Stress-test your strategy before the future does.
Most organisations extend the trends they know and build their strategy on that future. In the Anthropocene, the future branches and sometimes breaks: thresholds, cascades, policies that change overnight.
The future we expect: extrapolate, pick the most likely scenario and optimise for it.
The futures we don’t expect: explore several worlds, their risks and thresholds, and look for what holds in all of them.
A collaborative, collective-intelligence workshop in foresight and strategy, to stress-test your strategy across several futures and come away with robust decisions. It is built on the scientific state of the art and the reference literature in foresight.
What future do we expect?
What if the future isn’t the one we expect?
Which actions are robust?
An experiential, hands-on exercise to project yourselves into the future and question it. Each team gives shape to an object from its scenario, with its packaging, label and slogan, and discovers what that future changes in everyday life.
For executive committees and strategy, risk, finance and sustainability teams who need to test their plan against several futures: preparing the scenario and resilience analysis required by the CSRD and IFRS S2, reviewing a transition plan or deciding on long-term investments. The workshop can be run on your own case, with your sites and your value chain.
For municipalities, regional bodies, agencies and governments planning infrastructure, services and territories that will last for decades. The workshop helps build adaptation and transition plans that hold across several climate and socio-economic scenarios, make a territory’s thresholds and cascading effects visible, and align technical teams and elected officials around robust decisions.
For universities, business schools and researchers. The workshop turns the scientific literature on foresight, scenarios and planetary boundaries into a hands-on exercise, ready for a master’s or executive education programme. Its open materials, under a CC BY-NC-ND licence, can be reused in class, and its design can serve as a basis for studying how organisations decide under deep uncertainty.
The eleven templates and all the materials, to repeat the exercise in their own organisation and with their teams.
The tools to prepare the climate resilience analysis required by the CSRD (ESRS E1) and IFRS S2, and EU climate proofing for infrastructure projects, going beyond mere compliance.
Forecast and foresight, SSPs, physical and transition risks, planetary boundaries: a shared vocabulary to talk about the future with management, risk and finance.
Making trade-offs with incomplete information, defending a strategy in front of other teams and checking which decisions hold up in every future.
The case can be fictional, like La Vaca Utopista, a family-owned dairy group with plants in several countries and markets on three continents, whose strategy you rebuild to 2040. Or it can be tailored to your organisation: your sites, your value chain, your risks and the horizon that makes sense for you. In teams, with a case file, risk cards and a catalogue of actions, each with a cost, a timeline and an owner.
Paper, pencil and debate. Teams read the case, score each action in each scenario, cross out, argue and start again. Theory is put to work for the decision.
Each workshop has its template: printed, filled in as a group and pinned to the wall. Click one to see it full size.
Each strategy is tested in each of the five scenarios. The table shows where it works and where it fails.
A good strategy holds in most futures, including the sustainable scenario: it protects the organisation without degrading the nature and society it depends on.
Scenarios have no probability. Instead of betting on the most likely one, you prepare a strategy that holds in several.
What matters is the moment something stops working, and what it drags down with it along the value chain.
The best strategy for one future is fragile in the others. Under deep uncertainty, the one that survives in all of them wins.
Preserving natural and human capital has a cost. You learn to make the trade-offs with your eyes open.
All the workshop materials are released under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence, so you can reuse the method with your teams.
The methodology and the tools, ready to print and to run the workshop yourselves.
A short overview of the journey, from the expected future to the stress test.
Author of the workshop and its materials.
Author of the workshop and its materials.
Author of the design fiction phase.
Write to us to run the workshop in your organisation: over one, two or three days, with a fictional or tailored case, in English, French or Spanish.
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