Scenario & Foresight Thinking

Purpose

Builds alternative future scenarios and stress-tests a strategy against them — not to predict which future will happen, but to check whether a strategy survives more than one plausible version of it.

Anchored in research

• Liedtka (1998) — thinking in time
• Schwartz (1991), The Art of the Long View — the classic scenario-planning method: identify the driving forces of change, separate the predictable ones from the genuinely uncertain ones, and build a small set of internally consistent, divergent scenarios around the two most critical uncertainties (commonly structured as a 2×2 matrix).

Method

1. List the driving forces relevant to the strategic question — trends, technologies, regulatory shifts, competitor moves, customer behavior changes.
2. Separate predetermined elements from critical uncertainties. Some forces are near-certain (demographics, already-committed regulation); others are genuinely unknown. Scenario planning is built around the uncertain ones — treating a predetermined element as uncertain wastes the exercise.
3. Select the two most impactful, most uncertain forces. Cross them to form a 2×2 grid — this produces four internally consistent, meaningfully different scenarios rather than a single "optimistic/pessimistic" spectrum.
4. Name and flesh out each of the four scenarios with enough concrete detail that someone could recognize which one is unfolding from early signals — a scenario that's too abstract to recognize in practice isn't doing its job.
5. Stress-test the strategy against each scenario, not just the expected one. Where does the strategy hold up? Where does it quietly assume a single future?
6. Identify no-regret moves and early-warning indicators — actions that make sense across all four scenarios, and signals worth monitoring that would indicate which scenario is actually materializing.

What this skill does NOT do

• Doesn't make the final decision for you — it produces a structured draft to support a human decision.
• Doesn't confirm figures, market data, or competitor data from memory — it uses the inputs you provide, or marks an assumption clearly ([assumption — verify]).
• Doesn't predict the future — it builds plausible alternatives for a stress test, not probabilities.

Refinement notes

Areas to keep deepening with real practice:

• your own rules of thumb and heuristics for this technique
• concrete templates (into ../../references/)
• reference cases / your own examples
• what this skill deliberately does not do (guardrails, common mistakes) — add to the list above

This is an internal working note, not a claim about the skill's current usability. Track depth privately via the maturity field in skills_index.json (see ../../../meta/maturity_levels.md). Don't add new fields to the frontmatter — name and description are the only ones allowed (see ../../../meta/frontmatter_schema.md).

Continue from here

• Next in this pack: ../strategic-options-evaluation/SKILL.md — Compares strategic options in a structured way (impact/effort, risk, resources) to support a decision.
• A ready-made skill chain for this situation: see ../../../playbooks/
• This pack's shared guardrails: ../../CLAUDE.md

References

• ../../references/ — the pack's shared background material
• ../../CLAUDE.md — the pack's shared guardrails