The greater the uncertainty, the greater the value of scenario planning

I have been applying scenario planning with clients for the last decade across a variety of industries and environments, including the future of financial services, technology, capital markets, risk management, construction, Internet, Asia, and far more. As I wrote back in 1998 in an article on scenario planning in portfolio and risk management, “The greater the degree of uncertainty and unpredictability, the greater the value of using multiple scenarios rather than forecasts.”
Knowledge@Wharton has just published an interesting discussion on Will a New Theory Help Firms to Manage in a ‘Flat’ World? (registration required), which looks at how executives can make sense of the rapidly changing environment. Paul Kleindorfer, a Wharton professor of operations and information management, made this very interesting comment:

In the past six months, there has been an upsurge in the number of companies coming through INSEAD [the European institute for management education] looking for assistance in scenario planning and scanning, or determining the signposts that suggest which scenario or scenarios should be the focus. Some companies — like Nestle, Unilever and Procter & Gamble — have been doing some scenario planning, but it’s been directed toward competition and technology. So these and other companies were completely blindsided by the recent increase in mineral oils — which was spurred by a law in Germany requiring power plants there to burn 10% bio-fuel by 2010 –and its impact on the vegetable oils and other ingredients they purchase for their products.
These sorts of commodity risks have escaped the scrutiny of many companies. Now they see a single government make a decision and it throws the profitability of an important ingredient out the window. So scenario planning and scanning, together with strategic modeling, intelligence and other issues, are really beginning to take on a much larger significance than before. It used to be about markets, technology and competitors, but now there’s a much richer texture.

Over the last decade I have certainly seen how the cycle of interest in scenario planning from major organizations has tracked the degree of perceived uncertainty in the business environment. The scope of the imponderable now, ranging from geopolitics to consumer behavior, overlaid on the necessity for long-term strategic thinking, means that scenario-based approaches are again on the rise. As suggested by Kleindorfer’s comments, I have seen many traditional consulting firms do scenario planning in such a reductionist manner that the scenarios cover only part of the scope of uncertainty, which entirely defeats the purpose. Today more than ever, there is massive value in engaging in scenario planning for long-term strategy development, in a way that really does uncover assumption and open out thinking across the organization.

Changing investor disclosure could transform the world of blogging

I have previously written about blogging and Regulation FD, which is a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulation that requires egalitarian dissemination of substantive news that could affect the share price. On the face of it, blogs and RSS are the perfect way to allow perfectly equal access to news by everyone. Yet this is not allowed by current SEC regulations. So Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, has written to Christopher Cox, the chaiman of the SEC, to ask him to change the regulations to allow blogs and similar tools to be used for disclosure of substantive news. He says that previous conversations with Cox indicate this will be heard with receptive ears. Schwartz has of course disclosed this on this own blog, together with the full letter to Cox. If this change is approved, this will be an enormous boost for blogs, because it will mean investors and intermediaries will have to monitor the blogs of public company officers, and it will allow company directors to disclose substantive information on their blogs, in turn reducing the governance issues of corporate blogging. It makes all the sense in the world to use the power of RSS to disseminate information – this in fact would be a significant improvement to current mechanisms – so with just a tiny variation in the regulations on what are appropriate ways of disseminating corporate information, blogging could become quite a different world, with the development a thoroughly corporate segment of the blogosphere focused on egalitarian diffusion of investor information, and by-the-by, resulting a deeper and broader view of public company activities, and better informed investors.

Open innovation in collaborative filtering

Netflix has just announced a $1 million prize to whoever can improve the accuracy of their movie recommendation engine. To enable people to design an improved recommendation engine, they’ve provided their users’ ratings of 100 million movies, an extremely valuable database. This harkens back to Canadian gold mining company Goldcorp’s initiative, whereby they publicly released the geological data on their properties, and set up a competition with prizes for whoever could give them the best recommendations on where to dig for gold. Other open innovation initiatives such as Innocentive match a whole series of people looking for innovation, again providing pre-specified rewards for meeting specific parameters. Some note that the prize will mean a lot of people work for free, and it’s arguable that if you can indeed do better than the other competitors, you’ll be able to make more than $1 million from it commercially anyway. The size of the prize indicates the value in enhancing the accuracy of collaborative filtering, as I’ve written about many times before. If Netflix can more accurately recommend a movie to its customers, the more likely they will stay with Netflix. For companies with other business models, greater accuracy directly impacts sales and revenue. More and more energy and resources will be going into this space. Netflix has chosen to combine two of my passions – open innovation and collaborative filtering – so I will be very interested to see the results from this. Details of the prize are at netflixprize.com, which will provide a progress chart on how the competing teams are doing.