Scenario planning is a widely used decision-making practice used to find a sure course of action in the face of great uncertainty and difficult challenges. It was first developed at the Rand Institute and refined by the Group Planning team for Royal Dutch/Shell, who used it to anticipate and prepare for the 1970s energy crisis. The practice played a role in the end of apartheid in South Africa, in public health responses to the AIDS crisis in the 1990s, and in the development of modern war-gaming at the military. It can be used to make sense of today’s most difficult public challenges: climate change, the energy transition, future pandemics, and many political challenges.
Scenario exercises don’t predict the future or assess the likelihood of possibilities. They explore uncertainty, articulating several different plausible, relevant alternative trajectories. They then consider decisions that need to be made today, exploring which will be robust in any potential future.