Developing disruptive scenarios to improve campaign effectiveness

Greenpeace Asia Success Story

Summary

Greenpeace is the world’s leading organisation campaigning on environmental and sustainability issues. Established for over 40 years it still faces some uncomfortable realities in terms of the impact its campaigning has had with global warming continuing to be a major crisis.

Greenpeace has a reputation for being innovative in its approach to campaigning and engagement. And =mc consulting has a history of working alongside Greenpeace including helping them develop their first innovation strategy with a specialist team led by Marcelo Iniarra in Argentina through to developing an engagement framework work with the fundraising team more recently.

This success story explores a project we undertook with Greenpeace in Asia helping them develop scenario planning as a way of developments in India, Indonesia and China.

If you’re interested in the war about scenario planning and how it can inform your work you should read our insight piece here.

The Challenge

Scenario planning represents a very different way of thinking about the future. It is different from trends analysis which extrapolates from current data to identify some possible outcomes. Instead scenario planning begins the number of outcomes – possible or imagined – and then asks the agency to decide how to help stop these outcomes taking place in the case of negative outcomes, or in the case of positive outcomes, how to make them happen.

Greenpeace Asia was keen to explore especially how to disrupt scenarios which involved extensive growth in use of coal for power generation, and for increased deforestation, which threaten not just the climate but also animal and plant life.

They wanted some tools and frameworks to help develop work to promote the positive options and mitigate the negative ones.

How we helped

This project involved a significant amount of pre-planning in order to ensure that we understood the complex issues. This included reviewing a number of research papers that Greenpeace had developed especially relating to government regulation. We had to check this was robust and could be shaped into suitable scenarios

We also undertook a number of interviews with senior Greenpeace stakeholders based around the world and especially in Asia. We also looked at economic growth data, current regulations and governmental plans, and environmental impact assessment. And finally we interviewed several individuals involved in the carbon fuels industry to establish their concerns and assessments.

These elements gave us the data to create some key drivers and a broad framework which explored the rates of change and the effusiveness of governmental response illustrated below. And the important issue here was the extent to which Greenpeace could leverage control or impact when there was significant power in the hands of governments and business.

We then developed a two-day workshop in Bangkok for a group of high level planners. This was designed to help develop the scenarios. In parallel we introduced tools to tackle them.

The Impact

At the end of the workshop there were six different scenarios developed, three positive and three negative. The scenarios planning group had also had access to a number of tools which could help them accelerate or decelerate the scenarios.

This material fed into some new campaign programmes that Greenpeace subsequently launched although the struggle to tackle climate change continues.

Who else have we helped?

=mc consulting has worked with a number of agencies on scenario planning of various sorts- from full training programmes to research projects to provide the basis for strategy discussions. These include Amnesty International, UNICRF International, World Animal Protection, Smile Train, Compassion in World Farming, Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, Fairtrade Foundation, HE Butt Foundation (USA), London Mayor’s Office, and British Red Cross.

Next Steps?

Have a similar challenge or want to explore a project?
Contact Bernard Ross, Director.

+44 7976 280314