Rethinking Strategy

CHAPTER 10 ‘What’s next?’ — Anticipating the future

Scenarios provide the essential creativity for strategic transformation

Conditioned by a culture of evidence-based (after-the-fact) decision making, it’s not hard to see why some people can struggle initially with creating scenarios. Time and again I’ve seen how participants can hit a wall at this stage of the strategy process. People who comfortably embraced each of the previous stages — internal interviews, environmental scanning, sorting of uncertainties and choosing driving forces — suddenly freeze at the prospect of imagining circumstances that don’t yet exist, frozen by a combination of insecurity (What if I’m wrong?), uncertainty (This could happen or that could happen), lack of creative belief (How would I know?) or the absence of supporting data (Where are the facts?).

It’s this absence of facts, the scaffolding for their everyday decision making, and the pivot to relying on intuition, creativity and logic, that usually proves most challenging to scenario builders.

Does it make sense?

This chapter describes the intuitive logics approach to creating scenarios that was developed by Royal Dutch Shell and SRI International during the 1970s.¹ In lay terms, this technique applies a ‘Does it make sense?’ approach to exploring the future based on the logic of cause (drivers) and effect (outcomes) relationships.

Intuitive logics is primarily a qualitative technique, with secondary quantitative support. Such an approach, ...