.15 The Role of System Theory in Scenario Planning

It is no surprise that as our world increases in com-plexity and uncertainty, business leaders look for ways of anticipating change to help their organizations sur-vive. In efforts to do so, business leaders are relying more heavily on strategic tools. One such tool has been scenario planning. Scenario planning has gained increased attention during the last 20 years as an effec-tive method for identifying critical future uncertainties and investigating blind spots in the organization (Kahane 1999). By focusing on several plausible alterna-tive futures and giving up the notion of predicting the future, scenario planning has avoided many of the pit-falls and criticisms of strategic planning (May 1996, Mintzberg 1994). As a result of popular use, there are multiple methods for conducting scenario planning, and due to proprietary methods, the ability to examine the theoretical foundations has been severely limited