The Firetail Guide to Time Travel: Part Two
Part 2: Creating scenarios that matter
Effective scenario planning isn't a one-off exercise but an ongoing strategic conversation.
The goal isn’t to predict the future, but to expand strategic imagination and prepare for a range of possibilities.
It builds on the trends, drivers and signals identified through horizon scanning and turns them into rich, distinctive future worlds.
These future worlds can be used to test assumptions, identify blindspots, and create more anticipatory and adaptive strategies.
As we wrote in our piece on the Futures Gap, organisations that lose touch with the forces shaping the future risk becoming passive recipients of change, rather than active shapers.
Scenario planning, when done well, helps to bridge this gap.
What principles underpin scenarios that matter?
Firetail uses six core principles to ensure our scenario planning makes a real difference.
Divergent → truly distinct futures
Valuable scenarios challenge you to consider substantively different futures, not just marginally different versions of the same direction. The scenarios should feel like genuinely different worlds, each requiring distinct strategic responses.
When a leadership team or board can recognise that certain choices would be wise in one scenario but potentially catastrophic in another, the scenario planning exercise has succeeded in creating meaningful divergence.
Plausible → stretching yet believable
Effective scenarios stretch your thinking without breaking credibility. They should be rooted in evidence—built through horizon scanning, research and real-world signals—and show how today’s trends might interact to produce coherent, if surprising, futures.
You should be able to see the pathway from the present to each scenario. It might not be a straight line, but it should make sense. This balance of creativity and credibility is what keeps scenario work relevant to real-world decisions.
Participative → value in the process
Scenarios are most powerful when they’re co-created. That means designing participatory processes that bring in a wide and diverse range of voices across roles, disciplines and lived experiences.
Done well, this isn’t just good facilitation; it’s central to the strategic value. The conversations that happen during the process often prove as valuable as the final scenarios themselves. Inclusive, well-structured engagement helps shift mindsets, build shared language and understanding, and unlock new ways of seeing the world.
Engaging → be clear and memorable
If you want scenarios to shape decisions, they need to be accessible. That means using clear language, memorable framing, and distinctive characteristics so that people can easily recall and refer to them.
In our work with the RSPCA, the scenarios became a shared language—leadership asked, “How would this fare in the One Planet versus the Blinkered World scenario?”
Challenging → rethink the fundamentals
Scenarios should make people just a little bit uncomfortable. They should ask hard questions and test the assumptions that underpin your current strategy and ways of thinking about the world.
What if your funding model no longer works? What if the public’s expectations shift dramatically? What if your whole approach is disrupted by technology? Exploring these “what ifs” helps organisations prepare better for a range of possibilities.
Relevant → connect it to real life
Scenarios should ultimately support strategy. That means linking each future world back to your organisation’s core questions—about priorities, partnerships, investments or positioning.
The best scenario planning doesn’t end with the scenarios. It leads into conversations about what to do next: where to build capacity, where to remain flexible, and how to make decisions today that are resilient across a range of future possibilities.
Taken together, these principles ensure your scenarios are more than just thought experiments. They make the future legible.
When scenarios are divergent, plausible, participative, engaging, challenging, and relevant, they become strategic assets—tools that help organisations not only anticipate change, but adapt to it with clarity and confidence.
The next step is to explore how to create scenarios that embody these principles in practice.
How do you create scenarios that matter?
Get comfortable with uncertainty - You can’t predict the future with certainty
The hardest part of scenario planning isn’t technical—it’s psychological. It asks us to let go of the idea that there is a single, knowable future and to instead hold space for multiple plausible futures simultaneously.
This runs counter to the instincts of most organisations. Strategic plans promise outcomes. Budgets require forecasts. Boards and funders want reassurance. Scenario planning, by contrast, invites us to work with uncertainty, not against it.
Effective scenarios create space to explore futures that might initially feel uncomfortable, uncertain, or unlikely. They resist the temptation to discount difficult possibilities as “too negative,” recognising that resilience comes from imagining a full range of outcomes—not just the convenient ones.
In our work with the RSPCA, we used scenarios to explore two big uncertainties: how the world will respond to climate change, and whether animals, nature, and biodiversity will be included in that response. The resulting set of divergent futures helped the organisation reimagine their strategy and role in delivering transformational change for people, the planet, and animals.
Embrace diversity and difference - Rethink who’s in the room
Speaking to the same people you always speak to, about the same topics you always discuss, is a recipe for reproducing existing assumptions and blindspots. Scenarios produced in this way will at best be bland, and at worst be actively detrimental.
Good scenarios depend on diverse input. It should include frontline practitioners who see system dynamics invisible from the boardroom; new team members who question long-standing assumptions; partner organisations with different viewpoints; and communities whose lives are shaped by the strategic decisions. It should include people who think you are wrong.
With the right facilitation, the creative tension between different worldviews generates insights no single perspective could produce. The scenarios become richer, more grounded—and more likely to constructively challenge status quo thinking.
We saw this in our work on the Future of Maths for the Royal Society, where we broadened the conversation beyond curriculum experts to include employers, investors and industry leaders. Their perspectives helped uncover new ideas—not just for the scenario process, but for everyone involved.
Ask big, difficult questions - Challenge yourself before reality does
Scenario processes are an invitation to step outside of the day to day and explore the difficult questions facing the organisation.
Organisations are often focused on ‘what now’ and ‘what next’ questions. But good scenario work makes the space for the big ‘what if’ questions. These aren’t proposals for change. They are provocations - designed to challenge established mindsets and unlock new ways of thinking.
In one project with the RSPCA, we asked: what if animal welfare never becomes a first-order priority? Creating space for questions like this led to a shift in how the organisation saw its role—reframing themselves as a convener able to build coalitions and drive change across the big issues facing society.
Make it feel real - Bring the future to life
Scenarios are only useful if people can imagine life in those worlds.
That means making futures tangible and emotionally resonant—through creative outputs like personas and “day in the life” stories or artefacts from the future like news headlines, policy documents, or product descriptions.
These techniques help decision-makers move beyond abstract possibilities and engage with the lived experience of different futures. The result is a deeper understanding of the strategic implications—and more meaningful conversations about what to do next.
For the RSPCA, this even extended to building a game based on their scenario worlds, helping staff and the public explore future choices in a more engaging and accessible way.
Connect to strategic thinking - Drive decisions today
The true value of scenario planning isn’t in the scenarios themselves—it’s in what you do with them and the decisions they help you make.
Used well, scenarios can inform strategic decisions, shape operating models, and strengthen organisational readiness. But this only happens when you deliberately connect future insights to choices being made today.
That might mean building capabilities that are valuable across multiple futures, setting up early warning systems for key signals, or keeping strategy flexible enough to adapt as the world changes.
Rather than trying to predict what’s coming, the goal is to be prepared for whatever comes next.
Organisations can default to business-as-usual without pausing to ask whether the future still supports it. In a scenario workshop during one of our projects, a senior academic described how he saw the next 20 years unfolding. As he mapped out the drivers of automation, computation, and global shifts in education and research, he painted a compelling picture of fundamental change in the way science in his discipline would be practised. Yet he reflected that this conversation was not shaping the big capital investment decisions at his university. The future hadn’t shaped the investment—the pressures of day to day delivery had.
From plausible futures to concrete strategies
Scenario planning isn’t about prediction—it’s about preparation.
It’s not about eliminating uncertainty—but learning to work with it.
It helps you ask better questions, imagine different possibilities, and make stronger decisions.
For mission-driven organisations, the challenge is navigating a world of growing uncertainty, volatility, and complexity. Scenario planning offers a practical way to become more adaptive, anticipatory, and aligned with long-term impact.
This article shared what we’ve seen make scenario planning powerful, purposeful, and practical in real-world settings.
If you’re interested in learning more, contact us.
In the final part of our guide to time travel, we’ll explore how to translate futures thinking into organisational strategy.