Scenario planning

Pierre Wack and colleagues at Shell · 1985

Several internally consistent futures, written out in detail, instead of one forecast with a margin of error.

Its place in the frameworkTime Core›Contingency Planning

What it does

The purpose is not to predict but to make managers capable of recognising a future when it starts arriving. Wack’s account is explicit that the scenarios matter less than the change in what executives are prepared to see — which is why scenarios written by consultants and read once accomplish nothing.

Reach for it when: When planning rests on a single projection, and where the uncertainty is structural rather than statistical.
Where it stops: It is slow and demanding, and its value is destroyed by treating the scenarios as a menu with one marked most likely.

Pierre Wack, “Scenarios: Uncharted Waters Ahead” and “Shooting the Rapids”, Harvard Business Review, 1985.

Why it sits at Contingency Planning

What happens when the plan slips: where it slips, what absorbs it, what the fallback is, and when the decision to change course has to be taken.

A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:

SlippageEstimation research on optimism bias and the planning fallacy, and reference-class forecasting as the correction.
BuffersCritical-chain project management on aggregated buffers, and the argument against padding individual tasks.
The fallback planContingency-planning practice and the lead-time problem that makes late alternatives unavailable.
Decision pointsReal-options thinking on the value of deciding while options remain open.

All of Contingency Planning

What it touches elsewhere

Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at Contingency Planning lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.

Project managementSlippage is a project’s most common failure, and this object is what the project does about it.
Business CoreSupply resilience covers what happens when supply fails; this object covers what happens when time does.
Goal CoreA slipped plan raises the question of whether the goal moves, which is a decision rather than a consequence.
Data CoreSlippage history is data the organisation already has and almost never uses.

Filed at the same place

These answer questions that arise at Contingency Planning too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.

The pre-mortemAssume the plan has already failed a year from now, and have everyone write down why.

Elsewhere in Time Core

These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.

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