Scenario planning for economic recovery: short-term decision making in a recession

摘要

Scenario planning has enjoyed a recent upsurge in interest due to last year's near-collapse of the global financial system and the ensuing economic trauma of what has been called "The Great Recession." CEOs are suddenly painfully awarernthat spreadsheet models that offer a detailed single vision of the future are almost certain to be wrong in many critical respects, so corporate leaders are casting about for alternative methods of managing future uncertainty that actually help a business prepare for a number of alternative possibilities.rnSo we have seen, in the past few months, articles on "Managing in the fog" in The Economist, "The secret of successful scenario planning" in forbes.com; and "Don't oversimplify your scenarios" from Business Week. And there has been a similar upwelling of interest in other ideas about dealing with uncertainty such as "fat tails" and "Black Swans." These two concepts refer to events that are falsely deemed extremely unlikely, but whose impact is potentially enormous. This renewed interest in alternative futures seems apt after financial market events occurred that one leading banking house reportedly deemed to be 25 standard deviations away from the norm.