The use and abuse of scenarios

But the emphasis on successful prophecies misses the point. Most scenarios end up failing to predict future outcomes, but the very act of trying to imagine alternatives to the conventional view helps you perceive your options more clearly.

In addition to increasing decision quality, scouting various futures has numerous additional benefits. First, scenario planning reminds us that the future is inherently uncertain. By making that explicit in our decision-making process, we have a more realistic view of the world. Second, we are better prepared for how we are going to respond to diff

Scenario planning is a narrative art, first and foremost. It homes in on the uncertainties that inevitably haunt a complex decision and forces the participants to imagine multiple versions of how that uncertain future might actually play out.

Scenarios are great if mistakes have dire consequences, but many tasks can be learned on the job without bringing on disaster.

While experience is useful, scenario analysis is one of an architect’s most powerful tools to allow iterative design without building whole systems. By modeling likely scenarios, an architect can discover if a particular solution will, in fact, work well.

In the excitement of a looming opportunity, decision makers are infamous for concentrating on what a strategy could do for them if it succeeded and not enough, or at all, on what it could do to them if it failed. To combat this potentially ruinous overoptimism, time needs to be devoted, systematically, to addressing a pair of questions that often d

using scenarios to make learning more vivid and engaging, but the best scenarios are the learner’s actual problems or challenges.

is, if you could learn how you might fail without going to the trouble of actually failing? That’s the idea behind a “premortem,” as the psychologist Gary Klein calls it. The idea is simple. Many institutions already conduct a postmortem on failed projects, hoping to learn exactly what killed the patient. A premortem tries to find out what might go