Beyond the Five-Year Plan: Alexander Friton on Scenario Thinking
Most companies have a strategy. Far fewer have a picture of the future. Alexander Friton, Managing Director of Qesar, explains that this is true of many companies in mechanical engineering, and that scenario thinking can close that gap.
In two short conversations with the Futurewise Company, Alexander explains what scenarios add to strategy work. He also shares why developments that seemed merely plausible to him two years ago now feel very real.
Strategy without a future
Alexander is candid about where they started. For a long time, nobody really asked how industry, mechanical engineering and special-purpose machinery would evolve, or what role a partnership should play in that future. “We just didn’t ask those questions.”
Planning started from the present, with a horizon of three to five years at most. Nobody looked ten or twenty years ahead. “It may sound like a contradiction,” he says, “but we work on strategy without really thinking about the future.”
Carina Stöttner sums up the gap: strategy is derived from the here and now, or from the past, instead of being shaped by several possible futures. “And that was what was missing.”
Scenarios bring structure to your thinking
For Alexander, the first benefit of scenarios is clarity. “First of all, it structures your thinking,” he says. You’re working with several options, each with its own set of conditions.
That lets him see exactly where he stands. If these conditions hold, the future could look like this. If they change, or if he starts from different assumptions, it might look completely different.
The result is a set of three, four or five scenarios he can weigh side by side. Sometimes the answer turns out to be a combination of two, but that comes later. First he thinks each scenario through on its own, and only then decides whether his future matches one of them or a mix.
Only then comes the practical question: “What does this mean for my company, for my strategy, for the company’s future?” For him, the benefit is twofold: he covers a whole range of possibilities, and he does so in a structured way.
When “plausible” becomes real
Alexander connects this to what he sees happening around him. He remembers a chart Carina showed in one of her talks at Qesar on the fragmentation of the political landscape. Twenty years ago, things were fairly stable, with three or four parties. Today there are many more, and the results of the once-large and once-small parties are much closer together. That means more frequent changes of government, which is exactly what he’s seeing now. Her point back then, that companies could no longer count on a steady political course and should take matters into their own hands, has increasingly become reality.
He sees business owners doing exactly that and turning their focus inward. They concentrate on what they can control and shrug off the rest: “It’s out of our hands anyway.” The external conditions are still there, he says, but they matter less, “or at least they’ve lost some of their power to frustrate us.”
That’s exactly why scenarios matter so much to him. Because external conditions are harder to predict than they used to be, companies need to ask what that means for the future and which scenarios might follow.
When Carina raised this two years ago, it felt to him “plausible, but not quite real yet.” Today he says: “Okay, this is real now. We’re already there.”
Look further ahead, check in more often
A longer horizon doesn’t mean waiting decades to find out whether you were right. Even with a long-term perspective, Alexander says, you can check after two years whether you’re on track or need to adjust course a little.
His advice to other leaders is clear: “Look further into the future, and review more often to see whether it still fits.”
And what if things turn out completely differently? For him, that’s part of it too: you have to learn to break out of familiar templates and patterns.
For leaders rethinking their own approach, his experience offers three lessons:
- Build strategy from several possible futures, not just forward from the present.
- Develop several scenarios first, and only combine them once each one has been fully thought through.
- Pair a long horizon with regular reviews, and be willing to break out of familiar patterns.
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