Using an end game scenario to build a shared understanding of why…
I like to think I’m a pretty good at setting scenarios for teams to work on – I enjoy doing them and it’s a fantastic exercise for at least three reasons.
The first is it’s a fun way for a team to bond and learn to work better together; a shared challenge where there’s no pass or fail.
The second is that you invariably get stuff out of the exercise that’s useful whether the scenario ever happens or not – I’ve never once run a session that doesn’t produce a bunch of “we should do that anyway” ideas that leap off the page.
But the third, often overlooked benefit, is that it massively increases shared understanding.
In a volatile and unpredictable environment, often it’s the leadership that ends up carrying all the ambiguity, protecting others from the uncertainty that they know is ahead.
Scenarios are a way of bringing people into that uncertain future, but with the benefit of understanding how we can prepare ourselves in advance; an understanding that comes from the experience of “doing” the exercise, rather than simply being told the outcomes.
Being part of the “doing” creates a deeper, much more intuitive understanding of the “why” – why we’re keeping these particular options open; why we’re accelerating this project over that one; why we’re prioritising these relationships, even though they might not benefit us this year.
That’s why I had one of those wonderfully mixed reactions when Kate Lee shared an “end game scenario” her team had used during our recent seminar. My mixed reaction being one part, that’s genius, and one part, I wish I’d come up with that! (The full list of coming seminars is here, and you’re welcome to join them)
The end game scenario was this: imagine, in 2050, the government suddenly outlaws the UK voluntary sector. That means closing all charities and CICs, so there’s no third sector at all.
If we knew for a fact that we had just 26 years, what do we do differently today to leave our beneficiaries in the best possible place for when we get shut down?
The scenario itself may be outlandish, but the thesis behind it is both relevant and real.
If we continue being purely reactive to demand, and don’t do anything upstream to reduce that demand, not only will it continue to escalate, but the moment we run out of money the support will drop off a cliff.
Almost every service delivery charity faces this dilemma – how much of our resource should we focus on helping the growing number of people who need us right now, versus working upstream to prevent more people needing as much support in the future?
It’s understandable, perhaps inevitable, that the needs of the now usually end up taking precedence.
I’ve used various end game scenarios to help bring more nuanced thinking to that dilemma before, but never one quite as elegantly and compellingly framed as the one Kate described.
But what I can attest, is that working through a scenario like this pushes you to think differently, often quite laterally, about how you might engineer a dramatic reduction, or even an eradication, of the needs you’re having to meet.
Not every civil society organisation wants to put themselves out of business. But few wouldn’t be pleased to see a reduction in the volume or severity of the needs they’re seeing right now.
Which is why end game thinking can be hugely valuable, even when, or perhaps especially when, you’re stretched to the limit, because it offers you a much richer, more informed set of choices when you come back into the real world.
It allows you the space to think more deeply about resilience and sustainability, about capacity building and relationships, about how you and others can start embedding change in the mainstream.
And as is so often the case with scenario work, what emerges is at least as much about evolving how you think and plan, how you prioritise and even how you deliver your work, as it is about doing a bunch of new stuff.
But perhaps most important of all, it allows you to involve other people, to help you think it through, and to join you on the resulting journey.
So, ask yourself this: when was the last time you explored an end game scenario?