Has anyone ever wondered why large organizations such as IBM, McDonald's and Coco-Cola have been able to weather economic boom and bust yet still remain successful, while others like Pan-American Airways and Montgomery Ward have failed?  Pan-Am's demise came in 1991 after they could not recover from the 1988 terrorist bombing of Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland (Sipika, 1993, p. 138).  Montgomery Ward was forced to file Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2000 after 128 years in business because of the market encroachment of newer retailers Target and Wal Mart (Kaufman & Deutsch, 2000, p. C4).  While both scenarios are different, they show the range of events from the catastrophic to the subtle.  They also illustrate that neither company was able to envision or forecast such threats.

The ability to forecast potential future trands is vital to any organization today.  It is a must to identify these trends so organizations can take corrective action in an effort to conteract any negative scenario (Cornish, 2004, p. 61).  This workshop will present one possible economic future scenario as an example, and attempt to generate other plausible scenarios based on external trend analyses of the organization.