Seven Questions Scenario Method

They are two of the seven prompts designed to draw out tacit concerns. The oracle question asks: if you could speak to a clairvoyant who knew the future, what one thing would you most want to ask? The answer reveals instantly which uncertainty matters most to the respondent. The epitaph question asks what legacy or judgment the respondent would want for the organization or themselves looking back from the future, exposing their deepest aspirations and values. Both are deliberately evocative rather than analytical, because asking directly about 'key drivers' tends to elicit guarded, conventional answers, whereas these framings unlock genuine hopes, fears, and priorities.

Because scenarios should differ only along the forces that are genuinely uncertain and consequential. Predetermined elements — developments already in motion or highly certain, like demographic momentum or committed infrastructure — will appear in every scenario and form common ground, so spending scenario distinctions on them is wasted. Critical uncertainties, by contrast, are both important and unresolved, and they are what the scenarios must explore. Schoemaker identifies this sorting as the heart of scenario construction: misjudging a true uncertainty as predetermined builds the whole set on false certainty, while treating a near-certainty as uncertain produces scenarios that differ in trivial or implausible ways.

No. It is a front-end elicitation and seeding technique. Its job is to surface stakeholders' concerns and to separate predetermined elements from critical uncertainties, supplying the raw material and the key dimensions of difference for scenarios. The scenarios themselves are then built with a full scenario method — most often intuitive logics, where two or more critical uncertainties are crossed or combined and each resulting future is developed into an internally consistent storyline. The seven questions thus typically open a larger process and are paired with environmental scanning to corroborate the uncertainties and with the scenario-building phase that turns them into complete, decision-relevant narratives.