Knowledgebase Collection
Scenario Planning
Scenario planning enables professionals, and the public, to respond dynamically to an unknown future. It assists them with thinking, in advance, about the many ways the future may unfold and how they can be responsive, resilient, and effective, as the future becomes reality.
Scenario planning is a process to support decision-making that helps urban and rural planners navigate the uncertainty of the future in the short and long term. A scenario planning process begins by scanning the current reality, projected forecasts, and influential internal and external factors to produce a set of plausible potential futures (i.e., scenarios). It then develops a series of initiatives, projects, and policies (i.e., tactics) that may help support a preferred scenario, a component of a scenario, multiple scenarios, or all scenarios. Indicators that a scenario component is likely to occur (i.e., tipping points or triggers) may be established to alert planners that the likelihood of a scenario becoming a reality is higher, prompting them to take action on appropriate tactics such as allocating funding and moving into implementation.
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APA Resources
How to Design Your Scenario Planning Process
This edition of PAS Memo offers a step-by-step primer on designing a scenario planning process, and it includes a scenario planning process design workbook.
Robust Plans and Contingent Plans: Scenario Planning for an Uncertain World
This JAPA article discusses how planners can integrate uncertainty into scenario planning.
Getting Scenario-Building Right
Scenario Planning for Urban Planners: Toward a Practitioners Guide
This JAPA article presents a typology of scenario planning practices.
Exploratory Scenario Planning
This Commissioner article defines the concept of exploratory scenario planning and highlights two examples of exploratory scenario planning initiatives.
Land Use‚ Transportation Scenarios and Future Vehicle Travel and Land Consumption: A Meta-Analysis
This JAPA article examines compact growth scenarios in existing scenario plans to estimate likely vehicle miles traveled reductions.
Scenario Planning 101
This APA Learn course is an introduction to the concept of scenario planning and focuses on how to create dynamically responsive plans that can best react to unexpected challenges.
Scenario Planning in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
This APA Learn course discusses the many potential futures of Guantanamo Bay and how scenario planning can prepare the community for resiliency.
Innovations in Community Resilience for Planners and the Public
This blog post discusses how scenario planning technology helped planners and residents in Downers Grove, Illinois understand flood risk and mitigation solutions.
Best-Case Scenario Planning
This Planning article describes the benefits of scenario planning as a way to incorporate uncertainty into plans.
viewpoint: Brave New World of Scenario Planning
This Planning article argues that a new planning paradigm is necessary for coping with the uncertainty of our modern world.
The Impossible Task of Mapping the Future
This Planning article looks at how the Regional Plan Association used scenario planning to inform their recommendations in the Fourth Regional Plan.
Out of the Box, Into the Scenario
This Planning article explains how transportation planners are using scenario planning to plan domestic and international freight travel.
Tools for Building Scenarios
This Planning article provides an in-depth discussion of the goals and use of scenario planning.
Bridging to Public Health
This Planning article shares how scenario planning can be used to empirically evaluate the health impacts of alternative recommendations.
Scenario Planning as Complementary to Planning Frameworks
Scenario planning is often used in conjunction within larger decision-making and planning frameworks such as strategic planning, project prioritization, and comprehensive plans. Depending on how it is used, scenario planning can be useful to these projects in different ways, such as improving the analysis of key uncertainties, re-framing problems, or incorporating considerations of emerging trends.
Types of Scenario Planning
Terms commonly associated with scenario planning include “normative” scenarios, which describe a preferred, and achievable, end state as well as “exploratory” scenarios, which describe an unknowable, but comprehensible, array of future end states that may occur. While the former often structures tactics to support the preferred scenario, the latter often deploys “contingent” tactics as the future unfolds in real time. In some cases, a scenario planning exercise may include elements of both.
Potential Outcomes of Scenario Planning
Depending on how scenario planning is approached, it can help achieve a number of outcomes. If a systems approach is leveraged, it can guide an awareness of interconnectivity, unintended consequences, and silo reduction. If used to illustrate tradeoffs related to a complex issue, it can help produce public feedback with more realistic expectations. If a strong public involvement component is included, it can shift a scenario planning exercise from an internal orientation to an external orientation. If quality of life outcomes such as equity and health factors are at the core of scenario development, then it can also help inform appropriate tactics.
Scenario Planning with Software and Data
Once the process is clear, data and software tools can be leveraged to keep track of large amounts of information, incorporate key data, and quantify specific elements. Whereas some scenario planning exercises use little or no software or data, other scenario planning exercises have a strong software and data focus. Generally, software helps quantify relationships between factors such as land, environment, and transportation through the use of algorithms, which can enable a scenario planning exercise to have a more refined situational understanding and become more specific in its tactics. Scenario planning projects can involve various algorithms, computer models, and analysis tools, which are often tailored in order to answer particular questions.
Scenario Planning Fundamentals
Engaging the Future: Forecasts, Scenarios, Plans, and Projects
This book presents a collection of essays on scenario planning and other deliberative planning tools.
Exploratory Scenario Planning
This article defines the concept of exploratory scenario planning and highlights two examples of exploratory scenario planning initiatives.
Getting Scenario-Building Right
This article introduces the concept of scenario-building in the context of local and regional planning.
Insights Into the Scenario Planning Methodology
This briefing paper reviews how various organizations have used scenario planning and shares lessons learned from international practice.
Robust Plans and Contingent Plans: Scenario Planning for an Uncertain World
This article discusses how planners can integrate uncertainty into scenario planning.
Scenario Planning for Urban Planners: Toward a Practitioners Guide
This article presents a typology of scenario planning practices.
Transportation and Land-Use Scenario Planning
Advancement of Performance-Based Scenario Planning for Regional Planning and Decision-Making: A Synthesis Report
This report explores how regional planning agencies use scenario planning.
Binghamton, NY, Scenario Planning Peer Workshop Report
This report summarizes a daylong workshop in Binghamton, New York, on tools and effective practices for scenario planning.
Birmingham, AL, Scenario Planning Peer Workshop Report
This report summarizes a scenario planning peer workshop hosted by the Regional Planning Commission of Greater Birmingham.
Burlington, VT, Scenario Planning Peer Workshop Report
This report summarizes a daylong workshop in Burlington, Vermont, on tools and effective practices for scenario planning.
Champaign, IL, Scenario Planning Peer Workshop Report
This report summarizes a daylong workshop in Champaign, Illinois, on tools and effective practices for scenario planning.
Chico, CA, Scenario Planning Peer Workshop Report
This report summarizes a daylong workshop in Chico, California, on tools and effective practices for scenario planning.
Scenario Planning for Sustainability and Climate Change
Decision Support Tools for Climate Change Planning
This report discusses scenario planning and other tools and data currently available to cities for climate change decision support.
Local Communities Adapting to Climate Change
This self-paced online course introduces decision makers to scenario planning and other tools for climate adaptation planning.
Managing Risk and Uncertainty: Collaborative Approaches for Climate Change
This article explains how scenario planning can be used in collaborative decision-making processes to mitigate climate change.
Scenario Planning Tools for Sustainable Communities
This article introduces the concept of using scenario planning to enhance sustainability.
Uncertainty and Risk: Building a Resilient West
This article discusses scenario planning and other tools designed to help communities plan and prepare for climate change.
Integrating Scenario Planning into Existing Frameworks
Integrating Exploratory Scenario Planning into a Municipal General Plan Update
This report introduces the concept of exploratory scenario planning and explains how Sahuarita, Arizona, used scenario planning in its comprehensive plan update process.
No Little Plans: The Evolution of the Comprehensive Plan
This article discusses how communities are integrating scenario planning into comprehensive planning processes.
Developing Scenario Planning Exercises
Envisioning Centers: A Planning and Implementation Process for Smaller Areas
This guide is designed to help planners develop and implement scenario planning exercises for small areas.
From Grassroots to Grasstops: Values Driven Planning, Issue Identification, and Partnership Building for Scenario Planning
This recorded webinar discusses how to identify and understand community values in scenario planning exercises.
How to Build Scenarios
This article introduces the concept of scenario building to corporate managers.
Integrating Scenario Planning and Cost‐Benefit Methods
This article offers a primer on writing scenarios for scenario planning exercises.
Nuts and Bolts: Technical Analysis, Scenario Development, and Land Use Modeling Tools
This recorded webinar discusses the technical aspects of scenario building.
Off the Starting Block: Data Gathering, Assessment, and Scenario Modeling Tools
This recorded webinar discusses data gathering, mapping, visualizations, and other techniques used to develop a compelling baseline scenario.
Scenario Planning and Public Participation
Enhancing the Role of Participatory Scenario Planning Processes: Lessons from Reality Check Exercises
This article assesses the success of scenario planning exercises as a participatory planning tool.
Visioning and Visualization: People, Pixels, and Plans
This book provides in-depth guidance on using digital visualization tools to engage planning process participants.
Scenario Planning within Other Disciplines
Considering Multiple Futures: Scenario Planning to Address Uncertainty in Natural Resource Conservation
This report discusses scenario planning for natural resource conservation.
Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: Scenarios
This report provides extensive background on and analysis of scenario planning to protect ecosystem services.
Enhancing Strategic Planning with Massive Scenario Generation
This report discusses new methods for generating a large number of scenarios for geopolitical scenario planning.
Leipzig Graduate School of Management Center for Strategy and Scenario Planning
This clearinghouse website provides information about scenario planning for businesses.
Living in the Futures
This article offers advice for corporate scenario planning.
Overcoming Obstacles to Effective Scenario Planning
This article discusses how to overcome common pitfalls in organizational scenario planning.
Scenario Planning Project Examples
Alternative Futures Scenario Planning: Approach and Scope of Work
This staff report summarizes a proposal for a scenario planning process to inform an update of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning’s regional comprehensive plan.
CMAP Go to 2040: Preferred Regional Scenario
This report describes a preferred regional scenario for Greater Chicago based on a scenario planning exercise for a regional comprehensive plan.
Driving Forces of Change in the Intermountain West
This briefing paper summarizes key factors to incorporate in exploratory scenario planning efforts for the Intermountain West.
Embracing Uncertainty: Exploratory Scenario Planning (XSP) in Southwest Colorado
This article profiles a scenario planning effort in southwestern Colorado focusing on varying drought conditions.
Envision Utah's Process
This web page describes Envision Utah’s scenario planning process for the Wasatch Front.
Greater Philadelphia: Future Forces
This report presents five possible future scenarios for Greater Philadelphia.
The Future of Scenario Planning
Advancement of Performance-Based Scenario Planning for Regional Planning and Decision-Making: A Synthesis Report
This report explores how regional planning agencies use scenario planning.
An Evaluation Framework for the Use of Scenarios in Urban Planning
This report proposes an evaluation framework for urban scenario planning.
Opening Access to Scenario Planning Tools
This report explores the state of the art in scenario planning and discusses a opportunities to expand scenario planning efforts.
Planning Support Systems for Cities and Regions
This book discusses the potential of computer-based tools to enhance the effectiveness of planning and the associated challenges of applying them.
Sketch Planning Tools for Regional Sustainability
This report discusses the state of the practice of scenario/sketch planning tools.
Related Collections
Community Visioning
This collection catalogs resources that provide background, procedural guidance, case studies, and examples of local documents that illustrate various aspects of the community visioning process.
Comprehensive Planning
This collection catalogs resources that provide background information, comprehensive plan development guidance, and examples of potentially noteworthy plans from various types of communities across the country.
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