Scenario Planning in Practice
Art Kleiner
I’ve recently been asked to describe how to use scenarios in a business or community context. Scenarios are imaginative pictures of potential futures. They are used to spark conversations that help you make better decisions now.
(This article is based on the work Juliette Powell and I do at Kleiner Powell International, on the future of media course we teach at New York University, and on 30 years of researching and writing about scenario practice — including consulting editorial work with Peter Schwartz on his influential guide, The Art of the Long View, and my own history of the field in The Age of Heretics — and conversations with many friends and mentors along the way.)
The primary goal of the exercise is to expand your ability to deal with the uncertainties you face. Often with the help of a facilitator, you explore several alternative future realities. Each gives you a compelling, clear, and realistic view of what could plausibly happen in an area you care about — for example, a particular set of technologies or a venture into an unfamiliar but necessary space.
These portrayals of future reality become part of your shared shorthand language about the challenges and opportunities you face. They give you a new way of talking about the complex event that could happen in the next few years, only…
