Scenario Analysis Quotes

This idea of anticipation is key to investing and to business generally. You can't wait for an opportunity to become obvious. You have to think, "Here's what other people and companies have done under certain circumstances. Now, under these new circumstances, how is this management likely to behave?"

"What would I do if?.." By thinking tactically, we can more easily arrive at correct tactical solutions, and practice - even theoretical practice - tends to produce confidence in our solutions which, in turn, makes it easier for us, and thus quicker, to reach a decision.

In life, you know, they do this in focus groups; if you were in such and such circumstance, what would you do? Well, you never know what you're going do unless you're faced with it.

If I would need to make a prediction I still believe Kaplan's scenario is very plausible.

Corporate planning cycles are a classic example of generals fighting the last war over again instead of preparing for what might lie ahead.

My time at Shell was a most valuable experience because it taught me to look at the world in a long-term way. Shell takes a 20-year view on events and plans for different scenarios. It makes you see the world as a kind of large matrix.

It's bad policy to speculate on what you'll do if a plan fails when you're trying to make a plan work.

Every actor prepares a scene in their own way. For me, it's about understanding the scenario, the room I'm going to be working in, the obstacles in and around the frame, etc.

Auto repair, piloting, skiing, perhaps even management: these are skills that yield to application, hard work, and native talent. But forecasting an uncertain future and deciding the best course of action in the face of that future are much less likely to do so. And much of what we've seen so far suggests that a large group of diverse individuals will come up with better and more robust forecasts and make more intelligent decisions than even the most skilled "decision maker."

An important task for government is to think about the future as well as to learn from the past, and the Foresight Programme, run by the Government Office for Science, helps in the development of this thinking.

Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish.

So if I could just go back now to something which I am sure we should cover here regarding our original scenario: we have, in fact, four ways - four major potential lines of research.

Accommodation to change, the thoughtful pursuit of alternative futures are keys to the survival of civilization and perhaps of the human species.

Spreadsheet: a kind of program that lets you sit at your desk and ask all kinds of neat "what if?" questions and generate thousands of numbers instead of actually working.

We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.