Scenario Planning Workshop
Future=Proofing your strategy against uncertainty and disruption
Positioning Your Company For Multiple Futures
Disruption is no longer the exception. It is the rule. Times change, people change, culture changes and technology changes - fast. Scenario Planning allows you to prepare for predictable futures, even if those predictions are improbable.
But its not just about preparing for risks or downsides. Scenario planning can highlight gaps in the market and emerging opportunities that give your company first-mover or other competitive advantage.
It's Not New. But it is still useful...
Scenario Planning was pioneered in the corporate world by Shell in the early 1970s, whose planning team foresaw the oil shock born of Middle-East upheaval that blindsided its rivals. It's a striking reminder that the region's geopolitics have shaped global strategy for fifty years, and that the discipline built to navigate them has never been more relevant.
What is scenario planning?
Scenario planning is a structured way of preparing your organisation for a future you can't always predict. Rather than betting on a single forecast and hoping it holds, you and your leadership team build a small set of plausible, distinct futures - each one a coherent story about how your market, your customers, your regulators and your technology might evolve - and then test your strategy against every one of them.
It works in both directions: it exposes where your current plan breaks and where new openings appear - the markets you could enter, the capabilities worth building early, the moves that only make sense once you've seen the future clearly.
The point isn't to guess which future arrives. It's to surface the assumptions you're quietly relying on, and build the judgement to move early and confidently - defensively and opportunistically - whichever way the world turns.
Why is Scenario Planning so useful right now?
Two forces are converging. The first is uncertainty: the range of plausible futures has widened, and the single-forecast plan - one projection, extended in a straight line - no longer holds against the volatility in markets, regulation, and stakeholder expectations.
The second is disruption from emerging technologies, AI foremost among them, which is rewriting cost structures, business models and competitive advantage faster than any budget cycle can absorb.
Scenario Planning doesn't just brace you against the downside; it trains your leadership to spot the upside early.
Handled well, this moment of maximum uncertainty is also a moment of unusual opportunity, and scenario planning is how you get to it deliberately rather than by luck.
Meet our Facilitators
Over 30 years experience across multiple sectors and markets..
David Fuller
Digital, AI & Marketing Strategist and Futurist
David specializes in Marketing Strategy and Digital Strategy, but more recently has been advising businesses about AI strategy. David employs techniques such as Scenario planning to help companies build strategies against disruptive technologies.
"Scenario planning is a great way to match the probability of something happening with the impact of that outcome on your business or market or team. It all starts with a simple question - What if?"
✽ How it Works
Its a journey.
Learning about you & your stakeholders
Before your workshop, we conduct pre-workshop interviews with key stakeholders - your leadership team and maybe your customers and even suppliers or vendors. This surfaces the strategic questions that most need to be answered, the assumptions your current strategy is built on, and the dynamics your facilitator needs to understand before walking into the room.
Who is in the room? What do they want?
Your Leadership Team's time is important. We design your scenario planning workshop around your market, not a generic template. We brief all participants clearly so your leaders arrive understanding the process. They will know why scenario planning works the way it does. We don't want to waste an hour.
It might be larger than you think
Together, your team maps the system your organisation operates within the driving forces, feedback loops, and key relationships that shape your strategic environment. Long-term trends versus short term fads. Generational change versus campaigns. This is a highly valuable exercise for boards and leadership teams on its own, entirely apart from the scenario work that follows.
Where to stretch
Your facilitator guides your team to identify and select the most important uncertainties, the forces that are both highly uncertain and highly impactful. Your team will typically select two or four stretch axes to define your scenario sets before choosing stretches that are genuinely challenging rather than incremental variations on your current plan..
With an Author!
Working through the scenario quadrants, your team creates the most evocative worlds it can using rich descriptions, images - even AI video. The goal is to make each future feel vivid and tangible, not abstract. The more alive the scenario, the more useful the strategic conversation it generates.
And Repeat...
For each scenario, your team works through the strategic implications: what would this future mean for our current strategy, our competitive position, and the assumptions your team is relying on. Your facilitator repeats this process several times across the scenario sets, building your cumulative insight.
Oh-Dear and Ah-Ha Moments
Your facilitator helps your leaders isolate key insights (the strategic ‘aha’ moments that have emerged) across the full scenario set and helps capture your ideas and implications, especially the ones your team would not have reached through conventional analysis.
Start Preparing
The workshop closes by applying those insights directly: identifying opportunities to improve the current strategy, and developing new strategies and contingencies as they are required. Your leaders leave with practical actions, not just interesting futures.
Let's Have a Chat
Not everyone is creative. Our facilitators straddle corporate and creative domains like fiction writing and video game world-building to help envision the future.
Frequently Asked Questions
Strategy Planning Workshop Facilitation.
Our standard 1 Day Scenario Planning workshop starts from $9,500.
Other drivers of cost include:
- On-site or off-site facilitation (Travel, accomodation, catering etc)
- Pre-work and research requirements
- Add-ons e.g. roleplaying, gamification, vibe-coding of MVPs etc
Scenario Planning can be a powerful tool for leaders and executives who are looking to make the best decisions when budgeting or allocating resources for the future, however it can also be used by Product Teams, Innovation Teams, Risk Departments and others.
We believe that the more diverse the group in the workshop, the less assumptions are made about the future.
We have been facilitating workshops on four continents for over 20 years. Our facilitators are practitioners with experience in professional development, consulting and training, comfortable speaking to the highest and the lowest people in an organisation.
Our facilitators understand local culture and markets and educate themselves about emerging trends and technologies to ensure that strategies are forward looking and 'future-proofed'.
Aquitude facilitators have worked in a wide variety of industry sectors including Healthcare, Customer Experience, Sport, Travel, Media, FMCG Manufacturing and Marketing, Fintech, Start-ups, Marine, Not-for-profit, sustainability, luxury goods, local and national government.
Workshops have been facilitated in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, United Kingdom, Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Australia.
Yes. Scenario Planning workshops can be run at a company level, business unit level, department level or local team level.
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