Ever had the feeling that you’re always in it and it’s just the level that changes? After the on-board explosion, the crew of Apollo 13 were so far in it they needed chin-high waders! Their situation called to mind Murphy’s law: “Everything that can go wrong will go wrong” and O’Brien’s variation: “Murphy was an optimist”. As one problem was solved, another one arose. To summarise their predicament: an explosion had destroyed a vital oxygen supply, virtually robbing the command and lunar modules of power and the crew of water and limiting the supply of oxygen. In order to conserve power, the three-man crew had to move from the main navigational command module to the two-man lunar module designed only to travel to the moon’s surface and back to the command module. They could only return to the command module just before splashdown.
Moreover, the explosion came after the craft had made its mid-course correction out of an immediate-return-to-Earth trajectory. So it was committed to travelling into an orbit of the moon and couldn’t simply hitch a ride in the form of a direct trajectory back to Earth. The two craft, although attached, were incompatible in certain ways – the lunar module navigational system was not designed for getting back to Earth and the square canisters used to remove carbon dioxide from the command module did not fit into the round openings of the lunar module environmental system.
Without the ability to navigate, they had no hope of getting home. If carbon dioxide wasn’t removed, the crew would asphyxiate. Power was needed to steer the craft: yet power was all but non-existent. The power that remained needed to be conserved and so all but the essential requirements were cut. When the power was cut, the temperature dropped. When the temperature dropped, condensation formed on all the electrical circuitry, posing the danger of arcing and complete failure when it came time to power-up. All in all, the crew were up to their necks in it.
To follow up on our fan analogy: prima facie it would seem that, when the proverbial hits the fan, it will not be distributed evenly and therefore no predictable pattern can be discerned. You can bet, however, that all concerned on the craft and in Houston went through the type of thinking process embedded in our matrix to narrow down the range of possible dispersion patterns. They examined the rules of the game, which mainly comprised the laws of physics; they selected two key uncertainties, namely the availability of power and oxygen; and they formulated various scenarios of the likely outcomes. Seeing that they didn’t know how much power was available and they didn’t know how long they could survive in the face of carbon dioxide build up and lack of water, this all might sound airy-fairy and contrived. Which is why the Brothers Grimm would be pretty handy here! But it gave them a better clue to the options open to them and the best course of action. You will notice below that the first two scenarios on offer were utterly negative. Yet, they had good education value by informing the team as to what they should do to minimise the chance of either of these scenarios materialising.
The first scenario was “Close but No Cigar”. Assuming they didn’t have enough power to get back to Earth, they could still effectively control the carbon dioxide and conserve water and food. They wouldn’t die immediately. They would hover agonisingly close to Earth until gradually and slowly they would starve to death or die of thirst. The second scenario was “Tin Tomb”. Assuming they had enough power to get back to Earth, their survival mechanisms could fail them before they got there. They would be DOA (dead on arrival) with the command module being converted into a very expensive body bag. The third and positive scenario was “Sweet as Apple Pie”. Assuming they had enough power to get back to Earth and their survival mechanisms remained intact, they would arrive to a hero’s welcome and have apple pie with the president on the White House lawn.
We know what you’re thinking: even if the astronauts were allergic to apples, they would focus on the last scenario to help them formulate their options. But that misses the whole point of scenario planning. It is only by studying all three scenarios simultaneously and looking at what you want to achieve as well as what you want to avoid that you get a feel for all the options. In the extreme case of life and death, we have a natural tendency anyway to do all this in the blink of an eye. It is when our lives are not at stake, and there is no emergency, that the error of concentrating on only the desired future creeps in. Take the hockey-stick projection so beloved in many companies. Like the Nike swoosh, it accepts a trough in the short term, but a market soaring to infinity thereafter. To adapt Keynes’s famous quote, in the long term we are all optimistic! But Pollyanna would not have survived at the controls of Apollo 13.
Negotiating the rapids with the wisdom of Wack
The point we want to make from the previous narrative is that the uncertainties of a situation can be built on to give you a chance of success. There is a logic to identifying the two key uncertainties that would have the greatest impact on your business, life or situation at hand; but these uncertainties need to be translated into scenarios to give you a vision of your options. In other words, the bridging mechanism to get you from the key uncertainties to the options available is the set of scenarios or stories – the more vivid, the more contrasting but underpinned by logic, the better. This will encourage you to think the unthinkable and identify opportunities you didn’t even think were there.
Problem: just when you need the Brothers Grimm for your next scenario planning session, you realise that they lived in the early nineteenth century. So where do you find the talent for story-telling? An answer: multiple perspectives from inside your own backyard. The diversity of knowledge and insight of different people within a company can provide the richness of material to develop scenarios. And it needn’t just be your intellectual top guns. Encouraging ordinary people to engage in more creative and divergent thinking has the added advantage for a company of promoting expression and helping people to converse. It is this very harnessing of diversity and encouraging of creativity within groups and individual frames of mind that equip people to dream up scenarios of an unusual nature and then expand on the range of options necessary for decision-making. As Peter Schwartz said: “Scenario-making is intensely participatory, or it fails.”
Imagine you and your staff are on a corporate outward bound course. You arrive at the bank of a wide river, and there’s a rowing boat in front of you with which to cross the river. After a quick bout of team-building and strategic planning, you as the leader set the objective: to get to that specific tree on the other side. After examining your options, you work out the specific strengths of each member of your team to deal with the task at hand. Roles are delegated and, with a blood-curdling war cry, you and your team launch yourselves into the river and paddle like mad to get to that tree. Moments later you are swept downstream by the river’s powerful current that you didn’t know about and factor into the equation. According to Paul Valéry, a twentieth-century French poet and philosopher, “a fact poorly observed is more treacherous than faulty reasoning”. Ian Mitroff in Smart Thinking For Crazy Times put it another way: many serious errors of management can be traced to solving the wrong problems precisely. If the team had undertaken some scenario planning in advance of plunging in, the unknown magnitude of the river’s current would have been one of the key drivers in designing the scenarios. The other driver would have been the unknown combined physical stamina and co-ordination of the team under such circumstances. Using these two uncertainties as drivers, the unexpected outcome might have been captured in a scenario with a catchy name like “Deliverance”. As Pierre Wack said: “It is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong”. Then you can make contingency plans – like walking back up the river to that tree, totally drenched to the bone!
It’s all in the name
As we said earlier, graphic names for scenarios do help enormously in spreading the word. They become part of the in-house vernacular whenever the future is being discussed in a company. “Imperial Twilight” was one such name. It was applied to a scenario developed in the 1980s to show that the arms race between America and the Soviet Union was unsustainable because the Soviet Union was running out of money. The upshot would be the end of the Soviet Union, which is exactly what transpired. An environmental scenario sketched during the same decade was entitled “Rich Heritage”. It drew attention to the fact that the present generation inhabiting the planet had to pass on to the next generation the same level of biodiversity as it had inherited. What one advertising executive said about brand names