The scenario method: an aid to strategic planning

Strategic planning consists of determining the set of decisions that will enable us to access the activities considered to be the most significant. In the immediate post-war period, planning was based on business forecasting methods that made it possible to evaluate the future on the basis of simple, reasoned extrapolations of past trends¹. Essentially projective, planning began with an inventory of initial resources and means and ended, a posteriori, with the determination of short- and medium-term objectives. In the 50s and 60s, the emergence of foresight led to a renewal of planning approaches, particularly in terms of devising long-term objectives while the future remained undecided and uncertain. Unlike traditional planning, foresight planning focuses on long-term objectives and goals, and then progressively looks at goals, strategies, and resources in relation to an increasingly distant time horizon. Forward planning is based on a range of heterogeneous tools and practices², the best known of which is the scenario method.