When we look out into the future and try our best to make wise decisions, we only find ourselves staring into uncertainties. It happens to all of us that we confront this deeper dilemma: How do we strike a balance between prediction - believing that we can see past these uncertainties when in fact we can't - and paralysis - letting the uncertainties freeze us into inactivity?
Questions like these are known as "long fuse, big bang" problems (Schwartz, 1970). Whatever you decide to do will play out with a big bang, but it can take years to learn whether your decision was wise or not. Worse yet, "long fuse, big bang" questions don't lend themselves to traditional analysis; it's simply impossible to research away the uncertainties on which the success of a key decision will hang (Wilkinson).
Given the impossibility of knowing precisely how the future will play out, a good decision or strategy to adopt is one that plays out well across several possible futures. To find that "robust" strategy, scenarios are created in plural, such that each scenario diverges markedly from the others (Schwartz, 1970).
Yet, the purpose of scenario planning is making large-scale forces visible rather than pinpointing future events so that the planner will at least recognize them (Schwartz, 1970). It's about helping make better decisions today.
Scenario planning begins by identifying the focal issue or decision. There are an infinite number of stories that we could tell about the future; our purpose is to tell those that matter, that lead to better decisions. So we begin the process by agreeing on the issue that we want to address.
Some of the decisions we make today will make sense across all of the futures. Others will make sense only in one or two. The decisions that make sense in only one or some of the scenarios are tricky. For these we want to know the "early warning signs" that tell us those scenarios are beginning to unfold (Schwartz, 1970). Sometimes, the leading indicators for a given scenario are obvious, but often they are subtle. The main point is to be aware of these critical uncertainties and warning signs.
Ultimately, scenario planning helps us understand the uncertainties and what they might mean. It helps us "rehearse" our responses to those possible futures. And it helps us spot them as they begin to unfold.
