MAE Bank is negotiating to make a 7-year loan of $25,000 to Madanique Corporatio
ID: 2691882 • Letter: M
Question
MAE Bank is negotiating to make a 7-year loan of $25,000 to Madanique Corporation (MC). To repay the bank, MC will pay $2,500 at the end of Year 1, $5,000 at the end of Year 2, and $7,500 at the end of Year 3, plus a fixed but currently unspecified cash flow, X, at the end of Years 4 through 7. MC is essentially riskless, so the MAE bank is confident the payments will be made, and they consider 8% as an appropriate rate of return on low risk 7-year loans. What cash flow must the investment provide at the end of each of the final 4 years, that is, what is X? (can you show me the math of how to get the right answer) Can you put the above scenario in the context of a real world example?Explanation / Answer
Scenario planning, also called scenario thinking or scenario analysis, is a strategic planning method that some organizations use to make flexible long-term plans. It is in large part an adaptation and generalization of classic methods used by military intelligence. The original method was that a group of analysts would generate simulation games for policy makers. The games combine known facts about the future, such as demographics, geography, military, political, industrial information, and mineral reserves, with plausible alternative social, technical, economic, environmental, educational, political and aesthetic (STEEEPA) trends which are key driving forces. In business applications, the emphasis on gaming the behavior of opponents was reduced (shifting more toward a game against nature). At Royal Dutch/Shell for example, scenario planning was viewed as changing mindsets about the exogenous part of the world, prior to formulating specific strategies. Scenario planning may involve aspects of Systems thinking, specifically the recognition that many factors may combine in complex ways to create sometime surprising futures (due to non-linear feedback loops). The method also allows the inclusion of factors that are difficult to formalize, such as novel insights about the future, deep shifts in values, unprecedented regulations or inventions. Systems thinking used in conjunction with scenario planning leads to plausible scenario story lines because the causal relationship between factors can be demonstrated. In these cases when scenario planning is integrated with a systems thinking approach to scenario development, it is sometimes referred to as structural dynamics. Contents [show] [edit]Crafting scenarios These combinations and permutations of fact and related social changes are called "scenarios." The scenarios usually include plausible, but unexpectedly important situations and problems that exist in some small form in the present day. Any particular scenario is unlikely. However, future studies analysts select scenario features so they are both possible and uncomfortable. Scenario planning helps policy-makers to anticipate hidden weaknesses and inflexibilities in organizations and methods. When disclosed years in advance, these weaknesses can be avoided or their impacts reduced more effectively than if similar real-life problems were considered under duress of an emergency. For example, a company may discover that it needs to change contractual terms to protect against a new class of risks, or collect cash reserves to purchase anticipated technologies or equipment. Flexible business continuity plans with "PREsponse protocols" help cope with similar operational problems and deliver measurable future value-added. [edit]Zero-sum game scenarios Strategic military intelligence organizations also construct scenarios. The methods and organizations are almost identical, except that scenario planning is applied to a wider variety of problems than merely military and political problems. As in military intelligence, the chief challenge of scenario planning is to find out the real needs of policy-makers, when policy-makers may not themselves know what they need to know, or may not know how to describe the information that they really want. Good analysts design wargames so that policy makers have great flexibility and freedom to adapt their simulated organizations. Then these simulated organizations are "stressed" by the scenarios as a game plays out. Usually, particular groups of facts become more clearly important. These insights enable intelligence organizations to refine and repackage real information more precisely to better serve the policy-makers' real-life needs. Usually the games' simulated time runs hundreds of times faster than real life, so policy-makers experience several years of policy decisions, and their simulated effects, in less than a day. This chief value of scenario planning is that it allows policy-makers to make and learn from mistakes without risking career-limiting failures in real life. Further, policymakers can make these mistakes in a safe, unthreatening, game-like environment, while responding to a wide variety of concretely-presented situations based on facts. This is an opportunity to "rehearse the future," an opportunity that does not present itself in day-to-day operations where every action and decision counts. [edit]How military scenario planning or scenario thinking is done Decide on the key question to be answered by the analysis. By doing this, it is possible to assess whether scenario planning is preferred over the other methods. If the question is based on small changes or a very small number of elements, other more formalized methods may be more useful. Set the time and scope of the analysis. Take into consideration how quickly changes have happened in the past, and try to assess to what degree it is possible to predict common trends in demographics, product life cycles. A usual timeframe can be five to 10 years. Identify major stakeholders. Decide who will be affected and have an interest in the possible outcomes. Identify their current interests, whether and why these interests have changed over time in the past. Map basic trends and driving forces. This includes industry, economic, political, technological, legal, and societal trends. Assess to what degree these trends will affect your research question. Describe each trend, how and why it will affect the organisation. In this step of the process, brainstorming is commonly used, where all trends that can be thought of are presented before they are assessed, to capture possible group thinking and tunnel vision. Find key uncertainties. 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. Important driving forces that are relatively predictable (ex. demographics) can be included in any scenario, so the scenarios should not be based on these. This leaves you with a number of important and unpredictable driving forces. At this point, it is also useful to assess whether any linkages between driving forces exist, and rule out any "impossible" scenarios (ex. full employment and zero inflation). Check for the possibility to group the linked forces and if possible, reduce the forces to the two most important. (To allow the scenarios to be presented in a neat xy-diagram) Identify the extremes of the possible outcomes of the two driving forces and check the dimensions for consistency and plausibility. Three key points should be assessed: Time frame: are the trends compatible within the time frame in question? Internal consistency: do the forces describe uncertainties that can construct probable scenarios. Vs the stakeholders: are any stakeholders currently in disequilibrium compared to their preferred situation, and will this evolve the scenario? Is it possible to create probable scenarios when considering the stakeholders? This is most important when creating macro-scenarios where governments, large organisations et al. will try to influence the outcome. Define the scenarios, plotting them on a grid if possible. Usually, two to four scenarios are constructed. The current situation does not need to be in the middle of the diagram (inflation may already be low), and possible scenarios may keep one (or more) of the forces relatively constant, especially if using three or more driving forces. One approach can be to create all positive elements into one scenario and all negative elements (relative to the current situation) in another scenario, then refining these. In the end, try to avoid pure best-case and worst-case scenarios. Write out the scenarios. Narrate what has happened and what the reasons can be for the proposed situation. Try to include good reasons why the changes have occurred as this helps the further analysis. Finally, give each scenario a descriptive (and catchy) name to ease later reference. Assess the scenarios. Are they relevant for the goal? Are they internally consistent? Are they archetypical? Do they represent relatively stable outcome situations? Identify research needs. Based on the scenarios, assess where more information is needed. Where needed, obtain more information on the motivations of stakeholders, possible innovations that may occur in the industry and so on. Develop quantitative methods. If possible, develop models to help quantify consequences of the various scenarios, such as growth rate, cash flow etc. This step does of course require a significant amount of work compared to the others, and may be left out in back-of-the-envelope-analyses. Converge towards decision scenarios. Retrace the steps above in an iterative process until you reach scenarios which address the fundamental issues facing the organization. Try to assess upsides and downsides of the possible scenarios. [edit]Scenario planning in military applications Scenario planning is also extremely popular with military planners. Most states' department of war maintains a continuously-updated series of strategic plans to cope with well-known military or strategic problems. These plans are almost always based on scenarios, and often the plans and scenarios are kept up-to-date by war games, sometimes played out with real troops. This process was first carried out (arguably the method was invented by) the Prussian general staff of the mid-19th century. [edit]Development of scenario analysis in business organizations In the past, strategic plans have often considered only the "official future," which was usually a straight-line graph of current trends carried into the future. Often the trend lines were generated by the accounting department, and lacked discussions of demographics, or qualitative differences in social conditions. These simplistic guesses are surprisingly good most of the time, but fail to consider qualitative social changes that can affect a business or government. Scenarios focus on the joint effect of many factors. Scenario planning helps us understand how the various strands of a complex tapestry move if one or more threads are pulled. When you just list possible causes, as for instance in fault tree analysis, you may tend to discount any one factor in isolation. But when you explore the factors together, you realize that certain combinations could magnify each other’s impact or likelihood. For instance, an increased trade deficit may trigger an economic recession, which in turn creates unemployment and reduces domestic production. Paul J. H. Schoemaker offers a strong managerial case for the use of scenario planning in business and had wide impact.[1] Scenarios planning starts by dividing our knowledge into two broad domains: (1) things we believe we know something about and (2) elements we consider uncertain or unknowable. The first component – trends – casts the past forward, recognizing that our world possesses considerable momentum and continuity. For example, we can safely make assumptions about demographic shifts and, perhaps, substitution effects for certain new technologies. The second component – true uncertainties – involve indeterminables such as future interest rates, outcomes of political elections, rates of innovation, fads and fashions in markets, and so on. The art of scenario planning lies in blending the known and the unknown into a limited number of internally consistent views of the future that span a very wide range of possibilities. Numerous organizations have applied scenario planning to a broad range of issues, from relatively simple, tactical decisions to the complex process of strategic planning and vision building.[2][3][4] The power of scenario planning for business was originally established by Royal Dutch/Shell, which has used scenarios since the early 1970s as part of a process for generating and evaluating its strategic options.[5][6] Shell has been consistently better in its oil forecasts than other major oil companies, and saw the overcapacity in the tanker business and Europe’s petrochemicals earlier than its competitors.[2] But ironically, the approach may have had more impact outside Shell than within, as many others firms and consultancies started to benefit as well from scenario planning. Scenario planning is as much art as science, and prone to a variety of traps (both in process and content) as enumerated by Paul J. H. Schoemaker.[1] [edit]History of use by academic and commercial organizations Most authors attribute the introduction of scenario planning to Herman Kahn through his work for the US Military in the 1950s at the RAND corporation where he developed a technique of describing the future in stories as if written by people in the future. He adopted the term "scenarios" to describe these stories. In 1961 he founded the Hudson Institute where he expanded his scenario work to social forecasting and public policy [7][8][9][10][11] One of his most controversial uses of scenarios was to suggest that a nuclear war could be won.[12] Though Kahn is often cited as the father of scenario planning, at the same time Kahn was developing his methods at RAND, Gaston Berger was developing similar methods at the Centre d’Etudes Prospectives which he founded in France. His method, which he named 'La Prospective', was to develop normative scenarios of the future which were to be used as a guide in formulating public policy. During the mid 1960s various authors from the French and American institutions began to publish scenario planning concepts such as 'La Prospective' by Berger in 1964[13] and 'The Next Thirty-Three Years' by Kahn and Wiener in 1967 [14] By the 1970s scenario planning was in full swing with a number of institutions now established to provide support to business including the Hudson Foundation, the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International), and the SEMA Metra Consulting Group in France. Several large companies also began to embrace scenario planning including Dutch Royal Shell and General Electric.[9][11][15][16] Possibly as a result of these very sophisticated approaches, and of the difficult techniques they employed (which usually demanded the resources of a central planning staff), scenarios earned a reputation for difficulty (and cost) in use. Even so, the theoretical importance of the use of alternative scenarios, to help address the uncertainty implicit in long-range forecasts, was dramatically underlined by the widespread confusion which followed the Oil Shock of 1973. As a result many of the larger organizations started to use the technique in one form or another. By 1983 Diffenbach reported that 'alternate scenarios' were the third most popular technique for long-range forecasting - used by 68% of the large organizations he surveyed.[17] Practical development of scenario forecasting, to guide strategy rather than for the more limited academic uses which had previously been the case, was started by Pierre Wack in 1971 at the Royal Dutch Shell group of companies - and it, too, was given impetus by the Oil Shock two years later. Shell has, since that time, led the commercial world in the use of scenarios - and in the development of more practical techniques to support these. Indeed, as - in common with most forms of long-range forecasting - the use of scenarios has (during the depressed trading conditions of the last decade) reduced to only a handful of private-sector organisations, Shell remains almost alone amongst them in keeping the technique at the forefront of forecasting.[18] There has only been anecdotal evidence offered in support of the value of scenarios, even as aids to forecasting; and most of this has come from one company - Shell. In addition, with so few organisations making consistent use of them - and with the timescales involved reaching into decades - it is unlikely that any definitive supporting evidenced will be forthcoming in the foreseeable future. For the same reasons, though, a lack of such proof applies to almost all long-range planning techniques. In the absence of proof, but taking account of Shell's well documented experiences of using it over several decades (where, in the 1990s, its then CEO ascribed its success to its use of such scenarios), can be significant benefit to be obtained from extending the horizons of managers' long-range forecasting in the way that the use of scenarios uniquely does.[19] [edit]Critique of Shell's use of scenario planning In the 1970s, many energy companies were surprised by both environmentalism and the OPEC cartel, and thereby lost billions of dollars of revenue by mis-investment. The dramatic financial effects of these changes led at least one organization, Royal Dutch Shell, to implement scenario planning. The analysts of this company publicly estimated that this planning process made their company the largest in the world.[2] However other observers of Shell's use of scenario planning have suggested that few if any significant long term business advantages accrued to Shell from the use of scenario methodology. Whilst the intellectual robustness of Shell's long term scenarios was seldom in doubt their actual practical use was seen as being minimal by many senior Shell executives. A Shell insider has commented "The scenario team were bright and their work was of a very high intellectual level. However neither the high level "Group scenarios" nor the country level scenarios produced with operating companies really made much difference when key decisions were being taken".[source missing] The use of scenarios was audited by Arie de Geus's team in the early 1980s and they found that the decision making processes following the scenarios were the primary cause of the lack of strategic implementation, rather than the scenarios themselves. Many practitioners today spend as much time on the decision making process as on creating the scenarios themselves. In 2005, Peter Cornelius, Alexander Van de Putte and Mattia Romani, all former Shell Planners, published a seminal paper on Three decades of Scenario Planning in Shell in the California Management Review. This article reviewed the use and evolution of scenario planning in Shell. [edit]General Limitations of Scenario Planning Although scenario planning has gained much adherence in industry, its subjective and heuristic nature leaves many academics uncomfortable. How do we know if we have the right scenarios? And how do we go from scenarios to decisions? These concerns are legitimate and scenario planning would gain in academic standing if more research were conducted on its comparative performance and underlying theoretical premises. A collection of chapters by noted scenario planners[20] failed to contain a single reference to an academic source! In general, there are few academically validated analyses of scenario planning (for a notable exception, see Paul J. H. Schoemaker[21]). The technique was born from practice and its appeal is based more on anecdotal than scientific evidence. Furthermore, significant misconceptions remain about its intent and claims. Above all, scenario planning is a tool for collective learning, reframing perceptions and preserving uncertainty when the latter is pervasive. Too many decision makers want to bet on one future scenario, falling prey to the seductive temptation of trying to predict the future rather than to entertain multiple futures. Another trap is to take the scenarios too literally as though they were static beacons that map out a fixed future. In actuality, their aim is to bound the future but in a flexible way that permits learning and adjustment as the future unfolds. One criticism of the two-by-two technique commonly used is that the resulting matrix results in four somewhat arbitrary scenario themes. If other key uncertainties had been selected, it might be argued, very different scenarios could emerge. How true this is depends on whether the matrix is viewed as just a starting point to be superseded by the ensuing blueprint or is considered as the grand architecture that nests everything else. In either case, however, the issue should not be which are the “right” scenarios but rather whether they delineate the range of possible future appropriately. Any tool that tries to simplify a complex picture will introduce distortions, whether it is a geographic map or a set of scenarios. Seldom will complexity decompose naturally into simple states. But it might. Consider, for example, the behavior of water (the molecule H2O) which, depending on temperature and pressure, naturally exists in just one of three states: gas, liquid or ice. The art of scenarios is to look for such natural states or points of bifurcation in the behavior of a complex system. Apart from some inherent subjectivity in scenario design, the technique can suffer from various process and content traps.[22] These traps mostly relate to how the process is conducted in organizations (such as team composition, role of facilitators, etc.) as well as the substantive focus of the scenarios (long vs. short term, global vs. regional, incremental vs. paradigm shifting, etc.). One might think of these as merely challenges of implementation, but since the process component is integral to the scenario experience, they can also be viewed as weaknesses of the methodology itself. Limited safeguards exist against political derailing, agenda control, myopia and limited imagination when conducting scenario planning exercises within real organizations. But, to varying extents, all forecasting techniques will suffer from such organizational limitations. The benchmark to use is not perfection, especially when faced with high uncertainty and complexity, or even strict adherence to such normative precepts as procedural invariance and logical consistency, but whether the technique performs better than its rivals. And to answer this question fairly, performance must be carefully specified. It should clearly include some measures of accuracy as well as a cost-benefit analysis that considers the tradeoff between effort and accuracy. In addition, legitimation criteria may be important to consider as well as the ability to refine and improve the approach as more experience is gained. A third limitation of scenario planning in organizational settings is its weak integration into other planning and forecasting techniques. Most companies have plenty of trouble dealing with just one future, let alone multiple ones. Typically, budgeting and planning systems are predicated on single views of the future, with adjustments made as necessary through variance analysis, contingency planning, rolling budgets, and periodic renegotiations. The weaknesses of these traditional approaches were very evident after the tragic attack of September 11, 2001 when many companies became paralyzed and quite a few just threw away the plan and budget. Their strategies were not future-proof and they lacked organized mechanisms to adjust to external turmoil. In cases of crisis, leadership becomes important but so does some degree of preparedness. Once the scenarios are finished, the real works starts of how to craft flexible strategies and appropriate monitoring systems.[23] Managers need a simple but comprehensive compass to navigate uncertainty from beginning to end. Scenario planning is just one component of a more complete management system. The point is that scenario thinking needs to be integrated with the existing planning and budgeting system, as awkward as this fit may be. The reality is that most organizations do not handle uncertainty well and that researchers have not provided adequate answers about how to plan under conditions of high uncertainty and complexity. [edit]Use of scenario planning by managers The basic concepts of the process are relatively simple. In terms of the ov
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