Scenario planning and looking forward

Explore plausible futures, stress-test strategies, and spot trouble before you drive into it: always face-to-face, collaboratively, and with what most digital frameworks ignore.

A large wooden table in a modern sunlit co-working space, covered with hand-drawn maps, vibrant flip charts with coloured sticky notes, and team members in engaged discussion. Large windows flood the room with light.

Scenario planning helps teams look around the corner of tomorrow while accounting for human limits, blind spots, and the state of the world. It combines structured foresight with attention to obliviousness and congruence: surfacing assumptions, misalignments, and gaps between what the team expects and what is actually true.

The process is deliberately not about predicting the future. It is about developing the team’s capacity to think clearly under uncertainty, to notice when current assumptions are being tested, and to have already thought through responses to conditions that have not yet arrived.

The flow

  1. Define the focal issue: choose the core question or challenge your organisation wants to explore. This should be specific enough to be meaningful and open enough to admit genuine uncertainty.

  2. Identify driving forces: map external factors shaping the future. In security, this includes the threat landscape, the regulatory environment, the organisation’s own growth trajectory, and the capabilities of likely adversaries.

  3. Spot critical uncertainties: surface the unknowns that could radically alter outcomes. These are the things you cannot control and cannot predict with confidence. They are different from risks, which are known and estimable.

  4. Develop scenarios: sketch distinct, plausible futures based on how the critical uncertainties might resolve. Aim for variety: scenarios that are genuinely different from each other are more useful than variations on the same theme.

  5. Build narratives: craft vivid, concrete descriptions of how events, behaviours, and consequences might unfold in each scenario. A scenario that stays abstract is not useful for planning.

  6. Reflect and act: explore implications for the current strategy and programme, and identify specific preparations for each plausible future.

  7. Monitor and adapt: identify the signals that would indicate which scenario is developing, and build the habit of tracking them.

Obliviousness and congruence

These two concepts, drawn from Satir’s work, give scenario planning its particular character.

Obliviousness is the gap between what is actually happening and what the team believes is happening. Scenario planning surfaces this by asking teams to state their current assumptions explicitly and then examine them. The assumptions that feel too obvious to mention are usually the ones most worth examining.

Congruence is the alignment between what the team says, what it believes, and what it actually does. Scenarios often reveal incongruences: the organisation says it is prepared for a certain kind of incident but the actual preparations do not match that claim. Making this visible is uncomfortable and useful.

The scenario planning process is most valuable not in the scenarios it produces but in the assumptions and incongruences it forces into the open.