Author
Pierre Wack (Harvard Business Review)
1 reading card from 1 book · 1985.
1 card
Scenarios: Uncharted Waters Ahead · 1985
A good scenario does not guess the future; it changes the map in the decision-maker's head.
Wack headed the business environment division of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group's planning department, and his article opens with an uncomfortable observation: forecasts are dangerous precisely because they are usually right. They assume tomorrow will look like today and fail exactly when everything changes. The answer is not a better forecast but accepting uncertainty as a structural feature of the environment. The method separates two things: predetermined elements — what has already happened but whose consequences have not yet unfolded, like monsoon rains in the upper Ganges basin that will certainly show downstream — and critical uncertainties. The former are treated as facts; scenarios are built only on the latter. Today's practice has standardised the form. You pick, by consensus, the two most critical and uncertain forces, turn them into axes, and the four quadrants of the 2×2 matrix become four plausible worlds; the 2009 Tradecraft Primer describes exactly this step. For each world you write the indicators that would show it is becoming reality. The trap, in Wack's terms: first-generation scenarios that merely combine obvious uncertainties, such as one oil price or another, do not help decisions. A good scenario changes the decision-maker's mental model; otherwise it is water on a stone.
“Our real target was the microcosms of our decision makers: unless we influenced the mental image, the picture of reality held by critical decision makers, our scenarios would be like water on a stone.”