What strategic planning method helps a business prepare for uncertainties and potential opportunities?

The correct answer is scenario planning, which is a strategic planning method that allows businesses to envision and prepare for various potential futures by exploring different scenarios that could unfold. This approach involves identifying key factors that could impact the business environment and creating detailed narratives about how these factors may interact over time.

By engaging in scenario planning, companies can analyze how different variables—such as economic changes, technological advancements, regulatory shifts, or competitive dynamics—could influence their operations and growth. This method helps organizations not only to anticipate challenges and uncertainties but also to spot opportunities that could arise from those changes. Ultimately, scenario planning enables businesses to develop more robust strategies and increase their resilience against unforeseen events.

In contrast, while strategic management refers broadly to the process of formulating and executing strategies, it does not specifically focus on preparing for uncertainties. Similarly, scenario analysis involves evaluating the effects of different scenarios on specific aspects of the business, but it is not as comprehensive in planning for future uncertainties as scenario planning. Foresight planning is more aligned with predicting future trends rather than creating multiple plausible scenarios to help organizations adapt and thrive in changing landscapes.