Scenario Planning Prompt

Difficulty: Intermediate | Time to implement: 20 min | Saves you: ~2 hrs/week Tools: ChatGPT / Claude

This template builds three coherent futures for your business over the next twelve months — not optimistic, realistic, and pessimistic versions of the same story, but three genuinely different worlds driven by the handful of things you cannot predict. For each one it names the early signals that tell you that world is arriving, and forces you to decide your response now, while nothing is on fire. It is built for owners who have a plan that assumes one future, and a quiet suspicion that the plan has never been stress-tested against the year actually going badly.

The distinction that makes this work: a risk register asks "what could go wrong and how bad would it be." Scenario planning asks "what would have to be true for the world to look completely different, how would I know early, and what would I do about it." The first produces a list. The second produces decisions you have already made before you need them.