Planning for several futures beats betting on one

Many plans are built on a single expected future: one growth rate, one price, one technology. When that future does not arrive, the plan breaks.

Scenario planning offers an alternative. It is a method for thinking about the future by building a small number of detailed, plausible stories about how events might unfold, and testing plans against each. The aim is not to guess which scenario will occur, but to find choices that work reasonably well in all of them and to identify early signals that show which one is unfolding.

We think organisations of every size, from councils to companies, would make better decisions if they routinely asked: what are three different ways this could go, and what would we do in each?

The honest objection is that scenarios can become storytelling that no-one uses. Our answer is to tie each scenario to concrete decisions and to specific signals that would be watched and reported.

What would change our mind: evidence that organisations using scenario methods make no better long-term choices than those using a single forecast.