The success of your enterprise might not depend solely on the pursuit of solid strategies; it’s more likely that you need to find solid strategies for multiple futures. You also need to know when to execute them; a strategy that's right for today can become wrong for tomorrow overnight.

Your ability to anticipate a wide range of future conditions will be crucial to your success. Ask yourself these questions: In the next twelve to twenty–four months, what business conditions and market changes concern you the most? What new challenges will you face that you aren’t facing today? What new capabilities will you need that you don’t have now? The application of scenario-based strategy techniques to your most pressing future business issues will determine whether or not you’re able to see and seize fast-breaking opportunities before they arrive.

The wider the range of futures for which you are prepared, the greater your ability to compete. Will the strategies that make you successful today have the same power tomorrow? Why wait to find out? Our Future Scenes program, comprised of four separate modules that are described below, shows you how to use simple scenario–building techniques and tools to take a different look at tomorrow.

Future Scenes
Rather than confine yourself to thinking only about changing economic conditions and how they will impact you and your industry, imagine a future business scenario that you believe could happen within the next 24–48 months. Imagine how the basic drivers of a possible future would interact—consumers, industry, cultural issues, innovations, markets, competitors, technology, politics, economies—as if the future has already arrived and you are already there. Then look back from your imagined future to imagine how it might have unfolded.

Future Scope
Instead of betting your business on just one future scenario that you feel is sure to emerge, develop a wide range of radically different scenarios—all of them possible, but each one with a different probability of occurring. By expanding the scope of the futures you can handle, you’ll expand your competitive boundaries while gaining greater control of your future business results and risks.

Future Strategies
Play your current business strategies against the most probable of the futures you painted. Determine how you measure up to the challenges you may face. Identify your competitive gaps and define the new capabilities that will help you win. Pursue those capabilities now that will be essential in many of the futures that you imagined.

Future Maps
The road to the future is never a straight line. It is necessary to pay attention to the sequence, the path, and the pace of future events that you believe could signal impending shifts in future conditions. Then lay out a roadmap of plans, strategies, actions, and investments that will keep you positioned to take advantage of as many potential futures as possible... before they emerge.