Cross-fertilising scenario planning and business history by process-tracing historical developments: Aiding counterfactual reasoning and uncovering history to come

Abstract

Scenario planning is a tool for considering alternative futures and their potential impact. The article firstly addresses the paucity of history on management tools by discussing several important lineages in scenario planning’s evolution over time, and the emphasis placed on historical analysis by some specific variants therein. Secondly, it describes how causal analysis can be enhanced in scenario planning by process-tracing important historical developments. Thirdly, it outlines how a scenario planning that incorporates history in this way can assist historians to identify counterfactuals and understand the relative importance of alternative causes, thus enriching historical accounts. It can also enable business historians’ research on the relationship between businesses and their external environments, and on management decision-making. In concluding, scholars of scenario planning and business history are urged to open a mutually-beneficial dialogue. The article initiates this by setting out some ways in which they can cross-fertilise each other.

Keywords:

• Scenario planning
• process-tracing
• causal analysis
• counterfactual history

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 At least compared to that deployed at Shell in the 1970s and 1980s, which had a multi-million pound budget and used large teams of analysts (Sharpe, 2008).

2 MacKay (2007, p. 302) references the rarity of ‘smoking guns’, but is actually referring to tests of a doubly-decisive nature.

3 Schoemaker (2020) quotes Mark Twain as stating that ‘History never repeats itself, but it does rhyme’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Derbyshire

James Derbyshire is Senior Research Fellow at Middlesex University. His research interests focus on decision-making under uncertainty, scenario planning, strategy, and innovation. He has a background in consulting, government, and academia, having worked as a Senior Economist at Cambridge Econometrics, as an Analyst at Capgemini, and for the European Commission, before returning to academia in 2012. He has carried out numerous projects for the UK government, many of which relate to policy evaluation. His work has appeared in journals such as Environment & Planning A, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, International Journal of Forecasting, and Applied Economics.