Intuitive Logics Scenario Planning

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.