The interest in scenario planning has been on the rise over the last decade and, in the aftermath of the global financial and economic crisis, even more so the last few years. Today’s business environment, however, is more rapidly changing and dynamic compared to when scenario planning became mainstream in the 70s. As a result, the use of scenario planning is gradually changing to make it a more effective strategy tool for both the short and long term.

By working with clients on strategy in organizationally inclusive ways, we found that scenario planning efforts lend themselves very well to making larger parts of organizations more aware, and as a result more anticipating, of the important driving forces shaping their competitive environment. As it turns out, discussing important drivers of change is a very effective way to create an open mind about the future.

However, we also learned that today, scenarios are not necessarily the most important output of scenario planning exercises when it comes to strategy formulation.

Scenarios are typically derived from the four quadrants created by offsetting the two most uncertain and most impactful driving forces against each other to create at least four different future scenarios. When it comes to strategy formulation however, the most impactful and certain driving forces are more important and actionable—since they are certain they will have to be strategized regardless of which scenario will prove to become reality.

This is where the scenario planning setting comes into its own. By involving sufficiently large multi-disciplinary groups, certain and high-impact driving forces can be explored and translated into discrete competitive opportunities. Systematically going through the most impactful and certain drivers provides a portfolio of competitive opportunities as strategy input. The opportunities can afterward be detailed, clustered where necessary, and thoroughly scrutinized to be able to make decisions on them.

All this doesn’t mean that traditional future scenarios have no more value—on the contrary, they provide an excellent evaluation framework for assessing the robustness of the identified competitive opportunities.