Spooked by war, terrorism and economic shocks, companies are adopting contingency planning techniques like never before, says Pierre Lavallée, who helps track management ideas for consulting firm Bain & Co.

"People have a sense that their planning horizons are getting shorter, and outcomes can swing a fair bit," said Mr. Lavallée, Canadian managing partner for Bain and part of a global team that monitors use of management tools.

"Instead of fixing your gaze on one point of the horizon, you have to pick two or three, and say 'I could end up in any one of those situations.' "

Boston-based Bain's annual survey of more than 700 global companies, called Management Tools & Trends, offers insight into the hopes and fears of many organizations in the early 21st century.

It shows that contingency planning -- often equated with scenario planning -- is No. 9 in popularity among management techniques in North America, according to the latest survey done in early 2003, and based on 2002 practices.

That's up from the 12th spot the previous year.

It is not nearly as popular in other regions, but even on a worldwide basis, it ranks No. 11 among the leading 25 management tools. Two years ago, it didn't even make that list.

Toronto-based Mr. Lavallée said the trend toward contingency planning took off with the dot-com bubble and its spectacular collapse. It further accelerated with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Now, he said, it will be increasingly driven by economic phenomena, such as the recent sudden rise in the Canadian dollar and the financial impact of severe acute respiratory syndrome.

Flexibility is a central theme in the 10th-annual Bain report, which is being released today. About 70 per cent of companies surveyed see an ability to change as a significant corporate advantage, compared with 38 per cent a decade ago.

The Bain survey also shows that hard-pressed companies, desperate to get growth and profits back on track, are trying more and more new things. The average number of management tools being used by surveyed companies is up nearly 60 per cent in two years, with the average firm using about 16.

The most popular one remains strategic planning, which has been at the top of the charts since 1996, when it first made the list.

Used by 89 per cent of firms, it is followed by benchmarking, and mission and vision statements, both at 84 per cent. "They are your basic tool kit," Mr. Lavallée says.

But the fastest spreading idea is customer relationship management (CRM), which is the collection and interpretation of customer data, using specialized software, to improve marketing, sales and service.

More than 78 per cent of companies worldwide said they were using CRM, compared with 35 per cent two years earlier. More surprising, Mr. Lavallée says, overall satisfaction with CRM increased in 2002.

He says this surge in satisfaction probably reflects the fact that businesses are now seeing concrete results from CRM, as opposed to three years ago, when they were simply spending money to install the software.

The survey's laggards are three ideas that require outlays of cash, which companies are reluctant to make right now: stock buybacks; corporate venturing (corporations investing in early-stage ventures), and merger integration teams.

The latter idea has cooled down for a couple of reasons: There are far fewer mergers than a few years back, and integration is acknowledged as a painfully difficult thing to do, Mr. Lavallée says.

Also losing steam is knowledge management, a broad term for systems and processes to capture and share intellectual assets in a company.

According to Bain director Darrell Rigby -- the founder of the survey -- employees seem less willing to share knowledge at a time of economic insecurity, because they see their ownership of knowledge as the best leverage to keep their jobs.

The survey also shows the use of corporate codes of ethics is on the rise, a pattern that was developing even before the Enron, WorldCom and Tyco scandals hit the headlines.

In an interesting twist, companies in Europe are less likely to have a corporate ethics code. While 69 per cent of European firms have one, that rises to 84 per cent in Asia and 81 per cent in North America. (The Bain survey does not break out the small Canadian sample, but Mr. Lavallée says Canadian results reflect North American trends.)

Surprisingly, 84 per cent of companies say they are proud of their codes of ethics, despite society's growing cynicism about corporate malfeasance.

Mr. Lavallée points out that serious breaches of ethics are still relatively rare. But in many companies, the fallout from the recent scandals may make it easier for senior executives to go to their employees and insist that the codes be taken seriously.

The Bain survey also mirrors the fickleness and faddishness of corporations regarding the management ideas they use. Consider the most widely used tools of 1993: Mission statements were No. 1, followed by customer satisfaction measurement and total quality management. Also on the list were re-engineering, No. 8, and self-directed teams, No. 10.

Those ideas have hardly disappeared but they are no longer flavours of the month.

Total quality management has dropped to No. 18, re-engineering to No. 19 and team-building has dropped right off the top 25 list.