Scenario And Foresight

---
name: scenario-and-foresight
description: "Builds a 2x2 grid of internally consistent future scenarios from the two most critical uncertainties facing a strategy, then stress-tests the strategy against all four to surface no-regret moves and early-warning indicators. Use when a strategy needs to survive more than one plausible future, not just the one everyone is already assuming."
---

# Scenario & Foresight Thinking

## Purpose

Builds alternative future scenarios and stress-tests a strategy against them
— not to predict which future will happen, but to check whether a strategy
survives more than one plausible version of it.

## Anchored in research

- Liedtka (1998) — thinking in time
- Schwartz (1991), *The Art of the Long View* — the classic scenario-planning
  method: identify the driving forces of change, separate the predictable
  ones from the genuinely uncertain ones, and build a small set of
  internally consistent, divergent scenarios around the two most critical
  uncertainties (commonly structured as a 2×2 matrix).

## Method

1. **List the driving forces relevant to the strategic question** — trends,
   technologies, regulatory shifts, competitor moves, customer behavior
   changes.
2. **Separate predetermined elements from critical uncertainties.** Some
   forces are near-certain (demographics, already-committed regulation);
   others are genuinely unknown. Scenario planning is built around the
   uncertain ones — treating a predetermined element as uncertain wastes the
   exercise.
3. **Select the two most impactful, most uncertain forces.** Cross them to
   form a 2×2 grid — this produces four internally consistent, meaningfully
   different scenarios rather than a single "optimistic/pessimistic" spectrum.
4. **Name and flesh out each of the four scenarios** with enough concrete
   detail that someone could recognize which one is unfolding from early
   signals — a scenario that's too abstract to recognize in practice isn't
   doing its job.
5. **Stress-test the strategy against each scenario**, not just the expected
   one. Where does the strategy hold up? Where does it quietly assume a
   single future?
6. **Identify no-regret moves and early-warning indicators** — actions that
   make sense across all four scenarios, and signals worth monitoring that
   would indicate which scenario is actually materializing.

## What this skill does NOT do

- Doesn't make the final decision for you — it produces a structured draft to
  support a human decision.
- Doesn't confirm figures, market data, or competitor data from memory — it
  uses the inputs you provide, or marks an assumption clearly
  (`[assumption — verify]`).
- Doesn't predict the future — it builds plausible alternatives for a stress
  test, not probabilities.

## Refinement notes

Areas to keep deepening with real practice:

- your own rules of thumb and heuristics for this technique
- concrete templates (into [`../../references/`](../../references/))
- reference cases / your own examples
- what this skill deliberately does *not* do (guardrails, common mistakes) —
  add to the list above

This is an internal working note, not a claim about the skill's current
usability. Track depth privately via the `maturity` field in
`skills_index.json` (see
[`../../../meta/maturity_levels.md`](../../../meta/maturity_levels.md)).
**Don't add new fields to the frontmatter** — `name` and `description` are
the only ones allowed (see
[`../../../meta/frontmatter_schema.md`](../../../meta/frontmatter_schema.md)).

## Continue from here

- Next in this pack: [`../strategic-options-evaluation/SKILL.md`](../strategic-options-evaluation/SKILL.md) — Compares strategic options in a structured way (impact/effort, risk, resources) to support a decision.
- A ready-made skill chain for this situation: see [`../../../playbooks/`](../../../playbooks/)
- This pack's shared guardrails: [`../../CLAUDE.md`](../../CLAUDE.md)

## References

- [`../../references/`](../../references/) — the pack's shared background material
- [`../../CLAUDE.md`](../../CLAUDE.md) — the pack's shared guardrails