When scenario planning practitioners and others speak of “looking forward”, they don’t mean prediction. Forecasting implies we know where we’re going, while scenario planning admits we do not.

Looking forward is not clairvoyance, nor is it the worship of trend graphs. It is not about guessing which shiny technology or geopolitical shift will “win”.

Like a single renewable technology or control system which will dominate the grid. That kind of forward-looking, the PowerPoint prophecy, breeds false certainty.

What if?

Real looking forward is structured curiosity. It is the art of asking what if? It is about mapping plausible futures, not to pick one, but to prepare for several.

Take a utility operator exploring smart grid scenarios. What if a regional cyberattack knocks out part of the grid? What if an unexpected surge in electric vehicle charging overloads local transformers? The value is not in predicting the exact problem, but in thinking through the consequences, spotting vulnerabilities, and noticing where plans or assumptions might fail.

The value is not in the scenarios themselves, but in the thinking they provoke. The exposure of assumptions, the surfacing of blind spots, and the quiet admission that the future will surprise us.

That kind of forward thinking is the oxygen of resilience. A resilient smart energy operator is not one that resists change. It is one that rehearses for it. By exploring multiple futures, attachments to the current system are loosened, and people train themselves to recognise early warning signals. Operational posture is adjusted rather than clinging to a plan that might already be obsolete.

Crisis management

There is a difference between reacting and responding. A reaction is biological, immediate, instinctive, messy. A response is behavioural, considered, contextual, and sometimes counter-intuitive.

It is impossible to respond well without having imagined a situation before. Looking forward gives such rehearsals. In a smart energy context for example, a ransomware attack that disables distributed energy resources could be imagined. The team experiences the confusion, tests communication paths, and can learn which backup systems fail first. It’s a sort of cognitive inoculation against panic, even when a scenario was not exactly rehearsed.

Organisations that do not practise looking forward for crisis management tend to react, freeze, deny, or over correct. Those that do practise scenario planning in one of its many forms, are more likely to respond. They have seen similar patterns in simulations, debated options, and built muscle memory for ambiguity.

Build to last

Tabletop exercises and crisis simulations are examples of practical translations of looking forward. They make the abstract concrete. Scenarios on paper are intellectual, simulations force decision.

In smart energy, a tabletop might involve engineers, operators, and cyber teams, debating trade-offs between shutting down nodes to stop an attack or keeping the system online for essential services. They let people experience friction, miscommunication, and the emotional weight of uncertainty in a safe environment, where learning can costs some embarrassment, but not real-life impacts.

The best simulations aren’t tests of procedure but mirrors of culture. Each run builds resilience not by hardening systems, but by softening people to uncertainty.

Building comfort with uncertainty requires deliberate practise. Start small: debrief failures openly without blame, reward teams for surfacing risks early rather than hiding them, and rotate people through different roles in simulations so they experience multiple perspectives. Create psychological safety by celebrating the person who says “I don’t know” or “this assumption might be wrong”.

Over time, these small acts compound. Uncertainty stops being a career threat and becomes operational reality that can be discussed honestly.

TL;DR

  • Looking forward is not predicting, but preparing.
  • Resilience is not rigidity, but adaptive capacity.
  • Responding requires imagination. Reacting happens without it.
  • Tabletop simulations are the rehearsal rooms where imagination becomes responsive reflex.

Refs

For scenario planning methodology:

For organisational crisis response: