Compare methods

	Cone of Plausibility	Intuitive Logics Scenario Planning
Field	Futures Foresight Studies	Futures Foresight Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2003	1995
Originator	Charles Taylor (cone imagery); popularized and formalized by Joseph Voros	SRI International / Royal Dutch Shell tradition; Paul J. H. Schoemaker (codification)
Type	Scenario-framing pipeline bounding alternative futures around a baseline	Deductive scenario-construction pipeline using two critical uncertainties
Seminal source	Voros, J. (2003). A generic foresight process framework. Foresight, 5(3), 10-21.	Schoemaker, P. J. H. (1995). Scenario planning: A tool for strategic thinking. Sloan Management Review, 36(2), 25-40.
Aliases	Futures Cone, Voros Futures Cone, Cone of Plausible Futures, Plausibility Cone Analysis	Intuitive Logics, 2x2 Scenario Matrix, Deductive Scenario Method, SRI Scenario Planning
Related	3	3
Summary	The cone of plausibility, often called the futures cone, is a framing device for scenario work that projects a baseline 'expected' future and then bounds a widening cone of alternative futures around it by varying the key drivers and assumptions on which that baseline rests. Drawn from the present at the cone's apex, the trajectory fans out as it extends into the future, because uncertainty compounds over time and the range of futures that remain plausible grows wider the further out one looks. Joseph Voros, building on Charles Taylor's earlier cone imagery, formalized the device by nesting categories of futures — possible, plausible, probable, and preferable — within the cone, giving foresight practitioners a shared vocabulary for distinguishing what could conceivably happen from what could reasonably happen and from what is most likely. As Bishop, Hines, and Collins note in their survey of scenario techniques, the cone provides a disciplined way to generate and bound a manageable set of alternative scenarios.	Intuitive logics is the most widely used family of scenario-planning methods, in which a small set of internally consistent, plausible stories about the future is constructed deductively from a few critical uncertainties. Rooted in the practice pioneered at SRI International and at Royal Dutch Shell in the 1970s, and codified for strategic thinking by Paul Schoemaker in his 1995 Sloan Management Review article, the approach asks a planning team to identify the driving forces shaping a focal decision, rank them by how much they matter and how uncertain they are, and select two critical uncertainties that become the orthogonal axes of a two-by-two matrix. The four quadrants define four contrasting but coherent futures, each developed into a narrative. The aim is not to predict but to stretch managers' mental models and to stress-test strategy against a manageable spread of qualitatively different worlds.