Top Ten Reasons to Use Scenario Planning

1. The future is uncertain.
2. You put your organization at risk when you think you are certain about something you can’t possibly be certain about, so you need a robust process to challenge assumptions.
3. One of the best ways to drive innovation is to put people into places and situations that they haven’t imagined and ask them how products, processes or services morph under those conditions.
4. The only way to test ideas against different conditions is to set up the conditions of the test in a meaningful way.
5. It’s hard to be surprised by something you imagined—rather than worry about surprises, anticipate.
6. Discontinuities make looking at historical information meaningless in many cases. Don’t churn over things that won’t matter in the future.
7. For the future value of many planning attributes, from interest rates to housing to technology innovation, more data won’t get you closer to a clearer forecast. Scenarios create a context for exploring multiple possibilities.
8. Scenarios empower adaption to changes in markets, competitive landscape, and business models by helping organizations model the forces acting on them and how they shape and influence strategic choices.
9. The only way to turn an emergent opportunity into a competitive advantage (or seize a new market) is to have the courage to look into the shadows and see it in the first place.
10. Even though Drucker said the best way to predict the future is to invent it, most of us don’t invent it, we ride it out, so we better learn the best way to surf (which is scenario planning).

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