What is the significance of corporate policy in today’s changing
scenario?
Ans ;
Scenario planning is a tool originally used
by the military. A group of analysts generate different scenarios (often in the
form of games) which combine known facts about the future (such as
demographics, geography, military, political and industrial information, and
mineral reserves), with possible social, technical and political trends.
In the 1970s, many
energy companies were surprised by the shock caused by the Middle East wars and
changes within OPEC and lost billions of dollars as a result. The dramatic
financial effects of these changes led at least one organization, Royal Dutch
Shell, implementing scenario planning. In retrospect, it is not clear that
Shell's use of scenario planning gave the company any significant long term
business advantages but this could be because too much dependence was given to
this management tool alone. Scenario planning is still worth considering as one
of the options for predicting the future.
The scenarios in the
plan should include all known facts and anticipated social changes that include
plausible but unexpectedly important situations. If the scenario throws up the
possibility of a major problem, action could be taken way in advance to head it
off. For example, in the anticipation of avian flu, a company may decide to
split key members of its workforce across different sites, even different
countries, to obviate taking a huge hit at one time in one place.
Scenarios should be
designed so that they can be readily adapted to changed circumstances. These
simulations are then "stressed" as the games play out. Usually,
particular groups of facts become more clearly important, so that the
intelligence organisation can refine and repackage real information more
precisely to better-serve the policy-makers' needs. Usually the games'
simulated time runs hundreds of times faster than real life, so that
policy-makers can experience several years of policy decisions, and their
effects, in less than a day.
The obvious value of
scenario planning is that it allows policy-makers to make and learn from
mistakes without risking important failures in real life.
Steps In Scenario
Planning
The starting point for
scenario planning is to decide on the key question to be answered by the
analysis. This may well determine if scenario planning is the preferred tool
over the other forecasting methods. If the question is based on small changes
or a very few number of elements, other more formalized methods may be more useful.
This is followed by
setting the time and scope of the analysis during which consideration would be
given to how quickly changes have happened in the past, and an assessment made
of the degree to which it is possible to predict common trends in demographics,
product life cycles etc. A usual timeframe can be 5 to 10 years.
The various
stakeholders in the scenario will be identified including their interests and
whether these have changed over time. This permits the mapping of the trends
and driving forces, including the PESTLE factors mentioned earlier (political,
economic, social, technical, legislative and environmental). It can be useful
here to map the driving forces on two axes, assessing each force on an
uncertain/(relatively) predictable and important/unimportant scale. All driving
forces that are considered unimportant are discarded while the important and
relatively predictable forces can be included in the scenario.
It is usual to limit
the number of possible scenarios to between two and four and each is given a
descriptive name and a written narrative, indicating key events and
probabilities.
The final step is to
assess the scenarios. Are they relevant for the goal? Are the internally
consistent? Are they archetypical? Do they represent relatively stable outcome
situations?
The term industrial
relations have a broad as well as a narrow outlook. Originally, industrial
relations were broadly defined to include the relationships and interactions
between employers and employees. From this perspective, industrial relations
cover all aspects of the employment relationship, including human resource
management, employee relations, and union-management (or labor) relations. Now
its meaning has become more specific and restricted. Accordingly, industrial relations
pertains to the study and practice of collective bargaining, trade unionism,
and labor-management relations, while human resource management is a separate,
largely distinct field that deals with nonunion employment relationships and
the personnel practices and policies of employers. It also includes the
management of conflict between employers, workers and trade unions when it
arises.
Clearly, the nature of
industrial relations is changing, the impetus for the same being provided by
the changing scenario. In the light of this statement it is important that we
look at some of these changes and understand the relevance of industrial
relations within their framework.
The Changing Scenario
The broad trend towards
decline in employment in the manufacturing sector, low union activity in
sunrise sectors, decentralized collective bargaining, and direct communication
with and involvement of workers can be seen as efforts at political
restructuring of industrial relations.
In order to ensure that we are
dealing with a changing scenario a comparative study must be made wherein the
current situation should be analyzed and contrasted with the scenario in the
past. For this purpose some changes have been identified and the role and
importance of industrial relations emphasized in each context.
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