Why do organizations get blindsided by market transformations that could have been anticipated? It may not be because their planning methods are flawed, but rather that they undertake strategic planning processes like scenario development without seeing them as a unique opportunity for learning about and exploring the future.

To help planners avoid strategic surprise, Monitor 360 has created a five-step strategic planning process that has been tested in interactions with leaders in the military, intelligence community, and corporations. This article from Strategy & Leadership guides you through a systematic process for incorporating plausible but challenging future scenarios into your organization’s learning processes, to help mitigate risk and decrease the likelihood of being unprepared for discontinuities.

Monitor 360, a unit of Monitor Group, helps organizations including governments, NGOs and corporations, make sense of complex geo-strategic issues.