Thomas is Founder and Principal of Chermack Scenarios which offers customised scenario planning and consulting. He develops systems to provoke new insights and connect decision maker mental models to complex and uncertain environments.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
More about Thomas
LinkedIn: Thomas Chermack
Transcript
Peter Hayward: Welcome to Futurepod. I'm Peter Hayward. Futurepod gathers voices from the international field of Futures and Foresight. Through a series of interviews the founders of the field and the emerging leaders share their stories, tools, and experiences. Please visit futurepod.org for further information about this podcast series. Today our guest is Thomas Chermack. Thomas is founder and principal at Chermack Scenarios, which offers customized scenario planning and consulting. He develops systems to provoke new insights and connect decision maker's mental models to complex and uncertain environments. Thomas is also a researcher focused on generating new knowledge about the effects and outcomes of scenario planning. He teaches courses in scenario planning and organizational change at Colorado State University, where he also serves as the Director of the Scenario Planning institute. Welcome to Futurepod Thomas.
Thomas Chermack: Oh, thank you so much Peter. I thank you for having me and I'm excited for the conversation.
Peter Hayward: Great. I've been looking forward to this chat for a while. So first question on Futurepod Thomas is the story question. So what is the Thomas Chermack story? How did you end up a member of the future in foresight community?
Thomas Chermack: Well I guess I'm not sure that I am a member of that community, but I would say I can think back to being an undergraduate student taking a strategic planning course at the business school. And one night, three hours of that course was illuminating the concept of scenario planning. And I was hooked immediately and I decided really essentially that night that this is what I wanted to make my career all about. And I was fascinated by the blend of scenarios require a degree of analytical thinking and also creative thinking. And the blend of the two was something that I had not come across before. And I decided there and then and that night that this is what I wanted to carve out my career. And at the time searching the academic literature there was not much in terms of empirical research on scenarios specifically. I mean there had been a bit about strategic planning but there wasn't much specific to scenarios. And I thought to myself that I saw an opportunity to blend the academic and the practical aspects of scenario planning. And I could carve out a career in terms of trying to generate empirical research about what does this process do? What does this activity deliver? And yeah, I mean that's 20 years ago.
Peter Hayward: It's funny aside that Thomas, because scenarios when you look at the journals and whether it's Futures or Foresight and obviously Tech Forecasting. Scenarios are they're there they're there in an odd way. People do write about them a lot. But I get the impression well, for you when you say that they're not actually studied whether it's scientifically or empirically, do you want to explain a bit more?
Thomas Chermack: Absolutely. I think a lot of my work has been quite honestly misunderstood because I think of scenario planning as a change intervention. It's no different from a training program or a leadership development program. These things are all very socially constructed and they're very soft in terms of how you're trying to give people an experience that helps them grow and learn. However there are rooms full of research on training and development programs. There are rooms full of research on leadership training programs. So what I have hopefully tried to do is to say yes, scenario planning is very, very socially constructed, and it depends on the people who are involved in what, the experiences and how the facilitator works through some kind of process, but I do think there are measures that can be taken as pre-test post-test. And we can see improvements in employee engagement. We can see improvements in job satisfaction. We can see improvements in organizational climate as perceived by the people who participate. So I think my work has been misunderstood. I don't think scenarios are a tool to predict the future at all. It is an entirely socially constructed process. What I've tried to do is to say this is a change management intervention. And I think there are benefits that we can measure. There are outcomes that we can isolate but that they don't have to do with predicting the future.
Peter Hayward: Yeah. If Thomas Chermack has a motivation for how scenarios appeal to him on that famous undergraduate session why this interest why this attraction?
Thomas Chermack: Thank you for that question. I'm a definite believer in continuous improvement. So I think we can always do things better and we can care more about the people we work with and how our workplaces function. So I immediately saw scenarios as a way to do that. There's a preface by Jed Davis, a former Shell alumni in, I think it's Rafael Ramirez edited book The Turbulence of the Future. He said in his editorial that uncertainty is not new. It's always been there and he went back hundreds of years to show these examples. But I think it's true that it feels, it feels more prevalent right now. That the world is changing faster and faster. Although if we look back historically, it may not be the case. However given that perception that the world is changing faster and faster one of the big lessons from Pierre Wack, in doing a biography on him, was just that making uncertainty a part of the planning process is what was novel about scenarios in the early days. And I would argue that it continues to be that way. I continuously show this chart with clients and students that strategic planning tends to say, here's where we are, here's where we want to be. And we just have to figure out the steps, but that is entirely divorced from how the external environment can change. So I think making uncertainty a part of the planning process and trying to understand how could the world change in ways that maybe we're not even thinking about is what is the most significant factor with scenarios and other kinds of futures thinking. Building uncertainty into how we plan and think about the future, whether a corporation, a nation state, a country, or, or whatever it might be
Peter Hayward: , Does working with uncertainty, with people that we're going to work with, improve us and our ability to work together because we start to practice the way the world actually going to be the way it's going to be when we walk out of the scenario workshop, and we walk back into the physical world, the physical workplace. But uncertainty is going to re-enter. I'm not going to agree with you. We're going to see different ways of doing things. Is it a place of rehearsal and safety and training wheels and play that is helpful when we go back into the real world?
Thomas Chermack: I think it is a rehearsal and this is why the selection of who participates is so important because they are your real world colleagues and I think scenario planning and that those exercises provide a basis on which to say, when we disagree, once the scenario or a futures effort is essentially for lack of a better word completed although I don't think it's ever really complete, it gives you a basis on which to relate to people having had that similar experience before. So I think it's critically important and just to touch on one other aspect of this. Pierre Wack at Shell was very adamant about what he called Remarkable People. And for him that meant it was nothing really remarkable about the people themselves, but people who were outside of Shell Oil. He invited Peter Gabriel the musician to come to Shell Oil. He is a rockstar. He didn't know anything about oil, but to provide an outsider perspective. So there is an aspect of I would say scenarios, but any futures effort that could benefit from bringing in outside thinkers, because the point of what you're trying to do is break the groupthink. So many Executives, Vice Presidents and SVPs and whatever, they're trained very, very, very similarly degrees maybe from the same MBA programs et cetera. And having different voices involved in this scenario process really opens up the thinking. So to come back to your question, I think if it's well facilitated and well-delivered, I think the scenario and futures exercises can really give a platform for people to have disagreements beyond those exercises and have a common understanding on which to build.
Peter Hayward: Did you have experience of other organizations? Is it some of those experiences of organizations and how the difficulty of setting strategy and working in a strategic space with other high minded, intelligent people? Did you have those experience without necessarily knowing about scenarios?
Thomas Chermack: Well before I learned about scenarios, I was really working in Training and Development. My mentor, Richard Swanson was a Professor at the University of Minnesota and he had contracts with companies like 3M and General Mills in the city there. And I was really like a standup trainer. Like I would just go and deliver these kinds of things. And interestingly once I found scenarios that I remember begging companies to let me kind of try this out, because at the time there wasn't a lot of guidance on precisely how to do it. And I can recall, when I wrote the first book, Scenario Planning in Organizations. I had charts and images in the book that describe ranking on impact and uncertainty, and the reviewer said, "do we really have to have this in the book?" And I said, absolutely because I didn't know how to do it. So yeah I think in hindsight, it was a lot of work for me to get to where I feel somewhat, maybe minimally confident about what I can deliver, but I know that it does have an impact and it does help.
Peter Hayward: Question Two Thomas is the guest talking about a framework, a philosophy for how they do their work and for you it's scenarios, you've written books about it. Yep. What is your belief and approach to what this does?
Thomas Chermack: Thank you for that. So 100% of the work that I do in the consulting fashion is customized. So I have worked on scenarios that took 12 months to produce and at the extreme other end, I ran a workshop on Tuesday. Wednesday we wrote the scenarios and on Thursday we delivered them and had a strategy generation activity. So it can run the whole range. Shell Oil is still the main organization that has done scenarios for 60 years and their scenarios are 30, 40, 50 years out. My clients can't think that far ahead and I tend to work much more closely to the corporate strategy domain. So I find that five to 10 years is it is about as much tolerance as people can have in terms of radically rethinking what kind of technology or smartphones we might be holding or not holding at all and what that might evolve to.
So my philosophy is generally a bit shorter term. I don't generally work on things like climate change scenarios. My clients are not in that realm. I don't work generally for governments or large entities. My work is mostly focused on organizations and corporations. So that bounds me a little bit in terms of how that works. So I always try to ask, what's reasonable and I think one of the problems with scenarios is that there's a perception that it takes a lot of time and a lot of money. And I would say, I don't think that's true at all. And I would refer to Peter Schwartz, the author of The Art of the Long View and Pierre Wack's successor at Shell. Any scenario planning is better than none. The whole point of these kinds of exercises is to check your thinking and to check your assumptions. Do you assume that tomorrow is going to be the same as today? And I think that assumption is faulty. So Peter Schwartz would do scenarios on a napkin in an airport and I would do the same. I think any instigation or inspiration to really just think about what we're not thinking about is ultimately the point. And a lot of people would criticize me and have criticized me. I'm generally in the intuitive logics school of scenarios. And there's a whole other host of ways of futuring in futures and foresight science. And we don't even have a real label for the overarching field, but there's, backcasting, there's forecasting, there's all these different methods. And I have chosen to specialize in a specific area. So what I hope that I bring to the table is a completely customized experience. And the latest book I've written is intended to try to target that.
Peter Hayward: I wonder Thomas by tightly bounding yourself to if I call it the commercial business sector of scenario and not necessarily working in places like government with longer term more abstract. Does that actually simplify the process for you? Does it actually make it easier to do scenarios when you do keep it short and you do keep it quite, quite concrete as a change process?
Thomas Chermack: I would immediately say there's nothing easy about doing scenarios and to do them as I describe this project last week running a workshop to get the information we need and then spending one day writing scenarios. Like there's no question, the scenarios could be better or more in depth or more detailed or more comprehensive if we had 3, 6, 8 months to work on them. But in the last 15 years, the pressure that I have experienced in terms of, I mean, I've had executives say like, what's the fastest, most efficient way you can deliver this? Like they don't want to wait, 3, 4, 6, 8 months. And if you compare it to strategic planning most organizations typically have a strategic planning retreat once a year and it maybe is a one or two day activity. So I think it's important for scenarios to evolve toward that direction. Decision-makers leaders don't have six months to wait and unfortunately, especially in the US and I've experienced this differently outside the US but especially in the US, there is a pressure for efficiency and economy of time.
And especially if you're thinking about this project last week. It was 30 people from around the US and outside the US. The cost to bring people together and scheduling so that there needs to be in my view a way to deliver the value of scenarios and futures thinking efficiently given the world that we live in. And how can't bring that group of 30 people together repeatedly over three, four months. It's just impossible given the scheduling.
Peter Hayward: I was a somewhat academic somewhat consultant when I was practicing Thomas. And the more I did scenarios and the more I engaged with scenarios, I wondered more and more about how we spent the time of the executives that we asked. And I increasingly felt that are we better off using executives time to build scenarios or are we better off using executives time to use scenarios? Because to me, I had too many experiences Thomas, where I put all the time and effort into the building and they almost had almost exhausted their budget, their kind of intellectual budget to suddenly now reinvest in an engagement of how to use it. So where do you sit on this notion that the best use of organization in terms of outcome is to be in using scenarios rather than necessarily being deeply involved in the crafting of scenarios?
Thomas Chermack: Well, I'm glad you asked that question because that's the entire premise of of my new book which is titled Using Scenarios. So I think if you look back historically the most important thing I learned from writing a biography of Pierre Wack at Shell was the leadership would tell him here's a big problem, a big uncertainty go and study it. And he and his scenario team would go away and they would work on their process and do whatever they did. And then they would come back to the Managing Directors and present the scenarios. So they did not use executive time to build scenarios at all. None. And I think that's just as effective today. I don't think executive time spent building scenarios is really the best use. Now I would back up and say again, referring to the project just last week, it was the entire leadership team. And we asked them for one day, and I think that's a reasonable ask of Executive VP SVP leadership team. One day. And we got everything we needed to write the scenarios and then went back to them two days later and said, here are alternative futures. So I think it's such a balance about what the organization wants, what time they have, but I would generally agree with you that using executive time to build scenarios is probably not the right way to go.
However, one of the other things that comes out of Shell is interviews. You can learn a lot by interviewing 5, 6, 7 people on a leadership team for 30 minutes a piece. And that gives you a whole lot of input into writing, in building scenarios and giving you a perspective on what people are thinking about the future. So that there's a lot of different ways to address the issue that you're raising. And there's not one answer. I think it, it just depends on some leadership teams really want to have a heavy hand in building scenarios. Some would care less and they just want to be sort of slapped over the top of the head with an interesting future that sort of shocks them. So it's all over the place, but I generally, I would agree with you. Executive time is not best spent in the scenario building phase although the input that you can get in different ways is critically important.
Peter Hayward: There clearly is tremendous learning experiences from working through scenarios as a group. What are the kind of things that people can learn working together on a set of scenarios for a period of time?
Thomas Chermack: I can't tell you the number of times that I have facilitated a group working on scenarios when someone has said, I had no idea, we were even doing that in our company. So there's a, there's a knowledge sharing that's really intangible. And it's really hard to quantify, even though I've tried. I don't know that I've done that well, but the knowledge sharing across the organization has been, a recurring theme in, I would say almost every single project that I work on. You have people from different divisions. People talk about silos in organizations and how difficult that is to break down and granted the way that I run scenarios is usually 20 to 30 people. So there's no way to get the entire organization involved in this kind of a conversation and process, but even at the silo level, somebody from marketing, uh, learning about customer service or whatever these different branches might be. There's no question in my mind that the experience of what I have had over the last 20 years with clients, from all different industries that gets starts to break down. Cause people start to understand these different roles and how they contribute. The hardest part, and if I could solve this it'd be, it would be the legacy of my career. The hardest part is how do you sustain that? It gets it's it's, it's gratifying. And it's, I would say relatively easy with this kind of process when you have those 20 or 30 people in the room. But when, when the work is, you know, essentially it's never done as I mentioned before, but when the workshops are over, people go back to their roles and how to sustain that cross-cutting thinking across the organization is quite honestly in my experience I haven't solved it yet. And I would like to. I don't know that I would.
Peter Hayward: We're talking about organizational learning and organizational dynamics . I think you can't, it'd be completely unfair to say, well, the scenario hasn't taught us how to work effectively as a group, across all domains. The answer is that was never the purpose of the scenario.
Thomas Chermack: The one thing I would say that I undoubtedly recommend to every single client is part of the scenario process, I always deliver a set of what we call Signals. And I'm sure you're familiar with signals, but these are the events required for a given scenario to actually unfold in reality. And the one resounding recommendation is review the signals. Whether you have a monthly management team meeting or however often it happens, but if you're monitoring the signals, you're paying attention to how the external environment is changing. And that alone is way beyond what strategic planning generally can offer in terms of its historical process. So these signals of how the world is changing are they're incredibly critical and I've found that tends to help keep the silos together. At least in some, in some sense
Peter Hayward: I think what happens when you ask people to revisit the signals, Thomas people go back to the workshop. They just for a moment, remember how they thought, how they were thinking, how they regarded the other person. It's not that it's not the complete workshop experience, but they remember. I was taught by someone who didn't do anything about scenarios, but she always taught me is give people enjoyable creative experiences in the workplace because too many experiences in workshops are not enjoyable or creative. And then if people have a powerful, positive experience working together, then if you can remind them of that at some point in the future, they, to some extent recapture the magic again.
Thomas Chermack: Yeah and there's two mechanisms for that. I work on the two by two matrix approach to scenarios. So you have a critical uncertainty on the horizontal and one on the vertical. And it's important what is the theme and how are they named? And I call that mental Velcro because a client I had two years ago, they had an animal theme and they had a gorilla, cheetah, et cetera, et cetera. And I could go back to that company tomorrow and say, you remember the cheetah scenario? And they would remember it because of exactly what you're saying. And the signals are another way to do that to connect people back to that experience and sharing the knowledge with their colleagues. But further the signals and I could give you examples of this. The way that I do it is we write them as headlines. So whatever news channel you watch there's the scrolling, there's this scrolling banner across the bottom. And it's like, if I said to you six months ago Elon Musk buys Twitter. You would not believed me. But if we did scenarios six months ago, and that was a headline, as soon as you saw that you would see maybe the world is trending towards one of these scenarios more than the others. So those are really powerful devices that are not super sophisticated and they're creative in nature. And they really make scenarios useful and attached to how people think about the future.
Peter Hayward: Thanks Thomas.
Third question. The emerging futures around Thomas Chermack. Not as a scenario expert. Just the human being that you are. Where is your attention, your research, your own personal thinking, going around the emerging futures around you and what are they and why?
Thomas Chermack: Okay. I'm afraid this might be very disappointing to your listeners. I'm actually quite an introverted person. I love running workshops and I can be highly extroverted, but when I come home I really like quiet. And I find the news really hard to watch these days and I have to limit how much I pay attention to it. I don't feel inspired by the world's leadership and it's easy to feel sad about all the things that are happening and why. So I do have a heavy heart about, about what's happening in the world and the conflicts and the prospects of potential nuclear war. I mean, these are not, these are not, um, friendly things. So I wouldn't say I ignore them, but I have to limit, how much attention. My local environment where I live is, is very beautiful. And I have spent a lot of time in Japan and I have studied Japanese tea ceremony for 15 years. And so I, meditate every single day and I find those things keep me optimistic and positive and just hopeful about the world.
And in terms of what's next there's so much to do. I get questions frequently from PhD students and corporate leaders, like how can I learn about scenario planning? And I'm really sad to say we don't have a professional association. We don't have a space where, I mean, Global Business Network, you know, all Shell alumni. And my colleague Raphael Ramirez, and Angela Wilkinson at University of Oxford they run the Oxford scenarios program is a one week training course. But outside of that I don't know of anywhere. University of Houston has their futures program at a master's degree level. And I think probably scenarios are like my undergraduate experience where it's covered, but I wish there was a formal way and process for how do you teach people this? Right now the only way that I teach people is I have a semester long PhD course in our Doctoral program here at Colorado State. But it's three months and your barely getting to scratch the surface of this whole discipline of futures and scenarios. So I hope long-term, and I don't know how to do it, but I certainly hope to be a part of creating some kind of futures training program to teach people how to do this because it's very complicated and it's difficult, but I don't know where people would go if they wanted to learn about it.
Peter Hayward: I think Thomas the world of learning for us is going through fundamental change through digital and technology. It's part of the reason why I decided to get into podcasting, which is a very old technology. Digital, video, audio, I think offer us alternatives for how we might consider learning, take place. What you're talking about is a community of practice. How do you build a community of practice around scenario? Now you can build a community of practice by having a shared experience of going to Houston or going to Oxford. Sure. Are there other ways to build community of practice that done that don't require a person who can't afford to, that's not the means to. Could you build a community of practice in a digital platform using Discord, YouTube, podcasts, streaming, and become a community that teaches one another.
Thomas Chermack: You know, it's fascinating that you say that because I was hit by the pandemic just like everyone else. And I had to figure out how to do scenario planning online. And I had a grant project and we did scenario planning for five states in the US in their Fish and Wildlife Departments. The dynamics were around people aren't hunting and fishing anymore. So the sales of licenses are decreasing rapidly and that's a huge revenue for states and what do they do? And anyway, I had to figure out a way to do this online and had a Miro, this online white boarding, sticky note technology and using Mentimeter and we got through it and we did it the best I think we could, but the engagement was just not comparable to being face-to-face. That experience was really difficult and I don't know how to overcome that? I really struggled with doing it that way and we could do it, but I would say it's just, doesn't compare to having people together. So I'm open to that but I am skeptical that technology is going to be able to replace what it feels like to be in a room and what happens at the breaks and we're getting coffee and we're having a chit chat about, you know, things maybe totally irrelevant to the scenario project, but those are important interactions.
Peter Hayward: I don't think technology ever replaces the physical experience. The thing that at my age becoming increasingly aware and just recently I did some podcasts with Peter Bishop's, where they did the young foresight practitioners. And I spoke to a young girl in Pakistan who's doing STEM education online and another young woman from Brazil doing online debates. There's a whole generation coming through that don't think the way we think.
Thomas Chermack: Completely. And I wish I could think the way they think,
Peter Hayward: Or maybe they actually become the people that lead us to other ways of doing this? That it's not about us getting them, teaching us. It's about, you told me how you can learn this way? And it might be that we start to support the way that the next generations think they can learn this. Um, cause it may be more disseminated.
Thomas Chermack: Scenarios are all about mental models. And I'll be the first to admit that I have gaps, I have fixedness in my mental models. And, uh, yeah, what, what, wouldn't it be fascinating to have your mind be able to think in, in the way that a 10 year old is thinking these days it's just radically different. I mean, I have all the baggage of how I was raised and where I grew up in all that stuff. And it's so, so I, you know, maybe the greatest skill going forward would be unlearning. The ability, the ability to unlearn is something that is not given a whole lot of attention but I think it's incredibly important.
Peter Hayward: That might be in your next book.
Thomas, the communication question. How do you explain what Chermak does to someone who doesn't understand what it is that Thomas Chermack does?
Thomas Chermack: At the start I would simply say I'm just a guy living in Fort Collins Colorado and enjoying life. So there's not much more to it than that. I wake up every morning with a smile on my face. Grateful to be alive and I have a practice I mentioned my affinity for Japan and Japanese culture earlier. But I have a practice every morning. I write down five things that I'm grateful for. And I have found that a life involving meditation and thinking about gratitude has served me very well. Some people go to church, some people become carpenters. Some people have various things that fill them and these are very simple, basic things that, that fill me. I've always tried to read as much as I can about Buddhism. I have an affinity for that approach to thinking about the world and I'm so far away from having anything profound to say about Buddhism but it's definitely something that I try. So what would I say to someone? So a lot about Buddhism is respecting the present moment. All we have is right now, this very moment. And it's useless to think about the past. And it's really useless to think about the future, which is a dichotomy for me because my whole career is in the future. So I somehow at least for now reconcile it in my mind in terms of, I do believe it's true that all we have is right now in this present moment. And I do believe it's true that the decisions that we make now inevitably shape what options are available to us tomorrow. So to me, the present and the future are inextricably linked. You can't avoid the connection between those two in my head. So maybe that goes more to your philosophy question.
Peter Hayward: I think you described Karma that from right mind come, come right actions from wrong mind come wrong actions and from wrong actions you create not preferred futures.
Thomas Chermack: I think those are all all linked. And I also really struggled to accept because I've spent a bit of time in Japan and I have watched, in some ways, a Monk's life seems like a cop-out to me. You go away from the world, you don't have children, you don't have relationships, you clean the floors, you meditate. And I've lived in temples for periods of time. And I've seen how that works. It almost, in some ways, seems like an escape. Like on the other hand, isn't it more learning focused or developmental to experience life, to experience heartbreak, to experience what it's like to raise a child and all these things? So I have my own battles with these things, but I, I do, I think it is Karma. I think how you choose to be today directly influences who you're going to be tomorrow. And I would say the same is true for a company, for a government, for a country, for an organization. These are things that I, I wonder about that I think about that I struggle with.
Peter Hayward: I think we all struggle with them Thomas.
So Thomas we're at the end of the interview. You've just written a new book I shouldn't say just it's been out for a little while, but then just talk to the listeners about your book and what you hoping from it and then what's next for Thomas Chermack?
Thomas Chermack: Well, thank you. So in February the book came out titled Using Scenarios. I'm a bit shy in terms of marketing. It's not my strong suit. And so I don't mean this to ever sound like a sales pitch, however, I do think this book is important and here is the reason why. This new book is entirely focused on using scenarios. And I have observed over my career that many scenario planners feel like their job is to deliver a set of scenarios. So whatever process you use, the product in essence is a set of three or four or five scenarios. And in this book, I do cover the history of strategic planning and why and how it has seemingly failed in a lot of ways, because the same thing has happened. Consulting firms do an analysis and deliver a strategic plan. But how do you use it? How do you implement it? It has always been the question and I fear that scenario planning is potentially set up for the same kind of failure. So this book is intended and I draft out there's seven different chapters on seven different ways that you could use scenarios beyond once you have them.
And I wanted to be really careful in this book that the scenario planning field has had these debates over the years of what's the right way to create scenarios. And I'm just throwing that out in the trash. There's no right way. It just doesn't matter. The point of this book is you have scenarios. It does not matter how you achieve them or how you develop them. It's just, it's just, doesn't matter. What do you do with them from this point forward? And that's really what I'm, what I'm trying to get to. And ultimately one of the last chapters in the book is about how to get scenarios a part of organizational culture. And I referred to this earlier in our interview. I really think scenarios should be an ongoing activity. It should be at least annual. If we're going to do strategic planning every year we should do scenarios. Right. So ultimately if it was a standard practice in every company across the world that scenarios were part of the planning process then I would feel like mission, mission accomplished, you know, but maybe that's too optimistic, but then ultimately where I'd like to go.
Peter Hayward: Is the point that you have to have in mind the use to which you are going to put the scenario before you start to build the scenario?
Thomas Chermack: That's a really fascinating question and I can only answer it I don't have any data or research evidence for this. Although I would say it's really shocking how many even of my own clients and I'm guessing probably many others out there, there isn't a clearly articulated purpose from the beginning. So there's an idea like, well we need to think differently or this sounds exciting. This sounds different to what we do. So let's do this. And what I'm saying in this book also is there's also a natural point once you have developed scenarios to stop and say, okay, now what are we going to do with these? How are we going to use them? So I don't in my own experience, like it's, it's uncommon that it's clearly articulated from the beginning. And what I'm trying to say too, is like, here's a natural pause point to say, okay, okay, we've done this exercise. However it was done and we have these scenarios now, what is the most strategic way to use them?
Or how can we use them to help us with whatever it is that we might be struggling with, whether it's acquiring a firm. And I try to also say clearly it's perfectly okay to develop scenarios just to wonder about the future. But but let's be honest about that, we're just trying to think differently. Like that's a whole different category than we have really important decisions to make. And we don't know what the right decision is. You know, to acquire a firm for $20 billion, like, is that a, is that a good decision and pushing that through scenarios would tell you something about that. It's just important at some point to be clear. Are we just trying to think differently or, or is there a specific outcome in mind?
Peter Hayward: Yeah again it's not just an afterthought. You don't think of this in the last half an hour of the workshop and people are suddenly wrapping up and getting ready to get to their planes. You actually, as the facilitator you would become conscious of this, certainly at a point where at what point do we started lace rising the question of how is this useful? Hey, how are we going to use this? What's going to be the point of this?
Thomas Chermack: Yeah, exactly. And often it is a follow on activity. I've had so many clients say, what a wonderful activity we are thinking in different ways, how can we move this forward? And so this book is like, well here are different ways depending on what it is on the top of your minds, as a leadership team or executive team or whatever it might be. So I do think it doesn't need to be articulated at the very beginning before you even build scenarios. I think there are natural points where you can, you can go back and ask that question about how can we use these to our best advantage?
Peter Hayward: Well, congratulations on the book and thank you Thomas for agreeing to have this chat and spending some time with the Futurepod community. Its been a pleasure to meet you.
Thomas Chermack: Well, likewise. And like I said I've really appreciated your questions. Very thought provoking, uh, got into more personal stuff than most interviews that I've done. And I just appreciated meeting you and having the conversation as well. So thank you.
Peter Hayward: This has been another production from Futurepod. Future pod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support Futurepod, go to the Patreon link on our website. Thank you for listening. Remember to follow us on Instagram and Facebook. This has been Peter Hayward saying goodbye for now.