Woody Wade

A SCENARIO PLANNING exercise APPLIED TO AN ENTIRE COUNTRY

For Chile, change is coming from every direction: Constitutional rethinks. New technologies that can disrupt its industrial and entrepreneurial base. Rising energy costs. Uncertain demand for key exports. Migration, security, and law-and-order challenges.

Over the next few years, a myriad of factors will have an impact on the country — many already visible on the horizon. Longer-term, even more changes are on the way: demographic trends, the health of the global economy, geopolitical shifts, changing relations with global commercial partners, and not least, evolving societal attitudes and values.

In 2022, an enthusiastic group of Chilean executives, working with me via Zoom, invested dozens of hours over a span of nine months applying my structured scenario-building methodology to Chile as a whole, ultimately constructing a portfolio of four alternative futures that could materialize for the country. These scenarios contrasted sharply from each other, yet we deemed all four of them as entirely plausible.

Co-authored with my Santiago-based business partner Antonio Manterola, the results of our “deep dive” into Chile’s futures have been written up as a new book:

“chilean voyages 2022-2032:

Alternative futures for the next decade”

Chilean Voyages 2022-2032 describes in detail the four different futures that emerged from the group's work, and addresses these questions:

• What uncertainties could bring about the unfolding of each particular future?

• What outcomes are to be expected if they materialize?

• What signposts will we be able to spot in advance that might tell us which future Chile is heading towards?

• What will the four futures look and feel like to people living in Chile? How could they impact their day-to-day lives and work?

Who is this book for?

Chilean Voyages 2022-2032 will open the eyes of anyone in Chile leading an organization or business that desires to be future-ready. It delivers not only thought-provoking insights about the possible consequences of the different futures, but also provides a practical framework for developing effective responses to the scenarios. Ultimately, it can help decision makers identify opportunities they may be able to exploit in different scenarios — as well as spot challenges they may have to tackle to survive and thrive.

A powerful model to apply to any country

Even if you are not particularly affected by what is going on in Chile yourself, you are probably interested in visualizing scenarios that may develop for your own country — or perhaps in some other important market wrestling with big uncertainties. In this case, this book will be very useful for you, too. It describes a scenario generation methodology you should apply to your analysis. But it goes beyond that: in our work in Chile, an especially inventive metaphor emerged during our scenario process, which turned out to be one of the most effective mental models for thinking about a country’s future that I have ever seen, revealing risk in a particularly insightful and provocative way. This template could serve you very well in thinking about the future(s) your own country might face.