Growth is often a significant factor of complexity leading to business crisis. Uncontrolled decisions giving rise to higher business assets or activity volumes may generate shortages in available resources, in spite of increasing revenues.

Decision-makers often do not take into account the evolving structure of relationships between different functional areas inside the firm, and between the company and its relevant environment. Most managers never discuss the future. They are too much focused on reducing the complexity of managing today. The implicit vision of the future they create in their mind tends to be set and unchanging. Human beings are subject to biases and imperfect reasoning about uncertainty. They tend to misperceive events that are quite unlikely and to ignore or stress other possible unpleasant outcomes. Today, business complexity has proved to be a primary cause of failure. Understanding complexity is not a matter of reducing it. It is, rather, important to deal with management complexity and unpredictability, and to foster organisational learning.

Understanding business systems does not imply the need to draw up detailed and long term plans. Planning does not usually mean learning to anticipate possible futures. It is, instead, typically seen as the work of reducing uncertainty through prediction. Decision-making based on such an approach gives an illusion of control.

Many companies use spreadsheet simulation tools to forecast the financial implications of plans. Quite often, such analyses are based on simplistic and misleading hypotheses that can lead decision makers to dangerous conclusions. In fact, usually such tools do not make explicit interdependencies between relevant variables, delays, non-linearities and policy levers.

Scenario analysis is a tool to support organisational learning and decision-making during times of rapid strategic change, when discontinuities in the business environment make extrapolation from available historical data misleading or meaningless. Through scenario analysis decision-makers are able to focus the relevant environment and to generate a spanning set of alternative futures, upon which strategic analysis and diagnosis will be developed.

Scenario planning can be successfully implemented through the use of system dynamics simulation models, linked with spreadsheet accounting-based tools. The system dynamics methodology allows decision-makers to make their mental models explicit, to assess their consistency and improve them.

Computer-aided visioning tools, based on the system dynamics methodology, are designed to provide not accurate predictions of the future, but a realistic and engaging vehicle to stimulate managers into reconsidering the ways of doing things and perhaps to adjust their mental models. Different stakeholders in the firm can then compare and share their new emerging view of, for example, how to prepare for major change.

More information
on scenario planning

Attending the workshop will enable you to:

• Develop an attitude to properly perceive management phenomena in a systems and dynamic perspective;
• Improve the capability of detecting policy levers critical to business growth;
• Acquire an attitude for modelling systems underlying growth processes;
• Increase an ability to detect effects generated by management current decisions on business longer term growth;
• Build dynamic simulation models to support the evaluation of different management policies, according to alternative scenarios;
• Develop skills in matching the accounting with the system dynamics perspective;
• Using microworlds supporting a continuous experimentation in a free–risk environment, concerning possible scenarios for the future.
• Understanding how system dynamics models can be introduced as a tool to manage business growth, concerning both organisational and control issues;
• Learning the basic principles of the System Dynamics methodology.

The workshop is intended for:

• Entrepreneurs;
• Managers involved in strategic and financial planning;
• Management consultants;
• Scholars and researchers in strategic planning and control issues.

No computer skills are required to participants.

The approach

The three-day workshop has been designed to provide participants with an empirical understanding of how to apply system dynamics as a methodology to enhance scenario planning based on strategic modelling and organisational learning.

The sessions will be based on team-working during which the case method will be also applied to participants’ own problems.

Teaching staff

• Program director: Carmine Bianchi

Associate Professor of Business Management (Universities of Foggia and Palermo, Italy)
Scientific co-ordinator of CUSA - System Dynamics Group, Palermo
Associate Editor of the System Dynamics Review
Consultant in management control systems and system dynamics modelling
E-mail: bianchi@unipa.it

• Teaching assistant: Enzo Bivona

Master Phil. in System Dynamics (University of Bergen, Norway)
Doctoral Student in business management (University of Catania, Italy)
Researcher of CUSA - System Dynamics Group, Palermo

• Guest professors:

Professor of System Dynamics (University of Bergen, Norway)
Director of the Master Phil. in System Dynamics (University of Bergen, Norway)
Consultant in system dynamics modelling in major European and American companies

Professor of Business Analysis (University of Plymouth, England) Editor of the System Dynamics Review
Consultant in system dynamics modelling in major European and American companies

The official language will be in English

Workshop venue

The workshop will be held at Grand Hotel Villa Igiea

Fees and cancellation
Registration fees

The fee includes:
- tuition;
- all education materials;
- accommodation 3 nights B&B: hotel Joli (3 stars cat.);
- coffee breaks and lunch;
- welcome dinner;

If a candidate withdraws more than five weeks before the opening date of the workshop, there is not charge. For written cancellations received between two and four weeks before the workshop, 70% of the fee is due. If a written cancellation is received less than two weeks before the start of the workshop or if the candidate does not attend, the entire fee is due.

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