Scenario Planning

Scenario Planning was developed by Herman Kahn at RAND in the 1950s as a disciplined way to think about futures that resist single-point forecasts, particularly nuclear strategy, but later energy, climate, geopolitics, and corporate strategy.

Rather than predict one outcome, scenario planners construct a small set of internally coherent, qualitatively distinct futures and stress-test plans against each. The method is a deliberate counterweight to anchoring on the most-recent or most-vivid future.

Salons and Question Networks on Futurecraft use scenario framings to surface assumptions that would otherwise remain implicit, particularly around frontier technology, governance, and institutional design.