These tools are formatted to help leadership teams develop and document up to three scenarios and associated assumptions for your organization’s future. These scenarios may be strategic in nature (“what would happen if we expanded a program?”) or responsive in nature (“what would we do if we lost a major funding source?”). This Rapid Response Scenario Planning tool is divided into five sections, and it may take multiple work sessions to complete all of them:
- Act, Monitor, and Adapt: outline next steps and decision points that will help your organization track and adapt.
- Set Guiding Principles & Timeline: outline overarching principles or goals that any scenario should adhere to—the “non-negotiables.”
- Summarize Current Position: document the current knowns and unknowns of your organization’s situation. A few key metrics will provide a high-level view useful for scenario planning.
- Define Scenarios: list internal decisions and external changes on a likelihood/impact matrix to inform the establishment of scenarios. Then, describe up to three distinct scenarios for the organization’s path forward, including notes about how programs, revenue generation, operations, workforce, and other major activities may change under each scenario (as well as any remaining unknowns).
- Run the Numbers: quantify the impact of each scenario on your organization’s financial picture. This is not a full budgeting process, but rather a high-level look at the most significant financial implications of each scenario.
The accompanying template is intended to be used for projecting an organization’s operating results across the budgeted or forecasted period for up to three different potential scenarios.
Download the identification tool. Then, customize the template to your circumstances.