“Scenario Planning for Hotel Development and Strategy Professionals”: New online course set to launch early next year

In early 2019, a first-ever online course on “Scenario Planning for Hotel Development and Strategy Professionals” will be launched, designed to give these specialists a valuable foresight tool for assessing how the future might change – no matter whether they are evaluating future scenarios for their entire company, for a specific project, a market, country or even a city. The designer of the course and online instructor is Woody Wade, a scenario planning expert who conducts in-company scenario generation workshops for organizations worldwide.

HospitalityNet: In a nutshell, what is scenario planning? How is it different from, say, forecasting?

Wade: They both look at the future, but in different ways. Scenario planning is a methodology that helps you foresee how your business landscape might change – and also see that it might not evolve in only the direction you expected, but that completely different directions are also possible. It’s based on the idea that at any point in time, there isn’t just one future that will materialize, but instead, many different futures are possible, depending on how various uncertainties play out. If these uncertainties are truly “uncertain”, then the future could realistically unfold in different ways. With scenario planning, you identify what these different ways could be. You go through a structured process that reveals these alternative futures. Forecasting, on the other hand, has more to do with trying to predict the future, for example projecting next year’s numbers based on this year’s numbers. Scenario planning isn’t about predicting what will happen, but exploring what could happen. So the process generates more than a single outcome, which means you can make more flexible plans.

You see this as especially relevant to development professionals?

Absolutely. It was Jeff Immelt, the former CEO of GE, who said, “I have to manage for tomorrow’s world.” That’s very much the case for anyone in the hotel business whose focus is on future growth. Let’s say you make a major investment decision today. When will you be able to judge the consequences of that decision? Not today. It’s only in the future where your decision will actually play out – maybe even years down the line. But in the meantime, the business landscape might have become very different. So if you’re responsible for the future success of a project, with perhaps millions at risk, then to help you make the best decisions today you really need to have an idea how its future landscape might change. We all know that the future is going to be different. That’s a given. But how will it be different? That’s where scenario planning helps you.

Tell us about the course.

Scenario planning follows a logical process, so the course takes participants through each of the steps, one after the other. Altogether, there are over a dozen modules, which consist of a video where I explain the logic of that particular part of the process and walk you through the practical “how to” aspects. I also use lots of examples from actual scenario generation exercises I’ve conducted over the last few years.

What will participants get out of the course?

Well, of course they are going to become good at generating future scenarios, as well as coming up with strategic responses that would make sense in each one. But besides this practical know-how, which is really valuable for anyone whose work involves planning or investing for the future, another benefit is that it shows you, in detail, a new way of thinking. You’re going to come away from the course with an appreciation for visualizing the future in terms of alternative outcomes rather than the conventional way we think about the future, which is to assume that things will evolve in a nice, fairly predictable way.

How long does the course last? Is there a start date and end date?

No. The nice thing is that since the course is being delivered online, you can sign up any time, start whenever you want, and proceed through the modules at your own pace. There’s no deadlines at all. So how long the course lasts is completely up to you.

What about your background, Woody? What are your qualifications for designing and teaching a course on this subject?

On the academic side, I got my MBA from Harvard (many years ago now!), and during my business career I also taught strategy at a couple of schools as an adjunct professor. So strategy is a subject I’m comfortable with.

On the practical side, I can trace my interest in scenario thinking back to my time on the Executive Board of the World Economic Forum. At our big annual meetings in Davos, it impressed me to see how business and political leaders really hungered for any information, even just opinions from knowledgeable people, about how the future might develop. Like that comment from Jeff Immelt I mentioned before, they all understood that their most important task is to prepare their organizations for the future, and if they can see just a little more clearly how it might turn out, they can be at a big competitive advantage.

My hotel industry experience is as an interested outsider. I was the Director of Marketing at the Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne for seven years, where I helped position EHL as a business school and establish relationships with hotel groups and conferences such as IHIF in Berlin. Later, after I’d become an independent consultant, I created a publication called The Hotel Yearbook in which opinion leaders from many parts of the hotel industry share insights and expectations about the future, each from their own perspective. Altogether I edited about 30 annual and special editions, featuring contributions from several hundred authors, including 30 or 40 CEOs. More than ten years later, The Hotel Yearbook is still going strong, though my own involvement has changed.

You also wrote a book on scenario planning. Wasn’t it a best seller?

AboutAbout eight years ago I was contacted by Wiley, one of the largest business publishers in the US, who asked if I could write a book on the methodology that was "not as boring" (as they put it) as the books already on the market. A year later they published my book “Scenario Planning: A Field Guide to the Future”, which has become one of the five or six reference books on the subject. But "bestseller"? I’m afraid it’s not exactly "Fifty Shades of Scenario Planning"… but for a few glorious hours, the book’s Japanese edition reached the No. 1 position at Amazon in Japan – interestingly, in the category "books about society"! Which goes to show that scenario thinking is not only relevant in the business world but to anyone wondering about the future and how it might be different.

How can people find out when the course is actually available?

If you go to http://bit.ly/2E5gv9C you can leave your name and e-mail address, and we’ll be sure to contact you with news about the launch date.

Woody Wade
+41 21 784 3303
Wade & Company