What is Scenario Planning?
Scenario Planning, also known as Alternative Futures Planning, is a collaborative way of thinking, planning – and acting – that explicitly factors in a range of plausible ways in which your operating environment could change in the future. For nearly two decades, FSG has helped leading organizations integrate foresight into their strategy and operations.
Our Approach
- We always work ‘from the outside in’, considering the forces and factors outside of our control, to paint the strategic context
- We stress future market pull rather than current capabilities push
- We are creative, rigorous and focused on practical outcomes
- Our approach is fundamentally collaborative
Applications
Our evolving tools and processes inform strategy, risk management, change leadership and innovation for leading business, government and non-profit organizations.
FSG’s toolkit is adaptable to a wide range of client needs and circumstances.
Our Clients
We have served some of the largest and most successful private and public sector entities in the US and the world. Many of them have been repeat clients. The following organizations are among those that have adopted Futures Strategy Group’s proprietary scenario planning methods to prepare for their futures.
Coming Soon: Fatal Uncertainty by Patrick Marren
FSG principal Patrick Marren’s new book Fatal Certainty lays out the epic story of how an increasing fixation on prediction – specifically, attempts to predict things that are inherently unpredictable – has thrown the United States and the developed world into crisis. Fatal Certainty does not simply point out a problem; it also shows a way forward. We can anticipate and think through the full range of plausible futures. But this approach requires abandoning probabilistic prediction of the truly unpredictable, in favor of rigorous imagination of the imaginable. Fatal Certainty is the result of decades of FSG experience helping major corporations, governmental agencies, and other institutions to imagine strategies for themselves, regardless of how the future unfolds.
Learn more about Fatal Certainty »
Training in Scenario Planning
FSG believes there’s only one way to properly learn how to do scenario planning, and that is to actually do it, in a real strategic context, and not as a generic business case. A US federal laboratory approached FSG for advice in learning how to do scenario planning in order to build internal capabilities to support laboratory planning and decision processes. FSG customized a training program for the lab’s team that was charged with developing a scenario planning capability. The program consisted of a week-long hands-on training exercise, which included a simulated scenario-planning workshop, followed by an actual scenario-planning pilot for an internal business unit focused on machine learning.