When fuel prices jumped sharply in the second quarter of 2026, the owner of a small courier business in Durban found his margins wiped out within weeks. His delivery prices were fixed in contracts with several regular clients, and his diesel bill had shot up. “Nobody could have seen this coming,” he told a friend.
In a narrow sense, he was right. Nobody could have predicted the exact timing or size of that particular jump. But fuel price swings themselves weren’t a surprise. They had happened before and would happen again. What he hadn’t done was ask, in calmer times, what his business would do if they did.
That question is the heart of scenario planning, a method large companies have used for decades to prepare for futures they can’t predict. It sounds grand and corporate. In its simplest form, it’s something a small business can do in a single afternoon.
One Like insight: You can’t predict the future, but you can rehearse for several of them.
Does thinking ahead pay?
Scenario planning is most famously associated with Shell, which used it in the early 1970s to consider futures in which oil prices rose sharply. When the oil crisis arrived in 1973, the company was better prepared to respond than many rivals. The story has been retold many times, often with some embellishment, but it established the idea that rehearsing possible futures can help organisations act faster when change arrives.
More systematic evidence came in 2018, when René Rohrbeck of Aarhus University and Menes Etingue Kum published a study in Technological Forecasting and Social Change. They assessed how well prepared 83 large companies were for the future in 2008, judging how far their foresight practices matched the uncertainty they faced, and then looked at their performance in 2015.
The companies judged to be well prepared for the future outperformed the average by 33% higher profitability and 200% higher market-capitalisation growth. Companies with significant gaps in their preparedness performed noticeably worse.
The usual cautions apply. These were large companies, the study shows a strong association rather than proof that foresight caused the results, and well-prepared firms may differ in other ways too. But the finding supports a common-sense idea: businesses that regularly think about what might change, and what they’d do about it, tend to respond better when it does.
A one-afternoon scenario exercise
Full corporate scenario planning can take months. A small business can capture much of the value with a simple version, ideally done with a few people who see the business from different angles.
1. Choose your time horizon. Two to three years is long enough to matter and short enough to feel real.
2. List the forces that could change your business. Fuel and energy costs, interest rates, new competitors, AI tools, regulation, customer habits, a key supplier or client. Write them all down.
3. Pick the two that are most important and most uncertain. Important means they would make a big difference to your business. Uncertain means you genuinely don’t know which way they’ll go. For the courier, these might be fuel costs (stable or sharply higher) and demand from online shops (slow or fast growth).
4. Draw a two-by-two grid. Combining the two uncertainties gives four futures, such as “expensive fuel, booming online demand” or “stable fuel, slow demand”. Give each a short, memorable name.
5. For each future, ask three questions. What would hurt us? What would help us? What would we do?
6. Look for moves that work in several futures. These “no-regret” actions are worth taking now, whatever happens. Then note the early warning signs that would tell you which future is unfolding.
[Infographic placement] Four futures for a courier business. A two-by-two grid. Horizontal axis: Fuel costs (stable → sharply higher). Vertical axis: Online shopping demand (slow → fast growth). Quadrants: Steady Roads (stable fuel, slow demand), Parcel Boom (stable fuel, fast demand), Squeezed (high fuel, slow demand), Busy but Costly (high fuel, fast demand). Beneath: No-regret moves: fuel adjustment clauses in contracts, route optimisation, a cash buffer.
Making it a habit
The value of scenario planning comes less from the four stories than from the conversations they provoke and the actions you take afterwards. Once a year, perhaps alongside your annual planning, spend an afternoon on the exercise. Then, each quarter, spend ten minutes checking your early warning signs. As we explored in Reading the Mood, indicators such as consumer confidence can be useful signals of which future is starting to arrive.
Keep the output short: four named futures, a handful of no-regret actions, and a list of signs to watch. A single page is enough.
A few questions can help:
- Which two uncertainties would make the biggest difference to our business over the next three years?
- What would we do differently in each of the four futures?
- Which actions make sense in all of them, and why haven’t we taken them yet?
- What early signs would tell us which future is unfolding?
Which brings us back to the courier and his fuel bill. If he had spent one afternoon imagining a “Squeezed” future, he might have added a fuel adjustment clause to his contracts, built a small cash buffer and planned more efficient routes. Fuel prices would still have risen. But instead of being blindsided, he’d have been opening a plan he wrote months earlier, which is exactly what thinking about the future is for.
Sources
- René Rohrbeck and Menes Etingue Kum, “Corporate foresight and its impact on firm performance: A longitudinal analysis”, Technological Forecasting and Social Change 129, 2018 (DOI 10.1016/j.techfore.2017.12.013; catalogue record).
- Pierre Wack, “Scenarios: Uncharted Waters Ahead”, Harvard Business Review, September 1985 (general reference for Shell’s scenario planning).
