe the uncertain possibilities, and come to a mutual understanding of the means we have to control — and not to control — our destiny. Along the way, we will learn how to engage more people in producing robust and resilient strategies for our organizations, how to inject innovative thinking into the planning process, and how to facilitate strategic conversation that supports effective growth and change.

Napier Collyns will join the first session of this module, to introduce the history and applications of scenario planning and the trends and driving forces for the case study, climate change.

"Scenario planning is a discipline for rediscovering the original entrepreneurial power of creative foresight in contexts of accelerated change, greater complexity, and genuine uncertainty." -Pierre Wack, Royal Dutch/Shell, 1984

Art Kleiner is the editor-in-chief of strategy+business, the quarterly magazine for executive decision makers published by Booz Allen Hamilton. He is also a writer and scenario planner, editorial director for The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, and faculty member at the New York University Interactive Telecommunications Program (the academic home for New York's "Silicon Alley"), where he taught scenario planning for 12 years. He chronicled the field in his book The Age of Heretics: Heroes, Outlaws, and the Forerunners of Corporate Change (Doubleday, 1996) and is also the author of Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege and Success (Doubleday, 2003) and a former editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. Art has led scenario planning processes for a variety of businesses and nonprofit groups, and served as a consulting editor to several books about scenario planning, including Peter Schwartz's The Art of the Long View.

Art Kleiner led scenario planning modules at the 2001 and 2002 Authentic Leadership Summer Programs, and the Institute warmly welcomes the return of this timely offering.

Napier Collyns is cofounder of the Global Business Network, which was established in 1987 as a "learning community based on ruthless curiosity, collaboration, and powerful new tools for thinking about and shaping the future. GBN's network continues to span the globe, blending strategic thinkers from leading companies in established and emerging industries; visionaries from the sciences, arts, business, and academia; and a community of practice engaged in innovating and transferring tools for scenario thinking and strategic action."

Before joining GBN, Napier spent more than 30 years in the international oil industry, mostly with companies of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group in Venezuela, Nigeria, New York, London, and The Hague. He was a senior member of the small team at Shell that developed scenario planning in the early 1970s under the leadership of Pierre Wack. Since 1988 he has been scenario consultant to the Californian Energy Commission and has helped the national oil companies of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Venezuela, as well as major international oil companies and electric utilities, to develop their own scenario planning processes.

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