SCENARIOS: LEARNING AND ACTING FROM THE FUTURE

Part 3: Three Schools of Scenario Planning

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In 1987 William Huss and Edward Honton published the paper “Scenario Planning — What style should you use?”, in which they distinguish three types of scenario development approaches, namely ‘Intuitive Logics’, ‘Trend-Impact Analysis’ and ‘Cross-Impact Analysis’.

In 2002, Heijden, Bradfield, Burt, and Wright (Heijden et al., 2002: 128–129; Bradfield, et al.: 805) stated that the categorization presented above had two problems: the first one relates to the omission of the “La Prospective” methodology which it is for these authors a true school of Scenario Planning; the second one relates to the fact that the “Trend Impact Analysis” and the “Cross Impact Analysis”, although being standalone techniques, share the same foundations, which are anchored in the mathematical improvement of extrapolated time series data. In this sense, these two techniques must be viewed as a coherent group of techniques which, for convenience, those authors called `probabilistic modified trends’ (PMT) methodology (Heijden, et al., 2002).

In this article we will present and characterize the three major schools or techniques of Scenario Planning identified by Bradfield et al. (20052): “Intuitive…