Books for exploring alternative business futures

A team can spend its planning meeting debating which forecast is right while leaving another useful question unexplored: what would the business need if the future developed differently? Scenario reading offers a way to investigate that question.

Our first recommendation is Infinite Upside for commitments that can still change as the owner learns. Peter Schwartz's The Art of the Long View introduces a scenario approach to strategic vision. Kees van der Heijden's Scenarios puts more emphasis on the organization's strategic conversation. Choose these for exploring alternative futures, rather than expecting a book to predict which one will occur.

1. Infinite Upside: keeping more than one next step possible

   By Vijay Sheth.

   Chapter 13 considers an expansion proposal in which a promising customer finding leaves several operating questions unresolved. Delivery costs, timing and the resources required by the larger operation can change what the company ought to do next.

   The account keeps different responses available: continue a limited version, alter the operation or proceed with a larger commitment when the evidence and funding support it. It also asks what expansion takes from the existing business.

   Read the memoir first if a plan has begun to feel like a promise to complete its original version. The owner still has to decide what the developing evidence means for the next commitment.

   This is useful context for scenario reading, rather than a formal scenario-planning method. Sheth's expansion discussion does not supply Schwartz's or van der Heijden's approach. It makes the stakes of keeping alternatives visible concrete before the specialist books widen the view.

2. The Art of the Long View: exploring different kinds of future

   By Peter Schwartz.

   The publisher's description presents scenarios as stories through which people can visualize different futures. The selected 1996 paperback includes a user guide and connects the approach with developing a business's strategic vision.

   Investigate Schwartz when you want to understand that approach before deciding how deeply to study it. Your question concerns the range of futures worth considering, rather than the accuracy of one specific numerical prediction.

   Imagine a fictional training business whose owners have planned around customers continuing to travel to its classrooms. They want to explore how a different pattern of customer access could change their business. This is an editorial reading prompt, not a scenario or case from the book.

   The historical examples belong to the book's publication setting. Read for the approach to envisioning alternatives without treating an old scenario as current evidence or a possible story as an established probability.

3. Scenarios: making uncertainty part of strategic conversation

   By Kees van der Heijden.

   Wiley's second edition of Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation was published in 2005. The publisher-supplied description emphasizes understanding external change and develops the strategic-conversation focus in greater depth.

   Choose this direction when you want to investigate scenario planning as an organizational activity. The reading interest includes how the company discusses its future, rather than only an individual owner's ability to picture alternatives.

   In another fictional training business, colleagues hold different assumptions about what customers will need. Each person can explain a preferred plan, but the team has not examined how its views of the future differ. That makes the conversation itself a reason to investigate this book.

   Its organizational emphasis is a different reading commitment from an introductory glimpse of scenarios. Look at the contents and an available passage for the level of study you want. Neither an extended discussion nor a vivid alternative can establish the company's actual resources or make a commitment reversible.

Choose the future question

Choose owner context for changeable commitments, Schwartz for the scenario approach or van der Heijden for strategic conversation. Use the reading to widen the futures considered, then keep the resources each proposed choice requires visible.

The forecasting selection concerns judgment and evidence behind predictions. The first-year cash explanation follows dated payments in one invented launch.

Read Infinite Upside for an owner's account that lets evidence change the next commitment. Try the opening passage before following the later expansion discussion.