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.