Scenario Planning for Policy

Scenario planning is a strategic-foresight method that develops a small set of plausible, internally consistent and divergent stories about how the future might unfold, in order to test policies and strategies against deep uncertainty. Rooted in the work of Pierre Wack at Royal Dutch/Shell and popularised by Peter Schwartz's The Art of the Long View, it does not try to predict the future but to expand decision-makers' thinking about it. By exploring several qualitatively different futures, policymakers can craft strategies that are robust across a range of possibilities rather than optimised for a single forecast that may not arrive.