How scenarios support strategic early warning processes

To survive and grow in an era of uncertainty, companies should strive not only for a single visionary view, which most likely corresponds with their expectations, but instead they should try to acquire multiple views that describe the whole ”window of opportunities”. The development of external market scenarios to assess current strategies is the usual way of coping with these uncertainties. Today this traditional scenario approach has to be extended in four directions: the use of market scenarios to systematically develop future‐robust strategies, the use of alternative strategy scenarios to address uncertainties within an organization, the use of scenarios as a basis for strategic early warning processes and the combination of performance measurement and strategic early warning in a scenario‐based future scorecard. In conclusion it is shown that scenarios could significantly help to bridge the gap between strategy implementation and early‐warning processes.