Scenario Planning and Strategic Forecasting

It has two parts, with the first five steps, concentrating on which particular scenarios to work on, and the rest three steps towards the story, implications and indicators.

1. Focal Issue: identify what to focus on.
2. Key Factors: brainstorm about the various factors influencing the focal issue. There can be numerous obvious factors and further digging can discover the less obvious, hidden ones.
3. External Forces: there are always certain remote, unseen forces that operate on the focal issue, and can be geopolitical, economic, social or technological. This may result in 70 to 80 key factors/external forces.
4. Critical Uncertainties: by combining all forms of key factors by implementing a divergent process, the next step is to converge by allocating priority votes to the importance of each factor and the degree of uncertainty.
5. Scenario Logics: a decision is taken on which potential futures out of the curated list are to be developed into a detailed scenario.
6. Scenarios: the eligible (top trending) scenarios are then turned into a story by a single author.
7. Implications and Options: fact check and stress-test each of the scenarios is set up after a few weeks.
8. Early Indicators can be easily found in consumer behaviour or stock price fluctuation.

A strategy is always developed with a set of scenarios studied and selected. It requires common sense as well as experience.

Example: A strategy can be an aeroplane, and the scenarios can be the conditions under which it can fly, or which it can crash.