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Conclusion 409
combinations. Often the relative performance of strategies is robust to
changes in these judgmental inputs. 3 This can sometimes lead to the
resolution of disputes between members of a planning team who, for
example, may see that the same strategy is always superior whichever
pair of competing weights is attached to an objective.
Conclusion
Scenario thinking can be used as a way of evaluating decision options,
as we have described above. As we have seen, used in this way, scenario
thinking avoids any need to think probabilistically and allows a variety
of viewpoints about the future to be reflected.
However, scenario planning is a practitioner-derived approach to
dealing with uncertainty in decision making. It is not based on an axiom
system – as is decision analysis – and so different practitioners tend
to promote different methodologies to construct scenarios. We have
described just two here – the extreme-world method and the driving
forces method. As we have seen, scenario thinking emphasizes the
construction of causal ‘storylines’ that describe how the future will
unfold. Willem Wagenaar 11 inastudyofhowjudgesreachdecisions
in courtrooms has found, analogously, that judges and juries do not
weigh probabilities that a defendant is guilty ‘beyond reasonable doubt’.
Instead, such decision makers evaluate scenarios that describe why and
how the accused committed the crime. One such scenario is, in principle,
contained in the prosecution’s indictment. The prosecution tells the
story of what happened and the court decides whether that is a true
story or not. ‘Good’ stories provide a context that gives an easy and
natural explanation of why the ‘actors’ behaved in the way they did. So,
storytelling via scenario planning may be a natural way of making sense
of the world. Kees van der Heijden 12 argues that, because of its focus on
causality, scenario planning is intuitively more attractive to managers
than approaches such as decision trees, which are essentially ways of
choosing between gambles with different expected values (or utilities).
Additionally, van der Heijden argues, decision tree analysis requires a
rigorous, but yet static, definition of a decision problem. By contrast,
decision makers experience and acknowledge the continuing fluidity of
an emerging decision context and feel, he argues, uncomfortable with
any further loss of flexibility introduced by decision analysis. Scenario
planning does not evaluate options against uncertainties in a single