Educating Future Managers for Developing Resilient Organizations: The Role of Scenario Planning

Abstract

Managers play an important role in creating organizational resilience. In highly volatile and uncertain times they must employ long-term visioning, think in alternatives, and deal with complexity in order to promote organizational resilience capabilities. However, strategic management education has been criticized for not providing significant learning experiences that equip them with those capabilities adequately. It still teaches outdated frameworks that do not meet the needs of today’s complex environment and that are not truly considering real problems of strategy. One way to confront these limitations could be a learning intervention that combines a future-oriented strategy framework with a subsequent experiential learning experience. We use a qualitative research design with an experimental character to contrast student groups that were part of a combined learning intervention (a lecture on scenario planning and a case study work) with student groups that only took part in the case study work. Our video-based analysis shows that the first are consistently superior in terms of the strategy process (structure and outcome), performance outcomes (accuracy, plausibility, creativity, and transferability), and learning outcomes. The analysis further shows a positive influence on resilience capabilities such as anticipation and sensemaking.