Scenarios

During this course you practice the content by applying it to a case, either your own case or one of the cases we provided.

Scenarios help you to deal with the uncertainty in your case. We invite you to define scenarios using the action points Elianne provided you in the video. Also bear in mind the pitfalls she discussed. As a wrap up we have listed the action points and pitfalls below.

ACTION POINTS

1. Categorise external factors
   Identify the external factors in your causal diagram. How do you categorise them using the axes certain-uncertain and high impact-low impact.
2. Identify factors for scenario analysis
   Your categorisation determines which of these factors are candidates for scenario analysis. Take the ones with high impact and high uncertainty. The others are less interesting. If their impact is low, it makes no sense to consider them further in your analysis. If they are very certain, then there is no need to make scenarios, as you already know what this factor will look like in the future.
3. Make scenarios
   Now you have your high impact high uncertainty factors, what useful scenarios can you create for your analysis? Scenarios are in principle possible future states of the situation you study. You can describe those states in words. Usually this makes it much more clear for other people than just saying you have one scenario with a low and one with a high oil price. People want to know what the world looks like when the oil prices are high!

PITFALLS

• No explanation of the scenarios
• Predicting the future