Scenario planning is the art of storytelling applied to the future instead of the past or present. In this way it is not unlike science fiction - it's about "remembering the future." Unlike science fiction, though, the stories woven by a scenario planner revolve around a question or decision. This question or decision has been framed on behalf of a patron, usually an organization rather than a person. It reflects the focus of curiosity of the patron, who uses the scenario to improve strategic thinking by considering multiple possible futures.

The benefit of scenario planning is not prescience, but flexibility and adaptability. Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalogs, has said that what scenario planning means is that while you may not always be right about the future, you are almost never wrong. And being wrong about the future is the only way to be unprepared.

Scenario planning gives you more than a dry statistical measure of a possible future - it gives you a palpable sense of what it will feel like to live in that future. Scenario planning requires a flair for the dramatic, a sense of how to help your audience suspend disbelief in a possible future that otherwise might never have occurred to them. But that possible future must still be demonstrably possible - it is not enough to be a convincing storyteller! To demonstrate this possibility, each future scenario must be carefully researched and documented. The better our research, the more convincing (and correct!) our scenarios will be.

In this paper, we'll first walk through an explanation of scenario planning, step by step. This will lay the framework of how we shall proceed in the next stage, as we work through a real-world example - the future of handheld computing.