Pilot2Service Scenario & Foresight Thinking
Purpose
Builds alternative future scenarios and stress-tests a strategy against them — not to predict which future will happen, but to check whether a strategy survives more than one plausible version of it.
Anchored in research
- Liedtka (1998) — thinking in time
- Schwartz (1991), The Art of the Long View — the classic scenario-planning method: identify the driving forces of change, separate the predictable ones from the genuinely uncertain ones, and build a small set of internally consistent, divergent scenarios around the two most critical uncertainties (commonly structured as a 2×2 matrix).
Method
- List the driving forces relevant to the strategic question — trends, technologies, regulatory shifts, competitor moves, customer behavior changes.
- Separate predetermined elements from critical uncertainties. Some forces are near-certain (demographics, already-committed regulation); others are genuinely unknown. Scenario planning is built around the uncertain ones — treating a predetermined element as uncertain wastes the exercise.
- Select the two most impactful, most uncertain forces. Cross them to form a 2×2 grid — this produces four internally consistent, meaningfully different scenarios rather than a single "optimistic/pessimistic" spectrum.
- Name and flesh out each of the four scenarios with enough concrete detail that someone could recognize which one is unfolding from early signals — a scenario that's too abstract to recognize in practice isn't doing its job.
- Stress-test the strategy against each scenario, not just the expected one. Where does the strategy hold up? Where does it quietly assume a single future?
- Identify no-regret moves and early-warning indicators — actions that make sense across all four scenarios, and signals worth monitoring that would indicate which scenario is actually materializing.
What this skill does NOT do
- Doesn't make the final decision for you — it produces a structured draft to support a human decision.
- Doesn't confirm figures, market data, or competitor data from memory — it
uses the inputs you provide, or marks an assumption clearly
(
[assumption — verify]). - Doesn't predict the future — it builds plausible alternatives for a stress test, not probabilities.
Refinement notes
Areas to keep deepening with real practice:
- your own rules of thumb and heuristics for this technique
- concrete templates (into
../../references/) - reference cases / your own examples
- what this skill deliberately does not do (guardrails, common mistakes) — add to the list above
This is an internal working note, not a claim about the skill's current
usability. Track depth privately via the maturity field in
skills_index.json (see
../../../meta/maturity_levels.md).
Don't add new fields to the frontmatter — name and description are
the only ones allowed (see
../../../meta/frontmatter_schema.md).
Continue from here
- Next in this pack:
../strategic-options-evaluation/SKILL.md— Compares strategic options in a structured way (impact/effort, risk, resources) to support a decision. - A ready-made skill chain for this situation: see
../../../playbooks/ - This pack's shared guardrails:
../../CLAUDE.md
References
../../references/— the pack's shared background material../../CLAUDE.md— the pack's shared guardrails