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Scenario Planning Indicators: The Missing Half of Every Scenario Exercise

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  Scenario planning just influences decisions when each scenario includes clear indicators and a trigger for action that everyone agrees on. Without these, you end up with a set of well-written stories, and stories alone do not drive action. This is the most common failure we see in scenario work. The workshop goes well, and the ideas are real. Teams create and debate four possible futures, then write them up. After that, the presentation gets filed away, and the organisation continues with its original plan. The Assumption That Breaks Scenario Planning Most organisations treat scenario production as the deliverable. Build the scenarios , present the scenarios, job complete. That assumption is where value is lost. A scenario is really a hypothesis about how things might unfold. If you do not attach a way to test strategies it, it is just an opinion, no matter how carefully you built it. The goal of scenario planning is not just to describe possible futures. It is to help your org...
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How Using Analysis of Competing Hypotheses Shows What’s Really Happening in Your Market, Not Just What You Hope Is True

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Confirmation bias means looking for evidence that supports what you already believe. Real intelligence is about searching for evidence that could prove you wrong. The Competitor “Threat” That Didn’t Exist In 2024, we spoke with a SaaS company that was sure its main competitor had a complex plan to move upmarket and steal its enterprise deals. Here’s what they “knew”: The competitor hired three enterprise sales reps. Competitor launched “enterprise-grade security features”. The competitor won three enterprise deals in Q2. The competitor announced enterprise partnerships. The story made sense. Their strategy seemed clear. The threat looked obvious. But that wasn’t what was really happening. Instead of just looking for patterns in surface evidence, we used a structured analysis. We listed out different possible explanations: Hypothesis A The competitor is executing a serious enterprise strategy to displace us. Hypothesis B The competitor is testing the enterprise market with limited commi...
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Competitive Intelligence To study competitor failures

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Most people focus on copying what their competitors do well. But you can often learn more by looking at where they went wrong. Here’s how you can get ahead by learning from your competitors’ mistakes before you make the same ones. They put $3 million into engineering, planned for eighteen months, hired a VP of AI, and did all they believed was needed. But they never stopped to ask, “Has any competitor already launched AI content features?” If they had, they would have found out: “Yes, three of them did last year.” “How’s that working for them?” Long pause. “We haven’t really looked at that.” Spend your time looking deeply at these launches If they had spent a few weeks looking into those competitor launches, trying out their AI features, scanning customer reviews, talking to prospects who had tested those features, and following public discussions and support forums, They would have seen that all three competitors launched AI content generation with a lot of hype—press releases, confer...
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