| Popis: |
Scenario Planning as a tool for planning for the future has widespread use in the industry today and enjoys an envious status as the primary tool of futures thinking. However, the development in this field has been mired with confusion on its application and purpose. Since popularized by Shell in its use to anticipate the oil crisis in the 70s, scenario thinking has grown in use to aid public policy making, corporate strategic planning and even in the natural sciences. This paper attempts to study the scenario planning process design from a corporate perspective by studying its use in energy companies in Sweden. Energy companies present an ideal industry for this study as it is embroiled with obvious uncertainties in future power and carbon prices but also with subjective uncertainties tied to the political interest in the industry and the industry being in the centre of the climate change debate. Furthermore, the extremely long term nature of investment projects in this industry further exacerbates the need for deep insights into the future. This paper studies the nature of the scenario planning process based on two past papers; that have identified the key characteristics of scenarios. Firm specific internal factors are used to explain the differences in the process designs found in empirical data. Finally a framework to design a scenario planning process is proposed. This framework takes into account these internal factors to enable companies to leverage their internal resources and make full use of scenario planning as a tool. |
