by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia
Ask a room of executives whether they do scenario planning and most of them will say yes. Ask to see the scenarios and you’ll usually get three slides: a good case, a base case and a bad case, each one a slightly adjusted version of the same spreadsheet.
I don’t blame them. That’s what the exercise has been reduced to, and a spreadsheet with a pessimistic column isn’t scenario planning. It’s the same future with the volume knob turned up and down.
For a Chief Strategy Officer, the real challenge is a harder one. You have to carry several genuinely different futures in your head, and then produce one strategic plan that doesn’t fall apart if the wrong one shows up. Here’s how I’d approach it.
Why three slides isn’t enough
The good-base-bad structure shares a hidden assumption: that the future differs from your forecast only in degree. A bit better, a bit worse. But the futures that actually blindside organizations are different in kind. A regulation reverses. A customer behavior flips. A competitor arrives from an industry you never watched.
You can’t see a difference in kind by adjusting a growth rate. You only see it by asking what different worlds the signals in front of you could be pointing toward.
Start from signals, not from a template
The most common mistake in scenario work is starting with the scenarios. Somebody picks two big uncertainties, draws a two-by-two grid, and fills in the four boxes with the most vivid story each combination suggests. It looks rigorous. It’s also built on whichever two uncertainties the loudest person in the room happened to pick.
A sturdier method works from the ground up, which is how the [FutureHacking™](https://bradenkelley.com/offerings/futurehacking/) approach is built:
- Collect signals. Small, specific observations about what’s changing: a competitor’s strange hire, a policy shift, a customer behavior that doesn’t fit your model.
- Group them into trends. The patterns those signals suggest. This is where the team has to argue about what it’s actually seeing.
- Build a set of possible futures from the trends. Several, and different enough that each demands a different strategic response.
- Decide which future is most probable. Not to bet everything on it, but so you know where your current plan is implicitly wagered.
- Choose the future you’d prefer, and map the path. That’s the part that turns a planning exercise into a strategy.
Because every future traces back to real signals, nobody can dismiss one as someone’s pet theory. The argument is about what the evidence suggests, which is a far better argument to have.
The test of a good set of futures
Not every set of scenarios is useful. Here are the questions I’d use to check yours.
Are they different enough? If one strategy works equally well in all of them, you haven’t described different futures. You’ve described one future with different labels.
Can someone defend each one with a straight face? A scenario that’s there only to look balanced, or to scare the board, doesn’t count. Each should be plausible to a thoughtful person in the room.
Does each one change a decision? If you can’t name something you’d do differently in a given future, it’s trivia, not scenario planning.
Is it tied to evidence? Every future should be traceable to signals you can point to.
From many futures to one plan
This is the part most guides skip, and it’s the real CSO problem. You don’t get to run four strategies. You have to deliver one plan. So what does carrying multiple futures into a single plan look like?
Find the moves that work everywhere. Some actions pay off in every future you’ve described. These are your no-regret moves, and they should anchor the plan.
Isolate the bets that depend on one future. Some investments make sense only if one future arrives. Name them as bets, with the future they depend on written next to them. Sometimes the right call is to place the bet. The point is that you’re doing it knowingly.
Build options for the uncertain middle. Where futures diverge, look for ways to buy the right to act later: a pilot, a partnership, a small investment that keeps a door open. Options cost little and are worth a lot if the world tilts your way.
Set tripwires. For each future, decide in advance what you’d have to see to conclude it’s arriving: a metric crossing a threshold, a regulation passing, a competitor making a particular move. Then assign someone to watch for it. A plan that says when to change course is a very different thing from one that hopes it won’t need to.
Done well, you end up with one plan that has a spine of no-regret moves, a short list of explicit bets, a handful of options and a set of tripwires. It’s a living plan that expects to be updated, which is exactly what the annual, single-future version can’t do.
The politics of it
I’d be doing you a disservice if I left out the human side. Presenting multiple futures to a leadership team can feel like admitting you don’t know the answer. Some executives hear “scenarios” and translate it as “indecision.”
The way through is to make the plan firm and the uncertainty explicit. “Here’s what we’re doing no matter what. Here are the bets we’re making and why. Here’s what would make us change our minds.” That isn’t indecision. It’s a level of clarity most single-future plans never reach.
A way to practice
If your team has never built scenarios from the ground up, start with step one. The free FutureHacking Signal Picker helps you identify and prioritize the signals worth watching, which is the foundation everything else rests on. Run it before your next planning cycle and bring the result into the room.
What I’m building next
I’m putting the finishing touches on the FutureCanvas Picker, which takes planners through the full arc: from signals, to trends, to a set of possible futures, to your most probable future, and then to the path toward the future you’d prefer. It’s the closest I’ve come to letting you feel the whole process in a single sitting.
I’m offering early access to a select group first: CSOs, strategic planners and leaders running a planning process right now who can give me honest feedback under real deadline pressure. If that’s you, reach out and let me know and I’ll follow up personally with the select few who get in first.
The plan that survives
The goal of scenario planning was never to predict. It was to build a plan that doesn’t need the prediction to be right. If your current one only works in one future, that’s worth knowing before the future gets a vote.
Image Credits: Pexels
Content Authenticity Statement: The topic area, key elements to focus on, etc. were decisions made by Braden Kelley, with a little help from Claude to clean up the article.
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.