Scenario Planning Extreme E-Book

Martin Gillo

• Herausgeber: BoD - Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 304

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Especially in our times of disruptive and transformative change, long-range planning is highly valuable: with Scenario Planning Extreme as described in this book. This method imaginates multiple extreme futures and creates strategies for success for each of them with the intent of preparing for success no matter what the future may look like. Never has there been a time when identifying the flaws in our thinking processes has been more critical. The fate of the world and our future destiny literally depend on it. This book demonstrates in a highly readable and understandable way how to do that. Linda O Riordan

Leseprobe

Why Do Scenario Planning Extreme?

When it comes to preparing for the future, we are hindered by what we don't know, and by what we think we know. Our values, beliefs and convictions make us see things that aren't there, like "the emperor s new clothes", and make us blind to things that are too threatening to our world views. We need to deal with both if we want to prevail.

Scenario Planning Extreme challenges what we think we know and helps us recognize what we don't. In ten steps it enables open-minded teams to think through several unlikely but possible scenarios and opens their eyes to opportunities for breakthrough success strategies.

"Never has there been a time when identifying the flaws in our thinking processes has been more critical. The fate of the world and our future destiny depend on it. This book demonstrates in a highly readable and understandable way how to do that.”

Linda O’Riordan

Director Center for Corporate Social Responsibility

FOM University of Applied Science, Essen

Martin Gillo’s insights reflect his professional life in Europe and the US: University-based leadership researcher, Management Consultant. Human Resource Executive in Silicon Valley, Geneva, and Dresden. Managing Director. Politician in Saxony. Saxony’s State Minister of Economic Affairs and Labor. For over 15 years Lecturer for Scenario Planning at several universities.

Dedication

For all those on whose shoulders we stand.

Table of Contents

Glossary of Key Terms

Foreword by Charles Hampden-Turner

Welcome to Scenario Planning Extreme

Part I: Words Teach. Examples Convince

1.1 We World Explainers

Invented reality

Seductive past success: AT&T, IBM, Nokia

We fortune tellers

Wake up, automotive industry!

1.2 This is Scenario Planning Extreme

Flying with one foot on the ground: The Scenario Method/Technique

Black Swans. Big changes possible overnight

Scenario planning extreme defined

Extreme times – extreme change

1.3 Scenario Planning Extreme – is the CEO’s Prime Accountability

HuLio reality tunnels

When proven paradigms are displaced

Secret ingredient: co-ownership

Extreme scenario planning: A journey in ten steps

How to involve decision-makers

1.4 Scenario Planning Extreme in Politics

Non-profit NGOs

1.5 The Learning Organization

Systems thinking

Personal mastery

Mental models

Shared Vision

Team learning

How do we create a learning organization?

1.6 The Power of Multiple Reality Tunnels

Group Dynamics, Flow and FlowTeam Dynamics

Part II: Scenario Planning Extreme for Everyone

Step 1: The Team

The rules of the seminar

Be open for new insights

Step 2: The Client

Why values are important

The external seminar

The in-house seminar

The pilot project

Always two clients in politics

Step 3: The Key Question

Step 4: Relevant Trends

Preparation for the seminar

During the seminar

From individual observations to the common trend wall

Co-ownership vs. time restrictions

Step 5: From Trends to Extreme Scenarios

Step 6: Storyboards

Scenarios as personas

Step 7 : Strategies

Transform or adapt!

Strategies with rear-view mirror perspective

Three scenario-specific strategies

Step 8: Scenario Alert Signals

Identifying supporters of our strategies

Step 9: Winning over the Client

The external seminar

Winning over the internal client

Co-creating scenarios

Step 10: Implementing Scenario Planning Extreme

Part III: Coping With an Extreme World

3.1 Career Planning with Extreme Scenarios

Careers in any future

Start by doing something

Three prototype scenario careers

Do something

Meaningful scenario careers at any age

3.2 Extreme Scenarios of Migration and Integration

A long-term perspective for successful integration in Europe

The situation in 2015

Thinking about long-term solutions

Four scenarios

Strategies to strengthen European integration and identity

Summary

Is political reflection without blinkers too dangerous?

3.3 Alternatives to Drug Bans

The courage to think about extremes

What would be better than a ban on drugs?

Thinking Beyond Taboos

Fearless reflection on other controversial topics

3.4 Succeed Together in Every Future

Attachments

Selected Literature

Acknowledgements

Index

References Used plus some Personal Notes

Glossary of Key Terms

1926ing: The human tendency not to give up a deep conviction even in the face of contrary evidence, but to hold on to it with even greater conviction.

Assimilation-contrast effect: Information that is perceived as close to one’s own opinion is seen as confirmation of it. Information that is too far removed from one’s own convictions is emotionally rejected.

Black swans: The sudden occurrence of unforeseen changes that were previously thought impossible; named for the surprising discovery in Australia that the swans there were not white, but black.

Co-ownership: People identify themselves as co-owners of an idea if they contributed meaningfully to its development. Co-ownership is one of the strongest forces of human motivation.

Design thinking: thinking like a product developer. It is about understanding, observing, defining a point of view, finding ideas, creating a prototype, testing it, improving it, and repeating this process step by step until the solution is found.

Human Like Organization (HuLiO): It can be helpful to view an organization as analogous to a human being, possessing its own sense of meaning and purpose, striving to reach its full potential, and aspiring to achieve enduring longevity. This applies to companies, HuLiO(c), political organizations, HuLiO(p) and non-governmental organizations HuLiO(n).

Imaginate: To create a clear and vivid mental image of a specific abstract concept by seeing or imagining what others cannot yet perceive. Applied to a scenario, the vivid mental image would include a story of how it came about and what it looks like that is clear enough that one could author a story or make a movie about it.

Intersubjectivity: When people with different perspectives agree on what is real. It shows whether what we perceive to be true may likely to be true.

Learning Organization: An organization which recognizes that its most important competitive advantage lies in continuous learning, and which acts accordingly. A Learning Organization continuously evolves by encouraging and enabling its members to acquire, share, and apply knowledge. It fosters a culture of innovation, adaptability, and collaboration,

allowing it to respond effectively to changes in the environment.

Meaning of life: my self-image, which is derived from my past, my affections and loyalties; from human history as it has been handed down to me; from my talents as well as my insights and knowledge; from the things I believe in; from the things and people I love; from the values for which I am prepared to make sacrifices.

Positive deviation: In every community, there are people whose unconventional behavior has led to solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems. It is important to discover these and win them over for the benefit of the community.

Quantitative blinkers: The danger of self-imposed blindness to the potential for extreme developments in the future by tying the range of one’s analyses to calculated extrapolations of the past. By focusing narrowly on numerical or measurable data and neglecting qualitative, contextual, or subjective factors, one risks ignoring the possibility of extremes. Those who fail to prepare to deal with such extremes are left vulnerable to significant failures should they arise.

Reality: The landscape of the world as it is. Unfortunately, it is only indirectly recognizable to us.

Reality tunnel: What we perceive all around us is not the objective or "real" world, only our own individual reality tunnel, which reflects a construct shaped by our self-created mental maps. These maps show our personal interpretation or "take" on the world, based on how we see or believe we see it. Crucially, the reality tunnel excludes aspects of the real world that we may unconsciously or deliberately ignore. While we can never completely escape our individual reality tunnels, we can work on improving our self-constructed mental maps, by refining and expanding them to better align with the contextual complexities of the actual world.

Rear-view mirror perspective: The opportunities of innovative strategies are easier to recognize and develop if you look back from the future to the present.

Scenario Alert Signals: Subtle indications that a particular scenario is on the verge of becoming reality, signaling the need to activate and implement the strategies prepared in anticipation.

Shock doctrine: Naomi Klein's controversial thesis that the global free market has not triumphed through democratic means and that unchecked capitalism does not automatically lead to democracy. She argues that over the last 70 years, Western politics has repeatedly relied on violence and orchestrated shocks to impose its perspectives on the world.

Siamese Twins: Our reality tunnels are inextricably linked to our purpose in life. If you change your reality tunnel, you also change your purpose in life and vice versa.

Stakeholders: Interest groups, persons, corporations, or institutions that are directly or indirectly affected by the activities of an organization and attempt to influence it in return.

Storyboard: The concrete visualization of an evolving story, movie, or scenario with its details. In Scenario Planning Extreme, it is used to visualize scenarios with their most important trends and their development from the current situation 25 years into the future.

Time caravan of consent: Temporal sequence of social and organizational changes. The trendsetters lead the way, followed later by the early adopters and later again by most trend followers. Perennial skeptics bring up the rear with a long delay.

Unfreeze – change – refreeze: The process by which groups open themselves up to consider change, identify new behaviors that better reflect their needs and interests, and integrate these behaviors as a permanent part of their future conduct. This approach is widely recognized as the most effective method to create lasting social change and is equally applicable to drive transformation within organizations.

Foreword by Charles Hampden-Turner

Planning has a rather checkered history and a blemished reputation. A planned economy is identified with politicians "seizing the commanding heights of an economy," and imposing socialism. Autocratic governments that demand people obey also expect events to be controllable by them. They are especially hostile to market turbulence. One thousand tractors rust in the field because a bureaucrat forgot to order a No. 7 lug-head bolt. Had its price been allowed to rise the bolts would have manifested themselves. The Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries were all planned economies, and we all saw what happened to them once the Wall came down.

Over the next fifteen years virtually every department of Long-rage Planning in the US closed. When one or two global corporations dominated in the style of IBM, then it was possible to plan, and the future was doing more of what you had done in the past. But when there is a dozen or more competitors and East Asia is on the march, then straight-line trajectories of different companies collide with unforeseeable impacts. We have moved into a VUCA world. The letters stand for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. To forecast is to steam full ahead though an ocean of icebergs. You will collide and sink. Those who plan often mistake their expectations and their iron fists for what is actually happening. Autocrats are especially prone to error.

It looked very much as if we had to give up on planning all together. Those extolling markets counselled that we stand like Venus’s flytraps, snapping shut at any insect that approached. All you could really do was react. Short-termism was the order of the day. Markets were like bumper cars, with bangs and shouts. Luckily, there were at least two major institutions who felt they could not give up on planning long-term. The US defense department and its consulting partner the Hudson Institute were spending and collecting billions of dollars and Royal Dutch Shell faced a Middle East that was a tinder box of animosities. Great powers tried to assure their oil supplies by arming proxies to the hilt. What would happen next baffled everyone and Israel, a European enclave, was the potential detonator.

Yet in any conflict there will be winners, losers, those who persist—and very occasionally a negotiated settlement. It is possible to imagine three to four such outcomes and make ready for any of them to occur. It follows that another approach to planning is to make ready for all four contingencies, with a scenario for each of them as events develop. You then rely on the scenario that is more nearly coming true. Two years before this writer joined Group Planning at Shell, it had warned that OPEC might form a form a cartel and raise prices. Shell was prepared for this and gained considerably from this intelligence. Three years later group planning employed more than sixty people and two Harvard Business School professors and every Operating Organization prepared national scenarios to fit within the global ones they had been given.

It is important to realize that neither Shell nor the Pentagon gambles on which scenario will come true. You do not bet on your organization or nation. The point is to prosper whichever scenario comes true and be ready for each and all. Even if a scenario is "bad," being ready for it gives you a distinct advantage, like a ship that battens its hatches before a storm. Shell had a department for strategy, but these were now road tested against different scenarios and were expected to find advantages in each one. Every scenario was a narrative, an imagined end-state, with a story about how we got there from here. A current argument can have different outcomes or alternative futures.

One of the major characteristics of scenarios is that for the most part they are wrong. At best only one in three or four scenarios will come true and even that, true only in part. It seems to a lot of trouble to take over, being mostly wrong. Except that being wrong is an important part of learning, perhaps the main part. What we notice in life are differences between what we expected and what came about. When we are correct, we are at first satisfied, even complacent, but thereafter cease to notice. If you wrap someone up in a warm cocoon, which has the same temperature as the person's blood, then differences disappear and within a remarkably short time, a matter of hours, intelligence deteriorates sharply followed by consciousness. We are aware of where our skin stops, and our environment starts and when that borderline is obscured, mental processes deteriorate severely.

If you are watching the news on TV, then it is what you did not expect that registers. You must make hundreds of guesses in order to stay alert and what you notice are the discrepancies. When we commit an embarrassing faux pas, we remember for days! Being wrong most of the time is essential to keep asking questions, which is why skepticism plays such a key role in science. You assume you are wrong as the path to verification. When we researched those in Shell who had worked with scenarios, we found that they were much more alert and knowledgeable about current affairs. Whenever do you witness an event, you ask yourself, what longer-term scenario does this apply?

Many of us are familiar with ambiguous pictures, the ascending staircase that curiously then starts to descend. But when asked to draw this most of us could not do it. We have no map or scene in our minds as to how this contradiction operates. We would need to stare long and hard at the original. But scenarios give us this map and when it happens, we can recognize it and know what to do. We can see that which we have mapped in advance. When those born blind have their sight restored, they can at first recognize only what they once touched. We learn how to see. Adults with as much as five years of normal sight cannot "see” or even describe the front of a car. When blind no one let them linger there and they never felt it. Scenarios teach us to see. They are mental models of what is otherwise strange. Puppies or kittens raised in a box of horizontal stripes, cannot "see" a vertical shape for several days and bump into chair legs and table legs. We see what we can encounter.

Scenarios are the secret of resilience, of being bowled over by events yet being ready to pick yourself up and carry on. It is how we rally from setback that matters in the VUCA world. We quake over the Wizard of Oz and his fire breathing image until we spot that elderly man pulling levers. Scenarios de-mystify and see through shock doctrines.

I very much hope you enjoy this book. The author is particularly profound on this topic.

Welcome to Scenario Planning Extreme

The secret of success lies in

being ready when

the opportunity presents itself.

Benjamin Disraeli

Our world is characterized by radical changes1 including Black Swans2. Changes we did not think possible yesterday are shaping our lives today. The industrial history of the last 50 years is full of examples of companies that dominated their market but refused to accept the possibility of exponential change, even when they witnessed it, until they failed.

Scenario Planning Extreme is a surprising answer to the question of how we should plan for the long-term future of 25 years even though we cannot know what it will look like. We "Imaginate” several vastly different futures at the same time and then prepare strategies for each one. Scenario Planning Extreme deliberately focuses on extreme futures that we often ignore for a variety of reasons.

Quantitative methods are useful for short to medium-term planning in times of moderate change. However, even the best mathematical formulas fail when it comes to exponential changes. This also applies to the scenario technique/method known in German-speaking countries, which is significantly tied to quantitative trend analyses.

Our answer to the question of how we can prepare for extreme changes is this book on Scenario Planning Extreme. It shows how we can prepare for exponential change in today’s world. It deliberately focuses on imagination and diversity of perspectives that reflect as much as possible the diversity of the world in which organizations must prepare for their future. The approach works with purely intersubjective, qualitative means, meaning it relies on the perceptions of a highly diverse group of individuals, free of quantitative methods that intentionally or unintentionally limit the breadth of future possibilities considered and with which organizations effectively put blinkers on themselves. As we shall see, this can lead to catastrophic consequences. Future possibilities cannot be restricted. The future will be what it will be, whether we like it or not.

In Scenario Planning Extreme, we imaginate the space of all possible futures and usually develop four vastly different scenarios as reference points. This is comparable to triangulation used in creating maps. Scenario Planning Extreme can be carried out by all interested, committed, curious and unbiased teams in ten easy-to-understand steps. This approach has proven itself repeatedly in seminars at various universities for many years. The aim of Scenario Planning Extreme is to develop strategies with which the opportunities and threats corresponding to the respective scenarios can be recognized and exploited; because even in threatening times, billions in profits can be made, as George Soros3 has shown repeatedly.

Scenario Planning Extreme operates within an open-ended world of imagination that is visualized using qualitative examples, analogies and metaphors. These alternate in the book with descriptions of the step-by-step development of future scenarios and the corresponding success strategies.

To describe this with a metaphor: Reading our book is like a ski run of varied activities where the Scenario Planning Extreme approach is our ski run down the slope of a mountain. The challenging mountain we must ski down represents our own reality tunnels, because we can only imaginate reality indirectly through the ideas we have constructed of it. Our reality tunnels contain many mental crevices, cliffs and trees that can abruptly end our descent. Instead of barreling down the mountain of our reality tunnels in a straight line, we glide down in many enjoyable S-curves and thus arrive safely in the valley of future opportunities, with new knowledge and a reality tunnel that is closer to reality. We can then utilize these "learning loops" to our advantage. This makes our book both an instruction manual for Scenario Planning Extreme and a kaleidoscope of examples of human thinking, wishful thinking and action. The first concerns the question: How do you conduct a Scenario Planning Extreme project? The second sheds light on how we can continuously refine our reality tunnels to better approximate reality itself.

Part I describes the conceptual underpinnings of Scenario Planning Extreme and the insights into how we perceive the world.

Part II describes how Scenario Planning Extreme is conducted in ten clear and comprehensible steps. How do you conduct such a project? Our recommendations concern both the planning and execution of Scenario Planning Extreme seminars and the subsequent implementation of the approach in organizations. They reflect experiences in the development, organization, and implementation of change in Germany, Europe, and the US from the perspective of a former consultant and decision-maker in business and politics.

And yet every change is new and different. All innovations have their own opportunities and uncertainties and require users to have the courage to find and follow their own path. This is exactly what we wish for our readers. These times of rapid change help those who are ready for new opportunities, to recognize them early on and seize the chance to make effective use of them.

Part III shows how Scenario Planning Extreme can also help us with our individual life planning. It shows us how we can recognize different career options that are attractive and meaningful to us. We also look at two controversial topics that are de facto political taboos: the long-term potential impact of up to a million immigrants arriving in Europe each year from the Middle East and North Africa, and the impact of our current approach to the "war on drugs" as declared initially by US president Richard Nixon. We show how Scenario Planning Extreme can help explore these difficult topics with intent to find reasonable alternatives to the currently unreasonable solutions ... that do more harm than good. If we continue to willfully ignore these growing problems, we may end up being overwhelmed by them eventually.

In the spirit of lifelong learning, we suggest that interested parties use a "Copy Exact" perspective during their first Scenario Planning Extreme project, and in subsequent projects consider how they can adapt the initial approach ever better to the circumstances and needs of their own organization. Ideally, each project should fit the client and their objectives like a tailor-made suit.

Finally, Scenario Planning Extreme can also help us in our daily lives. There is something very liberating about always keeping your eyes open to emerging changes and at the same time thinking about the different options for dealing with them. In this way, we learn that there is more than one way to deal successfully with almost any situation. People spend a lot of money with therapists to slowly realize this insight.

Our industry case studies are described with interest and empathy. The author would of course be delighted if the companies in focus could contribute their internal views on these case studies, which could be included in a future edition of this book.

This book reflects the author’s personal views and his experiences in business and politics. It also describes relevant examples from his life, referring to himself as Martin. This is intended to create an equal relationship between author and reader and engage readers in a shared conversation. When referring to a specific person, we use the term "she," in the same way it has typical for many centuries to use the term "he."

The book presents itself as a mediator of a great idea. It offers practitioners suggestions and encourages them to open themselves up to a wide spectrum of future possibilities. It is more of a fine art than a scientific treatise. Despite over 150 references and personal views, I am happy to leave the scientific anchoring of the topic to future authors.

Scenario Planning Extreme is both simple and difficult at the same time. It is intellectually easy to follow the ten logical steps of its approach. It is emotionally difficult because it also requires us to set aside some of our dearly held beliefs and to take unlikely and even "unacceptable" trends just as seriously as those that confirm our points of view.

Readers who are more comfortable with quantitative methods are invited to embrace the qualitative approach of Scenario Planning Extreme, enjoy the journey, and learn to recognize and appreciate the value of this approach.

Part I Words Teach. Examples Convince.

You can only see well with your heart.

Antoine St. Exupéry

...and sometimes badly.

Martin Gillo

The essential is invisible to the eyes.

Antoine St. Exupéry

... until we also see through the eyes of others,...

including those of our enemies.

Martin Gillo

W e are all convinced that we see reality as it is. But we are mistaken, as Plato warned us with his allegory of the cave. East Asian thinkers expressed this even more blatantly with the parable of the blind men and the elephant. In the story, each blind man can only touch a part of the animal, leading them to misunderstand and fail to recognize the elephant in its entirety.

We often only see what we want to see, e.g., causal connections, even if there are none, but they fit well into our world view. This also applies the other way around. We often do not see what we do not want to see.

Why is that so? Welcome to the world of fears and hopes, likes, and dislikes, the loftiest worldviews and the deepest convictions.

This applies to everyone, including each of us and our beliefs, which have become truths for us. Two people with opposing points of view agree on a test to see who is right. And after the test, both are certain that the test result has confirmed their conviction. For us, this logical contradiction is often the rule. We will show many such examples in this book. Every time we put ourselves "in other people's shoes”, we may realize that we would have acted similarly in their situation, and we can learn from this.

How can we free ourselves from distortions in our views of reality? Can Scenario Planning Extreme help us to achieve this? Yes! Preferably with the perspectives of the Living and the Learning Organizations. More on that later...

1.1 We World Explainers

Everything is based on conjecture.

Marcus Aurelius

Scenario Planning Extreme is one of the means and methods used to prepare for the future and thus profit from it. Let us look at some of the historical ways and means by which we humans have tried to predict the future throughout our long history, some of which we still use today. From today’s perspective, this has led to both amusing misunderstandings and tragic disasters. We describe here the context of all strategic preparations. It is important to understand the uncertainties and misjudgments in any planning.

The desire to explain the world is as old as humanity itself. We want to understand it, rule over and benefit from it and, for some time now, live in harmony with it. This goes hand in hand with the desire to predict the future as successfully as possible, using a wide variety of means and methods.

Humans have always wanted to know where and how best to obtain or produce food, how to optimally use nature including its animals, how to find out where mineral resources can be found and how to utilize them to make their lives easier, how best to make friends with other people or fight against them, how to organize themselves and thus build an empire or how to destroy someone else's. For some time now, we have even been working on understanding our own intelligence to create artificial intelligence and use it to our advantage.

The history of humankind is also the history of predictions ... and very often of failures. Why is that the case?

Invented Reality

With the provocative book title "The Invented Reality", Paul Watzlawick4 confronted us in the 1980s with our inability to recognize reality itself. What we perceive is not reality itself, but only a reality tunnel made up of mental maps that we have constructed of it and that we can improve during our lives – provided we make an active effort to do so. A generation later, Thomas Metzinger5 describes this as our "ego tunnel" from which we cannot escape, a very apt term.

In the context of Scenario Planning Extreme, we will use the term "reality tunnel" as originally proposed by Timothy Leary6, because it emphasizes that it is up to us to constantly re-construct it to closer approximate reality. The walls of our reality tunnels consist of our mental maps of what we think is reality. Reality is the landscape itself. Since we cannot see the landscape, we can only act according to our self-constructed reality tunnels.

We define the concept of reality tunnels via the detour of the definition of the meaning of life, as inspiringly formulated by John W. Gardner:7

"Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning to you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account. "8 (underlining mine)

Our definition of the reality tunnel follows this literally:

We construct our reality tunnels ourselves in our minds from the following elements:

Our past

Our affections and loyalties

The history of humankind as it has been handed down to us.

Our competences, preferences, and choices:

Our talents, insights, and knowledge.

The things we choose to believe in.

The things and the people we love.

The values for which we are prepared to make sacrifices.

We juxtapose the individual meaning of life and the individual reality tunnel intentionally. For us, they are Siamese Twins. This makes it clear why our constructed maps in our tunnels of reality are always a mixture of facts and ideas, of truth and wishful thinking. Of the ten elements of our definition of the reality tunnel, only three are based on information. If our reality tunnel is confronted with a contradiction, its Siamese Twin, meaning of life, wants to defend itself – and vice versa, as we will see.

Our reality tunnel quickly creates a distorted picture of reality as soon as it

Calls our loyalties into question.

Threatens the order and institutions we believe in.

Makes people we love appear in a bad light.

Calls the values to which we are committed into question.

Seems to shake our sense and the very meaning of our life.

For such situations, our reality tunnel has developed numerous defense mechanisms, often invisible to us, which can prevent us from recognizing contradictions between the reality tunnel and reality itself. For example, those who see their working environment threatened by trends find it easy to play them down or even deny them, as we will show.

But reality does not care about our reality tunnels. Reality is what it is. It is up to us to constantly work on adapting our reality tunnels to the constantly changing real reality landscape so that we can be successful in it, no matter how it changes. Fortunately, there is a wide variety of individual reality tunnels. Even in a conformist society, there will always be people who have the courage to speak out when they think the emperor's new clothes are fictitious. They may not reach those loyal to the emperor, but many others will feel liberated and validated in their own reality tunnels, that differed from the narrative prescribed by the emperor.

Most people are not aware that they only see their own reality tunnels. It takes courage and lifelong learning to become and remain aware of one's imperfect reality tunnel character and to work on getting closer and closer to the constantly changing world through lifelong testing, tuning, and learning. It helps to view your own reality tunnel as a prototype model that can and should be constantly tested through failure and adapted to reality.

Two examples may help to illustrate the difference between reality tunnel and reality, between map and landscape. In the automotive industry, navigation systems were first introduced by luxury brands. Martin recalls a report that a driver drove his BMW into a river in northern Germany at night because his navigation system indicated a bridge over the river. However, it was a ferry. The navigation device did not match the reality. The driver complained to BMW and demanded compensation. A spokesperson for BMW replied something like this: 'We are pleased about the acceptance of our navigation devices, but we also assume that drivers pay attention to the road.’ A truck driver in Switzerland had a similar experience in 2010.9 In both cases, the drivers confused the map with the landscape. This is akin to mistaking the signpost for the destination.

If we want to be and remain successful in life, we should constantly put the mental maps in our reality tunnels to the test by learning in a safe environment and trying to consciously let them fail and then improve them to succeed in the real world. We consider Scenario Planning Extreme to be one of the best tools to achieve this.

It is easy for our reality tunnels to approximate reality when it comes to recurring, repeatable processes. In areas where we have little or no experience, they can quickly become and remain unrealistic. This holds especially true for the prediction of an uncertain future.

Seductive Past Success: AT&T, IBM, Nokia

Hanging on to past success is one of the worst business world's errors. It makes organizations overestimate the robustness of their success recipes and underestimate the potential impact of change on their world. Even the best quantitative methods for planning the future do not change the principle that the future is unknown and open eventually. It surprises us repeatedly. It cannot be predicted, and yet we keep trying. The history of industrial revolutions is littered with examples of catastrophic misjudgments about the impact of groundbreaking innovations, especially by companies that were previously successful. Below we will look at three companies: IBM, AT&T, and Nokia. Every company is liable to make catastrophic mistakes, even large global corporations like these three. We will learn about some of their strategic failures from Martin's perspective of the US semiconductor industry, i.e., from outside the three companies.

IBM and the PC: IBM10 was founded in 1911 and is now active in 175 countries with a focus on computers, services, software, supercomputers, and research. The corporation holds over 150,000 patents, six Nobel Prizes and six Turing Prizes11. But it, too, occasionally makes catastrophic mistakes, two of which we will take a closer look at now.

When it comes to quantitative planning, no one can second best IBM. For decades, this corporate giant had been the most successful computer manufacturer in the world. Its mainframe computers made the American Apollo moon landing possible. All through the 1980s, its products were a permanent fixture in every major computer center in the Western world.