What Is Scenario Planning?

At its core, scenario planning is an opportunity for you to put your creative thinking cap on and get to imagining what the future could look like for your business and how you’re going to respond. This is the equivalent of us going through the fire drills and earthquake drills we used to do when we were in school. Same concept in a way, except we’re just thinking about what we would do with our business in the event that some event happens in the future.

We want to look at what challenges we might face in the future. Things like economic downturns, supply shortages or maybe losing key personnel. We definitely want to take some time to brainstorm some creative solutions to those problems in this process. Believe us, it is a lot less stressful to take a little time to theoretically solve a potential problem with a calm and cool head, rather than waiting until the you know what hits the fan.

Our scenario planning shouldn’t be all doom and gloom, though. We also want to consider what decisions might be pending if things go really really well. What will we do if we experience a surge of new customers or we see an increase in demand for our products? What kind of systems or solutions might we need to support the hiring of new team members if we grow? Again, it is much less stressful to consider these scenarios in an intentionally focused brainstorming session today than it is to be creative in the eye of a hurricane you probably could have seen coming.

Scenario planning doesn’t predict the future—it just helps you prepare for it. By considering a range of possible outcomes your business can stay relatively adaptable, you can reduce risk and you can make quicker, smarter decisions when they matter. This will also help you retain a little bit of sanity hopefully! This is why we love to walk folks through scenario planning in our alesce Growth Model. Not only is it incredibly helpful to prepare for the path ahead, but it can also be pretty fun to just get creative and play a bit with thoughts of the future.

Happy imagining!