Strategic Scenario Planning
Strategic scenario planning is a structured foresight method that helps organizations make decisions under deep uncertainty by constructing a small set of internally consistent, sharply divergent stories about how the future could unfold. The dominant 'intuitive-logics' tradition was pioneered at Royal Dutch/Shell by Pierre Wack, whose 1985 Harvard Business Review account showed how scenarios prepared Shell's managers for the 1973 oil shock by changing how they perceived their world rather than by predicting it. Paul Schoemaker's 1995 Sloan Management Review article codified the approach into a repeatable step-by-step process for managers, and Kees van der Heijden's 1996 book reframed scenarios as the centerpiece of an ongoing 'strategic conversation' through which an organization builds shared understanding and adaptive capacity. The aim is not to forecast a single future but to make strategy robust across several plausible ones.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Schoemaker, P. J. H. (1995). Scenario Planning: A Tool for Strategic Thinking. Sloan Management Review, 36(2), 25-40. · URL
- Wack, P. (1985). Scenarios: Uncharted Waters Ahead. Harvard Business Review, 63(5), 72-89. · URL
- van der Heijden, K. (1996). Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation. John Wiley & Sons. · ISBN 9780471966395
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.