Good morning. Nobody can predict next year. You can still rehearse it.
Strategy.
Scenario Planning
Somewhere in your current plan sits a single assumption about next year — the market holds, the funding closes, the big customer stays; if it flipped next quarter, would you be executing a response you had already rehearsed, or improvising alongside everyone else — and if the honest answer is improvising, why haven't you spent the two hours the rehearsal takes?
Pierre Wack ran group planning at Royal Dutch Shell in the early 1970s, and he had concluded that forecasting was a machine for being confidently wrong. Drawing on Herman Kahn's cold-war work at RAND — thinking the unthinkable, as Kahn called it — Wack made Shell's executives live inside several futures at once, including one in which the oil-producing states restricted supply and prices multiplied. When the 1973 embargo arrived, the future Shell's rivals had dismissed was one its managers had already argued about in a room, and Shell navigated the decade among the strongest of the majors. Peter Schwartz, Wack's successor, later codified the method in The Art of the Long View (1991). The point was never prediction; it is the preparation of judgement. The trap is the forecast in three costumes — best case, base case, worst case — which are one future at three volumes. Most people plan for the middle one and are ready for nothing.
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