Overview & Comments

The Australian Business Foundation chose the scenario planning tool to help make sense of how the future could pan out for businesses, and to assist all those involved to anticipate and adapt to change, whether it is an unpredictable external shock or an as yet unimagined new opportunity.

The critical questions addressed by the Australian Business Foundation in this project were:

• what are the alternative, plausible scenarios for the future of business in Australia? and
• what are the most robust strategies, based on these scenarios, that maximise our ability to generate wealth and jobs, to integrate into global markets and to contribute to a rising standard of living for the Australian community as a whole?

The summary report of the Alternative Futures: Scenarios for Business in Australia to the Year 2015 details the four alternative scenarios that were developed.

After considering many different drivers of change, trends, forces and uncertainties, we came up with four possible worlds. Each worldview, or scenario, is independent from the others, although they all share common ground. The common ground included trends like the growth of information and telecommunications technology, globalisation of financial markets, and the advent of new technologies, as described above. We understood that a precondition for our future was an accelerating pace of change, and change of fundamental significance to business and society. We recognised the power of the complex interactions between people, technologies and the consumer drivers of technology applications, and the ramifications of these interactions for how businesses compete for the customer. We understood the importance of the opening Chinese economy, with its formidable ability to manufacture and supply large volumes of products at low cost and high speed into world markets, and its increasing ability to utilise high technology and achieve high quality. And we factored in demographic changes at home and abroad.

1. First Global Nation describes a successful Australia which adapts with flair and flexibility to the globalisation of world business and the challenges of an online knowledge economy.
2. Sound the Retreat sees a world in which geopolitical instability and cultural and social backlash override the benefits of economic globalisation, forcing Australia to revalue its bilateral business relationships as multilateral ones became impossible.
3. Brave Old World is a picture of Australia where our comfortable lifestyles, economic performance, adequate social security systems and laconic approach to the future conceal the need for strategic and concerted effort to make the transition to the global knowledge economy until it is too late.
4. Green is Gold looks at how global agreements on environmental management imperatives play out in Australia for business and the community at large.

By 2015, of course, the world will have evolved rather differently from any one of the 1999 scenarios. There is no such thing as an infallible forecast. But understanding each of the worlds created here will help us come to terms with the complexities of living and working in the present.

The full report of Alternative Futures: Scenarios for Business in Australia to the Year 2015 outlines in detail each of the steps used to develop the four alternative scenarios of Australia. The value of the full report is in its intricate account of the systematic process and methodologies used in scenario planning.

Fashioning these alternative scenarios is just the first step. The intention is to provoke reactions and thoughtful commentary from the widest possible range of audiences throughout Australia.
People are asked to reflect on three key questions:

1. How robust or at risk is Australia, given these scenarios?
2. What are the critical responses Australia needs to make?
3. What do you and your sector/business/organisation/community need to do?

Why Scenario Planning

Scenario planning is a tool used by many businesses to develop creative responses to existing and future challenges. This project is about looking beyond the bottom line, beyond the end of the next financial year, beyond the annual report to shareholders. It is about Australians, and especially those involved in business in Australia, engaging intellectually with possibilities for the future, and coming up with responses that can shape that future.

This project was not undertaken with the aim of removing doubt, nor of predicting the future, nor even of wanting to 'get it right'. Rather, it was designed to help those involved with business in Australia — governments, investors, consumers, the young, educationalists, families and employees — to think more deeply about the role of business in Australia's future and to create sustainable strategies for business and social success. These scenarios on alternatives for business in Australia focus specifically on building views of the future which address the question: what can we do to maximise our ability to generate wealth and jobs, to integrate into global markets, and to contribute to a rising standard of living for the Australian community as a whole?

The Process

Developing the scenarios involved research, consultation, analysis and commentary from a wide range of business, social and educational specialists. The scenarios were many months in the making and represent the distillation of material gathered through media monitoring, literature searches, research, opinion sampling, interviews with experts and focus groups.

To answer the question posed above, a key step was identifying the 'drivers of change', both for Australia and globally. Once these drivers had been identified, we could then move on to look at how these drivers might affect Australia into the future (in this case, 15 years into the future). This brought us to an examination of the four scenarios presented here, and hopefully the development of new ideas and approaches which can enable Australia as a community to achieve not only the most productive future for business in Australia, but the one that delivers the greatest benefits for all Australians.

Drivers for change

In undertaking this project, we considered many trends, forces for change and critical uncertainties: the 'drivers for change'. These are both factors which are operating now and those which are foreseeable over the next 15 years.

Australia as a taker rather than shaper
Globalisation and economic reform
Environment and sustainability
Technology and the interconnected world
Knowledge economy and innovation
Australian economic and social policies

The Australian Business Foundation, in initiating this alternative business scenarios project, sought to achieve the following:

• add more substance to our knowledge about possible futures for Australian business and so enhance our ability to create a more prosperous Australia with benefits for all;
• dramatically expand the debate and the mindsets about the best economic and industry policy settings needed for Australia to compete globally;
• provide business with more knowledge to underpin their risk management and strategic planning decisions and their assessments of opportunities for new markets, technological advances and further market penetration; and
• contribute a thoughtful and cogent business perspective to dialogues in the media and the wider community about the kind of society we want to create as we approach a new century and a new millennium.

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