La Administracion Episcolar

The futures-thinking exercise and strategic scenario building was carried out in France from March 1994 to December 1995, under the direction of Planning and the leadership of Professor Michel Godet. Until recently scenario planning was restricted, albeit unofficially, to a few specific sectors where long-term heavy investment was the norm, e.g. air and rail transportation, electricity, aluminiumand petroleum production. In fact most service companies did not see the need to hold futures-thinking exercises. Gradually, however, interest arose in the telecommunications and computer sectors. Soon areas like finance and tourism joined in because they too experienced growing uncertainty about the future given the threefold bind of deregulation, economic problems, and market globalization.Certain forward-looking pioneers stood out from the start. One was Axa France, a leader in insurance. Axa France is actually an umbrella company for all the French subsidiaries of the Axa insurance group. In the early 1990s, the French entities had decided to look to the future in order to prepare the traditional four-year plan (1996-2000). The previous plan (1992-1996) had focused exclusively ongreater rationalization ofresources and the reorganization of the new Axa, which had expanded through many buy-outs.

Given the company's objectives and focus on distribution, Axa's 1992-1996 plan had not taken into account how the general or competitive environment would evolve. The new plan (1996-2000) would, however, take into account the international objectives of Axa, its quality andprofitability directives. Moreover, with a ten-year future horizon, the plan would integrate external challenges more readily and set the strategic course for the five years immediately following (1996-2000). Note that the futures-thinking exercise took place two years before Axa and UAP (Union des Assurances de Paris) merged.

A Pragmatic Approach

The procedure that Axa France adopted reflectshow futures-thinking exercises have evolved and been applied to planning within major corporations. Today's companies have less time to think and feel an almost urgent need to act. Hence our mandate sounds increasingly like a bad self-help book — "how to conduct a meaningful exercise with managers on major future trends and uncertainties that is both coherent and realistic". In other words, whatcan we really achieve in six working meetings? Axa France, a relatively recently established group known for its rapid integration of numerous acquisitions as well as its mobile and highly decentralized structure, could not consider anything time- or labor-intensive, like a specialized department that would require divesting and reallocating directors from various subsidiaries to take part in theprocess. On the contrary, the idea was to encourage the company's general managers to work together. The overall goal was to look to the future with a shared vision as they identified threats, opportunities and potential bifurcations thus preparing for expected changes and hopefully fostering desirable changes while fighting feared changes. In short, participants would have to identify possiblefutures and pinpoint which ofthese would be the most probable. The horizon adopted was 2005. Given the nine-month deadline, we opted for efficiency and selected two main tools from the futures toolbox, structural analysis to find key variables and actors' strategies to explore possible changes. Three other methods mentioned in earlier chapters were also used, namely the futures workshops,morphological analysis and the Smic-Prob- Expert.
As emphasized earlier, selecting a methodology (workshops or structural analysis) to determine key variables is not a goal in itself.

The first objective is to encourage participants to express their vision of the future. Otherwise this underlying future vision remains implicit. It is only by verbalizing that vision that the group can gain greater...