The Firetail guide to time travel part 3: Connecting scenarios to strategy
“Strategy is the act of making choices under uncertainty, constraints, and competition”
In our previous guides to time travel, we explored the systematic process of horizon scanning and how to create meaningful scenarios.
Yet even the most insightful scenarios remain intellectual exercises without the crucial final step: connecting these potential futures to strategic action in the present.
A common missing element in futures work is the connection to strategy itself.
How can futures thinking help?
1. How futures thinking supports "the act" of strategy
Strategy requires moving beyond static planning documents to create ongoing capacity for strategic choice-making.
Yet many organisations struggle to make thinking about the future a regular discipline. Some do it as an occasional, one-off exercise and others fail to do it altogether.
The most effective organisations embed discussions about the future into their regular rhythms—executive meetings that routinely ask "which world are we heading toward?" and board discussions that regularly revisit strategic assumptions in light of emerging signals.
This creates shared capacity for strategic thinking across the organisation rather than it being constrained to a process run once every 5 years.
When we hear team members spontaneously using scenario names as shorthand in meetings—"This feels like we're heading toward the 'Fragmented Response' world"—we know the scenarios have become living tools rather than documents gathering dust on shelves.
The shared experience of exploring futures together creates a common language and understanding that naturally flows into better strategic conversations.
2. How futures thinking improves "making choices"
At its core, strategy is about choices—what to do and what not to do.
Futures thinking strengthens this choice-making capacity by providing context for decisions and revealing their implications across different possible, plausible futures.
Exploring a range of futures reveals which aspects of your strategy will hold up across different futures and which might come under strain when the environment shifts.
This process helps identify "no regret" moves—strategic choices that create value regardless of which future emerges—and distinguish them from bigger, riskier bets that depend on particular futures materialising.
Rather than making single, big bet strategic commitments, futures thinking enables a more experimental approach: smaller bets that can be doubled down on if early signals suggest movement toward particular scenarios, and strategic options that can be exercised as uncertainty resolves.
If strategy is about choices, scenarios provide the context within which these choices become clearer, more coherent, and more meaningful.
3. How futures thinking addresses "uncertainty"
Most organisations try to eliminate uncertainty from their strategic planning or simply ignore it.
Futures thinking takes a fundamentally different approach—it engages constructively with uncertainty by exploring multiple possible futures rather than betting everything on a single prediction.
When we explore a diverse range of plausible futures through scenarios, we prepare ourselves for adaptation rather than hoping for predictability. This transforms uncertainty from a strategic weakness into a source of competitive advantage.
We've seen organisations that build their strategies around multiple possible futures demonstrate better resilience when unexpected shifts occur. Rather than scrambling to develop entirely new approaches, they can often activate contingency plans they've already considered, giving them precious months of advantage over competitors still caught in strategic surprise.
The goal isn't to predict which scenario will occur, but to be more anticipatory and adaptive. To build the capability and capacity to recognise which future is emerging and be prepared to respond accordingly.
This allows organisations to take a portfolio approach to risk. Rather than making an all-or-nothing bet on a particular future, they can deliberately allocate attention and resources across time horizons: maintaining what works in the present and experimenting on what works across potential futures.
4. How futures thinking works within "constraints"
Many organisations develop strategies that work forward from today’s realities, without making time to work backwards from the future they want to see. At its worst, strategy becomes a long-term budget with some covering prose.
Futures thinking helps distinguish between temporary limitations and fundamental constraints. Additionally, it allows you to identify the capabilities needed to succeed across different possible futures.
Scenarios reveal important trade-offs that need careful management. Preparing for one plausible future might make you less ready for another. By making these tensions visible, futures thinking helps organisations balance competing priorities rather than swinging between extremes as circumstances change.
This approach to constraints recognises that limitations often create the most generative strategic thinking. Rather than seeing trade-offs as problems to be solved once and for all, futures thinking helps leaders recognise these as ongoing polarities to be managed with care and intention. It helps identify core capabilities that remain valuable across multiple futures while building flexibility around the periphery.
Taking a futures thinking approach to strategy doesn’t mean ignoring current realities, but instead creating structured space for making decisions that also work backwards from preferred futures whilst acknowledging current constraints, helping to bridge between current realities and future possibilities.
5. How futures thinking recognises "competition"
Even in collaborative, mission-driven spaces, there is competition: people with competing views of the future and competing values about what preferable futures should look like.
Futures thinking helps organisations develop compelling visions of the future that can compete effectively for attention and resources. Organisations that do this well are better placed to make better arguments for the future they want to see and to take the space in the debates shaping the future of their sector.
It also creates a shared language for building and communicating compelling visions of the future. When people across your organisation have really thought about different possible futures together, it changes how they think and talk every day. This shared experience creates a kind of collective wisdom that helps everyone make better decisions, even in small meetings or quick choices.
Teams that have explored multiple futures together can articulate their strategic reasoning more clearly to stakeholders, funders and partners. They can explain not only how their choices come together coherently in the here and now, but also how their choices are resilient across different possible futures.
They are better able to tell and sell a compelling story about the future and their role in shaping it.
From exploration to impact
Connecting scenarios to strategy isn't a mechanistic process of translating future insights into present actions.
It's about strengthening each element of strategic choice-making: nurturing the ongoing act of strategic thinking, providing frameworks for making coherent choices, engaging constructively with uncertainty rather than avoiding it, working creatively within constraints whilst not being limited by them, and recognising the competitive dynamics that shape even collaborative spaces.
The organisations that derive greatest value from scenario planning are those that view it not as a one-off exercise, but as a fundamental shift in how they think about strategy—moving from static plans to adaptive, anticipatory frameworks.
Those who do this well position themselves to be active shapers of the future they want to see.
By exploring a range of possible tomorrows, they make better decisions today.
Roger Martin's valuable insights about strategy have helped shape how Firetail thinks about strategy and feature regularly in our Firetail Briefing. The quote at the top comes from his article where he breaks down what strategy really means.
We have helped clients across a range of systems and sectors develop the capacity to connect future possibilities with present strategy.
Contact us if you would like to explore practical approaches for how we can support you.