The Top Ten Ways Scenario Planning Can Go Wrong: 10 Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

Scenario planning is a powerful tool. When it works, it rewires how people think about the future. It invites leaders to confront uncertainty, question their assumptions, and build more agile strategies. I’ve seen scenarios help organizations avoid big bets on bad assumptions — and uncover opportunities they didn’t know they were looking for. (Serious Insights)

I’ve also seen scenario projects go sideways. Not because the tool is flawed, but because of how it’s framed, governed, or executed. Scenario planning is unforgiving of shortcuts. Treat it like a ceremonial workshop, a box to tick in a strategy process, and it will happily absorb your time and budget while leaving your decisions untouched. I help my clients avoid these traps. But even big firms with good intentions often misuse the tools they employ to improve their own fortunes.

Here are ten of the most common ways scenario planning goes wrong, along with guidance on how to avoid them.

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1. Using Scenario Planning to “Find the Right Future”.

If your team starts a scenario project secretly hoping to discover which future is most likely, you’re already off on the wrong foot.

When people treat scenarios as sophisticated forecasts, they lean into the future they like best, label it “probable,” and quietly ignore the others. That turns scenario planning into a prediction exercise with extra steps.

The whole premise of scenario planning is that, beyond a certain horizon, the future is too messy and contingent to be predicted with any precision. Scenarios create context for decisions by exploring multiple plausible futures, not a verdict on which one will happen. (Serious Insights)

How to avoid this

• Be explicit up front: “We are not trying to pick a winner. We are mapping a space of plausible futures.”
• Avoid “most likely scenario” language. Talk about plausible, relevant, and challenging instead.
• Design strategy work to ask: “What would we do if this scenario came true?” not “Which one feels right?”

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2. Starting with the Wrong Question

Weak focal questions create weak scenarios.

If the question is too broad (“What is the future of everything?”), projects generate vague narratives nobody can use. If it’s too narrow (“What will our Q3 market share be in Region X?”), they end up with glorified sensitivity analysis.

When the focal question is misaligned with real decisions, the scenarios get politely read and then ignored. (Serious Insights)

How to avoid this

• Anchor the project on a real decision or set of decisions: investments, policies, strategic shifts. Use interviews and analysis to converge on a meaningful focus question.
• Phrase the focal question in terms of your role in the future, not just “what the future will be” (e.g., “How might higher education create value in 2035 under very different social and economic conditions?”).
• Test the question with senior decision-makers (and other stakeholders, including customers): “If we had great scenarios that explored this question, would you change anything you’re doing?” If the answer is “no,” rewrite the question.

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3. Confusing Trends with Uncertainties

Another failure mode: building scenarios on top of things that are actually predetermined — demographic bulges already baked into the population, regulatory changes already passed, technologies already commoditized.

If you put predetermined trends on the axes of your matrix, you get four flavors of the same future. That yields scenarios that are interesting reading but strategically useless.

Good scenario work distinguishes between:

• Predetermined forces: those that will show up in almost any plausible future (aging population, already-ratified regulation, infrastructure already under construction).
• Critical uncertainties: things that matter a lot to your focal question and could plausibly go in very different directions. 

How to avoid this

• Use tools like STEEP (Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political) to systematically separate “almost certainly” from “we honestly don’t know.” (Serious Insights)
• Treat predetermined forces as context inside every scenario, not as the axes that drive divergence.
• Make sure scenario matrices are built on uncertainties that genuinely pull the future in different directions.
• Conduct research that offers proof points that the uncertainties are fundamental, such as significant political or social disagreements over a concept. Documenting this evidence helps people understand the scope and character of an uncertainty.

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4. Building Four Versions of the Official Future

Many organizations already have an “official future” — a shared mental model of how things will “probably” unfold. Without conscious effort, scenario teams often repackage that one future into multiple, slightly tweaked stories.

The result: four scenarios that share the same assumptions about growth, regulation, technology, or customer behavior, with only cosmetic differences in color or tone.

When the stories don’t really disagree with each other, they can’t challenge the organization’s beliefs and they won’t change any strategies. 

How to avoid this

• Stress-test your uncertainties: for each axis, write a few sentences about radically different states of the world. The extremities of uncertainties, their “polarities,” should be meaningfully different, not just binary “highs” and “lows,” or “influential” or “inconsequential,” they should represent the edges of a continuum that will continue beyond the scenario horizon.
• Check for overlap: if the same assumptions show up in all the scenarios, ask if that’s truly predetermined — or if you’re just attached to them. (Serious Insights)
• Ask: “Would each of these scenarios force us to make meaningfully different choices?” If not, push further apart.

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5. Treating Scenario Building as a Data Exercise, Not a Cognitive One

There is no data from the future. There are only data about today and the past, plus our imaginations. When people forget that, they either drown in current data or dismiss scenario planning as “not rigorous.” (Serious Insights)

Scenarios absolutely should be grounded in evidence, but the value of the work lives in how people recombine that evidence into coherent alternative futures. That’s a cognitive and creative act, not a spreadsheet function.

How to avoid this

• Use data to inform and constrain stories, not to dictate them.
• Balance quantitative analysis with qualitative work focused on narrative, metaphor, and systems thinking.
• Explicitly talk about cognitive biases: anchoring on today, overconfidence, and recency. Ask the team: “What are we assuming will continue that might not?”

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6. Crafting Lifeless or Incoherent Narratives

A scenario can be analytically sound and still fall flat because nobody can see themselves in it.

Common failure patterns:

• Narratives that read like bullet points turned into paragraphs.
• Worlds with no people, just abstract “markets,” “governments,” and “technologies.”
• Stories full of contradictions that nobody bothered to resolve (“hyper-local autonomy” and “tight global regulatory harmonization” in the same story with no explanation as to how or why). 

If the story doesn’t feel lived-in, it won’t stick in decision-makers’ minds. If it’s internally inconsistent, it will quickly lose credibility.

How to avoid this

• Bring the scenarios down to the level of organizations, customers, students, citizens — real actors with names, incentives, and constraints. 
• Check each scenario for internal logic: “Given these conditions, would this really happen?”
• Write in clear, accessible prose. This isn’t science fiction; it’s strategic storytelling.

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7. Keeping Decision-Makers at Arm’s Length

One of the fastest ways to waste a scenario project: let consultants or a small internal team do all the thinking, then present finished scenarios to leadership as a glossy deck.

If executives only meet the scenarios at the end, they haven’t wrestled with the uncertainties, they haven’t felt their assumptions challenged, and they haven’t experienced the discomfort that leads to learning. (Serious Insights)

You end up with “great content” and no change in behavior.

How to avoid this

• Involve key decision-makers early in framing the focal question, voting on uncertainties, and choosing the matrix.
• Use work sessions rather than briefings wherever possible. The goal is participation, not just “communication.”
• Make it clear: the scenarios are not a report you consume; they’re a tool you work with.

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8. Stopping at the Stories (No “So What?”)

Scenarios that never touch strategy are just nicely bound thought experiments.

Another common failure: the team puts enormous energy into building and writing scenarios, runs out of time or attention, and then tacks on a short “implications” section. Nobody works through what to do differently in light of the futures they just explored.

Scenario planning is not complete until you’ve translated futures into options, tests, and choices in the present. (Serious Insights)

How to avoid this

• From the beginning, reserve at least as much time for “strategies from scenarios” as for building the stories.
• For each scenario, explore:
  • What strategies win here?
  • Which current assumptions break?
  • What leading indicators would signal we’re sliding toward this world?
• Look for robust strategies (good in many futures) and contingent strategies (activated only if specific signals appear).

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9. Treating Scenario Planning as a One-Off Event

I see this all the time: an organization does a big scenario project, publishes a handsome PDF, presents it at an offsite, and then puts it on a shelf.

The world moves, signals appear, assumptions get invalidated, but nobody updates the work. Five years later, someone says, “Didn’t we do scenarios about this?”

Scenario planning is most powerful when it becomes a living practice, not a rare ceremony. (Serious Insights)

How to avoid this

• Build an explicit early-warning system from the scenarios: a short list of signposts to monitor for each future.
• Schedule periodic reviews: What has changed in our STEEP landscape? Which uncertainties are collapsing? Do we need to revise or retire any scenarios? Treat scenario planning as a knowledge management exercise.
• Fold scenarios into ongoing planning cycles, risk reviews, innovation portfolios, and leadership development.
• When a major decision is actually made, come back to the scenarios with the following position: “Now that X(the decision is true), do new uncertainties arise for us? Do the narratives remain useful as they are in light of our change?”

For most organizations, individual decisions will not change the scenarios, but they will undoubtedly change the strategic plan (which should also be reviewed immediately after each decision to assess its impact on follow-on assumptions in the plan). Any significant milestone, however, offers an opportunity to reflect, and scenarios are the perfect tool to frame reflection. The reflection keeps the scenarios relevant and the organization on its toes.

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10. Underestimating the Emotional Impact

Scenario planning isn’t just an intellectual exercise. When done well, it can be emotionally unsettling.

People may see versions of the future in which their current skills are less valuable, their business models are under pressure, or cherished narratives about progress no longer hold. If you ignore those emotions, they come back as resistance: dismissing some scenarios, trivializing the process, or quietly sabotaging follow-through.

How to avoid this

• Normalize discomfort. Tell participants at the outset: “If these stories don’t make you uneasy at least once, we probably didn’t stretch far enough.”
• Make space for reflection after each scenario: What surprised you? What worried you? What excited you?
• Tie the work back to agency: show how scenarios can increase people’s sense of control by expanding the range of options they can see and prepare for. (Serious Insights)

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Bringing It Back to Practice

Scenario planning, done well, is messy, humbling work. It asks leaders to admit what they can’t know, to hold multiple futures in their heads at once, and to make choices anyway. That’s why I keep coming back to it in my strategy work: it is still the only tool that helps people really live with uncertainty long enough to learn from it. (Serious Insights)

But like any powerful tool, it can disappoint when misused. If you’re considering a scenario project or revisiting one, use these ten failure modes as a checklist. If you see too many of them in your design or governance, fix them before you invest more energy.

Scenarios don’t owe you predictive accuracy. What they can offer, if you treat them with respect, is better questions, better conversations, and ultimately, better choices in the face of a future that refuses to sit still.

For more serious insights on strategy, click here.

All images via Google Gemini and or Open AI ChatGPT from prompts written by the author.

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