Scenario Planning

Thinking about a specific issue or problem you need to address but you think there might be multiple future possibilities?

If you are not sure what the future may hold, scenario planning is a powerful way of exploring a range of possible futures and testing your thinking and strategies in these possible future environments. Scenarios are particularly useful for dealing with high levels of uncertainty. We can help you develop scenarios to test specific business strategies or policies or to explore broader future opportunities and risks as part of your long term planning.

Scenario development can be as simple or as detailed as needed depending on the outcomes you are seeking.

Some of the key steps are:

  • Identifying a focusing question for your problem or issue
  • Identifying factors that influence the issue from the past, present and future
  • Selecting the most uncertain or critical factors you need to understand better
  • Creating plausible ‘what if’ stories (scenarios) around the critical factors
  • Exploring what these mean in terms of the issue at hand
  • Developing strategy that takes these possibilities into account