Scenario Planning with Simon Mulcahy & Peter Schwartz | Leading Through Change | Salesforce

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Hi, I'm Simon Mulcahy, Chief Innovation Officer at Salesforce. And today I'm here with my colleague and friend, Peter Schwartz, who's Salesforce's chief futurist and the world's leading expert on scenario planning. And together, we'd like to share with you two really powerful tools to help you as you work your way through your company's response to the crisis. We have our one to three year scenarios and our COVID 19 response framework and the playbook recommendations that come with it. Now, Salesforce has been hard at work with some of the best experts on the planet, as well as with customers and partners in every geography to prepare these tools for you. Peter, why don't you start by walking us through the future scenarios?

Thanks, Simon. I began doing scenario planning back in 1972 and at Stanford Research Institute working on mission planning for the space shuttle. But today, we are experiencing greater uncertainty than I have seen in nearly 50 years of doing this kind of work. Now most people want to know, how deep is it going to go? And how long are the twin health and economic crises going to last? When do we move from the crisis mode to back to work building the next normal? And what will it be like as we get back to work in these new realities? The scenarios we will cover today will address those questions. But in short, the pandemic may lead to one of three potential outcomes in our scenarios, which creates both the need for and the opportunity to reimagine and then reinvent the future. To answer our questions about the future, we need to look at three things. First, how will the virus behave? That's the blue line in the graph. Will there be a second wave? Will people who've had it be immune? Will it mutate? And critically, when will there be a vaccine that's especially important for people my age? Second, how will our economies behave given the various policies being pursued around the world? The green line in the graph now, stopping the virus creates an immediate economic crisis as huge swaths of the economy hit the brakes. How deep and how long the economic crisis lasts will also be shaped by the third factor, the social response. Do people actually maintain the discipline needed to stop the spread and avoid recurrences? Do they support each other? Is this a moment for social renewal or social conflict? To avoid the worst, we need to do what my friend Martin Wolf says. Think big. Act fast. Together. Now, the crisis is unfolding in three phases. Nearly everyone has moved beyond losing control and begun to respond in a crisis mode, hammering down the virus. The third Phase going back to work will give shape to the next normal. So working with a small team from inside Salesforce and a few outside advisors, we looked at how these three forces could interact to create several quite different paths into the future. They vary by different assumptions for how the virus, the economy and society behave. The result are crises of varying depth and duration, and the outcomes will be different in every geography in the world. So think about how these stories will play out in your state or your country. To judge how the timing might be different where you work and live, you will need to think through how each of the eight uncertainties of this chart play out locally. Now, onto the scenarios. The first scenario, which may be a bit optimistic, assumes everything goes right. People do maintain social distancing, the virus does not come back later in the year, immunity persists, economic policy is effective. All these add up to the crisis beginning to unwind by mid summer and getting back to work by, say, the third or fourth quarter of this year, with the next normal beginning to merge early in the new year. Because the crisis is short lived, this new reality is perhaps the most familiar. Perhaps a bit more realistically, some places will get it right, while others will lag, meaning the crisis might persist, leading to a deeper and longer recession. It could take us until near the end of 2020 to get the virus under control. That means the economic recovery in getting back to work will take into the first and second quarter next year, and the next normal, quite different from our recent past, begins to take shape by mid year. The experience of the crisis will lead to major changes in how we work, shop, learn, travel, and much more. Much of what we have done out of necessity during the crisis, we will now do by choice in the next normal. While it may not be likely, we need to be prepared just in case the crisis lasts long, longer than we think. If the virus has multiple waves or immunity is weak, or a vaccine takes longer to develop, the impact on society and the economy could be longer lasting. The economic crisis may become a depression that lasts several years as the waves of the pandemic wash through the society over the next few years. The new normal may not be apparent until well into 2022. So the old adage that necessity is the mother of invention will shape our response to the pandemic. We are already reinventing how we work, shop, learn, do medicine, and even govern because we've had to. As we begin to return to work in the next normal, there is a unique opportunity to learn from our experience and to reimagine and reinvent nearly everything. What can we do remotely so we don't have to commute or travel halfway around the world for an hour meeting? How can we rethink our supply chain to make it more resilient in the face of discontinuities like this pandemic? And that may help us to see how we can be more sustainable in how we operate. And all of these depend upon the enabling foundation of a necessary digital transformation. There is no scenario for going backwards. We can intentionally design a better future. As the French poet and essayist Paul Valery said, the future is no longer what it used to be. Now over to my colleague Simon Mulcahy, who will help you figure out what to actually do in the face of all these possibilities.

Thanks, Peter. Well, we all left behind the old normal weather when we went into lockdown. And now here we are in this new normal, the new COVID 19 normal. And the big question is, what will the next normal look like? Well, one thing we do know is that the next normal will not be a copy of the old. The crisis has just accelerated change in too many areas. And all of that means that business leaders really need to be asking themselves, well, what decisions can I make now that will keep options open for me later? And how can I make sure that I can see the signs for change early enough so I can act quickly when the time is right? And we found that taking a structured approach broken out across three distinct but concurrent tracks, helps to guide this decision making process. The first track is what we call stabilize. This is about mitigating short term risks and and pivoting to customer and employee needs. The second is reopen. This is the planning and orchestration of the return to the workplace to scale operations. And the third track is grow. Now you're navigating economic recovery and asking questions like how do I be more relevant to my customers? Or I need to be more digital. How do I do that? Of course, there are many decisions that need to be made at each phase, but customers have found it helpful to break them down into what we call four key focus areas. And these naturally align to where Salesforce can best help you as well. The first is how you make decisions. Well, this is about connecting data, making it easy to access the right information at the right time, visualize customer and employee data, and then collaborate around it. How you work is the second area. And this is all about improving employee productivity and collaboration and about enabling employees to learn new skills. The third then is how you engage your customers, partners and your suppliers. It's how you market, sell and service from anywhere from home through always on storefronts with omnichannel service. And it's about delivering better, more personalized experiences and leveraging your whole ecosystem in service of the customer. And the fourth is how you serve society. This is about how you mobilize your employees and operationalize serving society not just in times of need, but as a platform for change more generally. So there you go. This framework allows you to explore where you're strong and perhaps where you need to make some progress. Behind it though, is a much more detailed set of tactical recommendations that you can use to double check against your own planning. Regardless of where you are on your journey, Salesforce is here to really help you navigate your path back to growth in the next normal. And if you'd like to get hold of the scenarios or the response framework and playbook, please just ask your account rep. You can also join though one of the many webinars and advisory sessions that we're also holding. Thank you and please keep safe.