It’s always easier after a difficult time has passed to think ‘shoulda woulda coulda’, and our sector definitely saw that during the pandemic. I saw many cases where some strategic planning, advance warning, some kind of mechanism could have helped an organisation better adapt to or learn from a difficult time. It can be something as small as an exchange rate issue that’s completely out of your hands, down to how happy your staff are which affects your ‘turnover’ and therefore stability. With a little bit of planning it makes the response a little easier. I really like scenario planning’s open-ended approach to challenges – big and small.

Scenario planning allows you to envision and plan multiple future scenarios. You can think about larger challenges and opportunities that could affect your context like upcoming elections. Then think about proactive decisions or options to respond in case a party that could threaten your work is elected in – which makes you proactive rather than reactive. It’s not about finding every single possible outcome of your upcoming national elections for example, but maybe thinking about the best and worst case scenarios, possibly some in the middle, and at least being aware of what you would like to do if they arise.

Here’s a quick guide to get you started:

• Identify factors: Begin by identifying the critical drivers or factors that could significantly impact your context. These could include political changes, funding sources, technological advancements, and social trends.

• Plan it out: Create a set of scenarios based on different combinations of these key drivers. Ensure these scenarios are plausible, challenging, and different – a combination of the above types of scenarios for example.

• [Optional] Research: You may need further information to help you think about strategies – like speaking to partner organisations, or doing a political analysis using this example of elections: what happened last time, what are the news outlets predicting will happen?

• Evaluate causes and effects: Evaluate how they’d affect your work, context, maybe your relationships with others, and your communities – think about the short, medium and long term, using a cause-and-effect analysis to draw lines between activity A and what it could lead to.

• Responses: Think about how you could and would respond to these situations – this could either be strategies or, if your context could be significantly threatened by the upcoming election, start to get an action plan together with specific steps.

• Monitor: As always, you should regularly take stock of what you’ve done to help protect your worn and update these strategies, as your context evolves. Scenario planning is an ongoing and adaptive process, not a one-off.

You’ll need support from your organisation’s leadership, communities if relevant, and maybe even donors. So take some time to think about the best ways you’d like to respond to the identified threats, and think about best- and worst-case scenarios to respond.

You may not be able to get your donor to support a series of public awareness campaigns to reassure your community of your support if the election goes badly, but could you instead put together some press statements and social media posts?

Think about the bare minimum you would need, and what the ‘would be nice to haves’ would be. This includes thinking about the resources – including financial – that would need to go into that response.