Here is an excerpt from an article written by Cynthia Selin for MIT Sloan Management Review. To read the complete article, check out others, sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
Illustration Credit: Brian Stauffer
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Understanding what won’t change clarifies what might — and strengthens decision-making in volatile times.
In a world gripped by turmoil, leaders are fixated on the big unknowns. Political volatility, technological acceleration, ecological disruption, and economic instability have converged to make even short-term planning feel precarious. Uncertainty is no longer an exception — it’s the baseline.
Scenario planning practices are meant to help in times like these. They offer a structured way to navigate chaotic times, not by aiming to predict the future but by constructing portraits of plausible alternative futures to surface hidden assumptions, question what’s known and unknown, and tune leaders’ attention to factors that strategists may have overlooked.
However, while scenario planning has earned its place as a valuable tool for examining uncertainties, I believe that its untapped strength lies in exposing and clarifying certainties. The pursuit of as-yet-unseen disrupters has overshadowed something equally vital: what is knowable about the future.
Strategic acumen lies not only in anticipating what will change but in recognizing what won’t. Certain constraints — whether physical, temporal, institutional, or cultural — shape the terrain of the future, delimiting what is possible and where meaningful shifts can occur. By surfacing these layers of certainty, leaders can shift from a vision of limitless potential to one grounded in the specific boundaries that shape change — offering a clearer basis for planning and vital scaffolding for building and stress-testing strategy.
The Future Is Not Wide Open
Envisioning the future as a blank canvas of infinite possibilities frees us from a fixed mindset that simply overlays today’s issues and trends on tomorrow. It stimulates imagination and creativity. Yet the future is not a blank slate; there are grooves from the past that persist into the future.
The landscape of the future is already being shaped by entrenched infrastructures, institutional legacies, durable social forces, and deep-seated, ongoing trends.1 Some forces exhibit obduracy — resisting change despite efforts to disrupt them — while others evolve steadily and predictably along slower, long-wave trajectories.
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References (2)
1. C. Selin and J. Sadowski, “Against Blank Slate Futuring: Noticing Obduracy in the City Through Experiential Methods of Public Engagement,” in “Remaking Participation: Science, Environment and Emergent Publics,” 1st ed., eds. J. Chilvers and M. Kearnes (Taylor & Francis, 2015), 218-237, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203797693.
2. T. Lang and R. Ramírez. “How Ghost Scenarios Haunt Strategy Execution,” MIT Sloan Management Review 65, no. 2 (winter 2024): 72-75.