Scenario Planning
Scenario Planning builds a small set of plausible, different futures around your biggest uncertainties, so you test today's strategy against tomorrow's world before you're forced to.
Two axes cross to form four quadrants, each holding a distinct, named version of the future.
Reach for this when…
- The future your plan assumes suddenly looks shaky and you have no fallback.
- Two smart people in the room disagree hard about what's coming, and both have a case.
- You are about to commit real capital to a bet that only works in one kind of world.
How to run it
- List everything that could shape your future and rate each by impact and uncertainty.
- Pick the two most critical, most uncertain drivers.
- Cross them to build four contrasting scenarios, not variations on one theme.
- Write each scenario as a story a stranger could recognise, not a spreadsheet.
- Test your current strategy against all four and find what holds up regardless.
- Set early-warning signals that tell you which scenario is unfolding.
A worked example
Situation. Ana Horvat ran Dalmacija Foods, a small agribusiness supplying maize and beans around Split, Croatia, and had built one growth plan assuming stable rainfall and open export borders.
Applied. She and her team picked rainfall reliability and export policy as the two critical uncertainties, crossed them into four scenarios, and found her plan only worked in the best of the four.
Result. She kept the growth plan but added a drought-and-closed-border contingency - local storage and a domestic buyer network - before the rains failed the following year.
The catch
Scenarios describe futures, they don't predict which one happens - treat them as stress tests, not forecasts. Two axes force you to throw away real complexity, and scenarios built by one team leader alone tend to just restate what they already believed.
If one of your four scenarios is secretly 'everything goes to plan,' you built a wish, not a scenario.
Origin: Pierre Wack; Royal Dutch Shell
This tool also appears in the Coaching Catalog (WECC): Scenario Planning