Surviving and prospering in challenging business environments - Combining roadmapping and scenario analysis
Due to the COVID-19 crisis the PhD defence of Remco Siebelink will take place (partly) online.
The PhD defence can be followed by a live stream.
Remco Siebelink is a PhD student in the research group Entrepreneurship and Technology Management (ETM). His supervisor is prof.dr.ir. J.I.M. Halman from the Faculty of Engineering Technology and his co-supervisor is dr.ir. E. Hofman from the Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences (BMS).
The sustained survival and prosperity of firms is threatened by various challenges. First, economic environments are increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, limiting the ability of decision makers to predict and anticipate future developments. Second, in order to survive and prosper in these contexts, firms need to balance their investments in both exploitative and explorative strategic options – where exploitative options ensure short-term success and explorative options target long-term survival and prosperity. Third, decision makers are limited in their attention: they cannot sense all relevant issues in their business environment, and they do not consider all appropriate responses. Notably, they tend to focus attention on issues and answers that are in line with their current business practices and their current world view. Finally, strategy tools support decision makers in devising coherent strategies. Tools highlight the issues and answers that decision makers should focus their attention on – further limiting attention or broadening it. Hence, selecting the right strategy tools – and individuals – is key for the sustained success of firms in today’s challenging business environments.
In response to these challenges, the dissertation contributes by proposing a combination of two strategy tools, roadmapping and scenario analysis. In particular, this study has strengthened understanding of how roadmapping and scenario analysis may be combined and applied so that the sustained success of firms in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous business environments has enhanced feasibility.
The dissertation verifies that scenario analysis is an appropriate tool for broadening the attention of decision makers to issues in their environment and to strategic options they would otherwise never detect. In this regard, the tool facilitates the identification of highly novel, explorative strategic options that are key to future success in challenging economic environments: scenario analysis breaks through the bias of decision makers that favors options that optimize current business activities. Indeed, the dissertation shows that selecting individuals with a specific set of cognitive capabilities to generate strategic options following scenario analysis greatly increases the odds of obtaining highly novel strategic options – and also highly valuable and exploitative strategic options.
Still, the dissertation recommends firms use both scenario analysis and conventional SWOT analysis in order to benefit from their specific characteristics and effects. Afterwards, firms need to devise a coherent course of action that seeks to create value for the long term as well as the short term. In other words, firms need to compile a specific combination of strategic options that promises great value. This dissertation explains that a roadmap is a valuable strategy tool to support firms in this process; it details a firm’s transformation over time, ensuring that the attention of decision makers is focused on alignment and coherence across various critical elements of a strategy as well as to its implementation. In short, a roadmap helps to achieve intertemporal, coherent, and clear strategic decisions. Essentially, the dissertation argues for the adoption of a real-options approach in which both robust and flexible elements are incorporated into the roadmap. This approach delivers an effective combination of roadmapping and scenario analysis.
