Scenario Planning: Making Better Decisions about Tomorrow, Today
The future is inherently unpredictable, forcing companies to
conduct strategic planning in the face of great uncertainty. As
a result, many companies struggle to develop strategies that
take into account long-term threats and opportunities, while
balancing short-term priorities. Scenario planning is a
structured methodology you can use to test existing strategies
against varied future states or scenarios. Scenario planning is
not meant to predict the future. Instead, it allows you to
explore a series of high-impact, uncertain—yet plausible—future
states. This knowledge, in turn, enables you to recognize the
“signposts” of scenarios as they unfold and react accordingly.
Frost & Sullivan’s Growth Team Membership (GTM) profiled Merck &
Co., Inc. (the global pharmaceutical company) and how it applied
scenario planning. Merck’s objective was to better anticipate
how different strategies would hold up against the state of the
global healthcare environ