Scenario development

External and strategic scenarios

In times of growing complexity and uncertainty in the development of markets and branches, the strategic planning needs to face various new challenges. Short-term focuses on a detailed situation analysis or filed prognostic systems are not adequate with regard that context. The ‘race for the future’ to make new business potentials accessible seems to be the supreme discipline of strategic management these days. Consequently, future scenarios -besides prognoses and trends- need to be considered particularly releavant instruments. Instead of  trying to predict one future, these scenarios elaborate an intellectual framework to think through various possible future developments.  This method primarily aims at supporting complex and strategic decision-processes from basically two perspectives:

• With external scenarios changes in the company surrounding are thought ahead (e.g. in markets, branches or global surroundings). This is one of the classic areas of application of the scenario technique/ the method of scenario management.
• Aditionally, with internal scenarios it is possible to systematically identify, structure and arrange company-owned options. This includes strategy scenarios, business scenarios, business models and product scenarios.