environments where future decisions must be played out.”
Peter Wack, a strategic planner who gained
fame during the oil crises of the 1970s through his ability to get the senior executives in Shell Oil to
understand what might happen in the energy business, stated that “…scenarios explore the facts but they
aim at perceptions inside the heads of decision makers. Their purpose is to gather and transform
information of strategic significance into fresh perceptions.”
The strategist must be careful, however, for
scenarios are not predictions but rather a “tool for helping us to take a long view in a world of great
According to Wack, scenarios serve two purposes: 1. to anticipate and understand risk
and 2. to discover strategic options of which the individual was previously unaware.
In order for this to
happen, strategists and decision makers need to question their assumptions and refrain from limiting the
range and scope of the situation.
While different people have applied the scenario planning framework in various ways, the basic
elements of this process remain the same. The first step is to define the policy question at hand. In this
case, it is, “How can the United States improve its bargaining position vis-à-vis North Korea?” The next
step is to identify the major trends that affect the policy question. These are the trends that influence the
outcome of the policy question at hand. Labeled as “Key Forces in the Local Environment” by Peter
Schwartz, these trends shape the environment from which the policy question is perceived.
The third step is to analyze the driving factors that affect, or push, the major trends affecting the
environment surrounding the policy question. These are the factors that influence each major trend, and
each of them have different measures of certainty.
Indeed, some of these forces have high certainty
(“pre-determined”) while others are highly uncertain. They also vary in terms of significance in how they
affect the future of the local environment. Of the different driving factors, the two that are the most
significant and have the greatest uncertainty, and thus have the greatest impact how the major trends
develop, are chosen as critical uncertainties. It is with these uncertainties that four different futures, or
“scenarios,” are developed.
Figure 1. Scenario Graph
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Convention