# Scenario planning for boards: a practical framework

How boards and executive teams can use scenario planning to stress-test strategy without drowning in forecasts.

Forecasts answer the question "what will happen?" Scenarios answer a more useful one: "what would we do if this happened?" For a board, the second question is where governance earns its keep.
## Choose the focal question
Scenarios need a decision to serve. "Should we commit to this expansion over the next three years?" is a focal question. "What will the economy do?" is not.
## Find the two critical uncertainties
List the external forces that could affect the decision. Sort them by impact and by uncertainty. The two forces that are both high-impact and genuinely uncertain become the axes of a simple two-by-two, giving four distinct scenarios.
## Write each scenario as a story
Give each quadrant a name and a short narrative: what happened, in what order, and what the early signs were. Stories are easier to remember and debate than tables, and they expose hidden assumptions.
## Test the strategy against each world
- Where does the current plan succeed in all four scenarios? Those moves are robust.- Where does it succeed in only one? Those moves are bets, and should be labelled as such.- Where does it fail badly in any scenario? Those need a hedge or a trigger to change course.
## Agree on signposts
For each scenario, name two or three observable indicators that would suggest it is unfolding. Review them at a set interval. This turns scenario planning from a workshop into a monitoring discipline.
## Keep it light
Four scenarios, a page each, revisited regularly, beat a forty-page document nobody reopens.

Source: https://adlerlynx.ca/insights/scenario-planning-for-boards/