Learning for uncertain futures: Training teams to rapidly develop scenarios during organisational crises

The global pandemic, cybersecurity breaches, and ongoing geopolitical shocks have demonstrated that corporations are often ill-prepared for uncertainty and resultant crises. A crisis requires top management teams to make strategic decisions that are often informed by a range of plausible future scenarios. This article investigates if teams with little or no experience in scenario planning can be trained to rapidly develop high-quality scenarios in the context of crisis management. It uses an empirical data set from a training intervention for a longitudinal study that involved teams of executives involved in crisis management at three large, publicly listed Australian corporations. The results identified that over a sequence of training events, teams improved the quality of their scenarios even while reducing the amount of available time they had to develop the scenarios. The results cannot simply be explained by the learning effect, but the initiatives used by the teams to speed up the process whilst maintaining scenario quality. The research has implications for other dynamic areas of practice where scenario planning may be deployed, and time is constrained.