Assess What Is Certain in a Sea of Unknowns

In a world gripped by turmoil, leaders are fixated on the big unknowns. Political volatility, technological acceleration, ecological disruption, and economic instability have converged to make even short-term planning feel precarious. Uncertainty is no longer an exception — it’s the baseline.

Scenario planning practices are meant to help in times like these. They offer a structured way to navigate chaotic times, not by aiming to predict the future but by constructing portraits of plausible alternative futures to surface hidden assumptions, question what’s known and unknown, and tune leaders’ attention to factors that strategists may have overlooked.

However, while scenario planning has earned its place as a valuable tool for examining uncertainties, I believe that its untapped strength lies in exposing and clarifying certainties. The pursuit of as-yet-unseen disrupters has overshadowed something equally vital: what is knowable about the future.

Strategic acumen lies not only in anticipating what will change but in recognizing what won’t. Certain constraints — whether physical, temporal, institutional, or cultural — shape the terrain of the future, delimiting what is possible and where meaningful shifts can occur. By surfacing these layers of certainty, leaders can shift from a vision of limitless potential to one grounded in the specific boundaries that shape change — offering a clearer basis for planning and vital scaffolding for building and stress-testing strategy.

Scenario planning is a discipline of re-perceiving that enables us to interrogate the assumptions we make about the future. It helps to tune our attention. Early pioneers worked with “known knowns” as anchors for exploring more volatile forces. For instance, Herman Kahn emphasized the importance of identifying “inevitable” trends that would shape the long-term future, such as population growth or natural resource limitations. Pierre Wack, another influential figure, spoke of certainties as “predetermined elements” that are already in motion and likely to unfold regardless of other uncertainties.

The political and economic uncertainty reminds us that strategy work isn’t just about imagining what’s next; it’s about recognizing what’s already in place and who is invested in keeping it that way. If I were an executive in an industry held together by strong regulations, I’d begin by mapping the policy frameworks, financial arrangements, and institutional norms stabilizing the current landscape. What’s holding the system together? Whose interests does it serve? Identifying these forces reveals what is deeply rooted and helps distinguish structural constraints from surface-level turbulence. For example, in banking, structural constraints like capital reserve requirements and regulatory oversight shape the core architecture of the system, while surface-level turbulence — such as crypto volatility or rapid fintech innovation — creates disruption without necessarily displacing the deeper rules that hold the industry together.

The initial goal in foresight is to clarify the strategic environment and test the thinking behind your views of the future.

The work of strategy is to make such assumptions explicit — to bring certainties and uncertainties alike into the open, where they can be scrutinized, challenged, and used to build alignment.

This questioning is where the real value of the scenario planning process shines. You’re not just identifying external forces; you’re probing how people on your team perceive and prioritize them. Distinguishing between certainties and uncertainties is a dialogue designed to generate insight by examining how your team perceives change, continuity, and constraint. And in that dialogue, tensions will surface: What seems inevitable to one person may feel deeply uncertain to another, and vice versa. The process of inquiry untangles confusion. Decades of practice have taught me that distinguishing between what’s certain and what’s uncertain lends a powerful crispness to strategic thinking.

Deploying the typology can ensure a breadth of certain factors and minimize tunnel vision. Consider the following questions to identify the certainties that matter most for your strategy work.

• Material and physical certainties: What physical laws, geographies, or built environments define the outer limits of what is possible? What infrastructures, supply chains, or material conditions are so embedded that they constrain future options, regardless of intention?
• Knowledge- and expert-driven certainties: What counts as legitimate knowledge in this domain, and who defines it? Where do expert systems, standardized metrics, or disciplinary logics obscure viable alternatives or codify outdated assumptions?
• Temporal and path-dependent certainties: What processes, investments, or commitments gain inertia over time and become difficult to reverse? How does timing — adoption curves, approval cycles, generational turnover — shape what feels inevitable?
• Political and economic certainties: What policies, regulations, or market structures lock in current pathways? Who has a stake in maintaining this certainty, and how is it being reinforced or contested? Where does institutional power create friction or enforce continuity?
• Normative and cultural certainties: What assumptions and norms feel so natural that they are taken for granted? How do shared values, narratives, or societal myths shape what is considered viable, legitimate, or off limits? What futures are excluded by the dominant worldview?

In using this tool, bear in mind that strategy work, including scenario planning, is naturally bounded by what’s relevant to the organization and to those who will use the insights generated. At first, you may be tempted to enumerate baseline certainties in the natural world — gravity, human mortality, or the sun rising tomorrow. But these certainties are both too mundane and too big-picture to be strategically useful. The goal is to identify certainties that are relevant to the decision or topic under investigation. Surfacing certainties is a purposeful act of deep inquiry — a chance to interrogate and re-interrogate what you assume to know about your very specific context.

It is also important to remember that this framework may hold “certainties” that may not be as immutable as assumed. Here, the scenario planning horizon matters, for what can be judged as certain in the short term may be less so in the longer term. For example, both regulatory rhythms and demographic and generational transitions can be considered temporal certainties, but the former may be overthrown by a new governing regime while the latter cannot be.

Balance Certainties and Uncertainties

Good strategy involves balancing your attention between both certainties and uncertainties. While certainties give us anchors, anchors don’t set direction or steer the way through radical uncertainty. Certainties and uncertainties must be put into dialogue with one another. It’s the tension and interplay between what we know and what we can’t know that shapes good strategic thinking.

In scenario planning, certainties aren’t just static backdrops — they’re the load-bearing elements, structuring the architecture of divergent, plausible futures. Critical uncertainties then play out against those anchors in different ways, animating the divergences. Putting certainties and uncertainties into dialogue means asking, “How do fixed elements constrain, channel, or amplify the unfolding of volatile forces?” For instance, if I were an executive building scenarios about the future of waste, I’d pay close attention to plastics: their persistence in the environment, the material limits of recycling, and the incentive structures around petrochemicals. No matter how divergent the futures, these factors would cut across all of the scenarios, representing a shared undercurrent shaping each narrative. More volatile forces — such as breakthroughs in biodegradable materials or consumer insistence on circularity — would then interact with these certainties, altering how they would matter in different futures.

Certainties can serve as ingredients at the outset of scenario building, but they can also be arrived at via inductive reasoning from a completed set of scenarios. After a set of divergent futures has been developed, you can scan across them to detect common elements — factors that remain constant despite differing contexts. If a factor holds steady across worlds, it stands as a stable reference point. The typology provides a structured lens to systematically comb through existing scenarios and distill foundational factors. These resulting certainties become the features you must cope with, no matter the rambunctiousness of the animating uncertainties driving the divergence in the scenarios.

This framework does not suggest a deterministic view of the future but, rather, invites reflection on which factors may outlast the others and serve to anchor wilder uncertainties. That is, certainties serve to tame the bigger unknowns. This approach insists that both certainties and uncertainties must be held in productive tension for strategy-making to be effective.

Building in attention to certainties provides richer and more honest scaffolding for the imaginative work of foresight, ensuring that strategic visions are anchored in the material, institutional, and cultural realities that will shape what is actually possible. Appreciating certainties means naming them, revisiting them over time, and using them to align actions and find grounding. This isn’t a one-time diagnostic. Attending to certainties must be a habit — one that strengthens strategic imagination and sharpens decision-making under pressure. By engaging in it, organizations move beyond the defensive posture of simply reacting to volatility and instead build greater strategic clarity.

The Power of Knowing What We Know

Scenario planning as a discipline is often associated with exploring uncertainty, but at its heart, its deeper purpose is re-perception. Re-perception is the practice of shifting how we see — not just confronting what is unknown but challenging what is familiar, expected, or taken for granted. It invites a reframing of assumptions, revealing blind spots and surfacing new possibilities.

The five lenses of certainty offer a way to re-perceive change. When uncertainty dominates, the temptation is to imagine that everything is up for grabs. Instead, this typology and heuristic shows how stability, when properly understood and leveraged, is just as powerful — and necessary.

When we ignore certainties, we risk becoming unmoored from the constraints and conditions emanating from the past that will shape tomorrow. Strategic failure often stems from misjudging what’s fixed and what’s flexible, by assuming freedom where there are constraints or imagining rigidity where adaptation is possible.

Attending to slower, stickier elements of change can improve scenario planning by putting it on firmer ground. Distinguishing between hardened realities and areas of greater strategic flexibility helps clarify where to invest, where to negotiate, and where to push for change. By mapping what’s locked in, what’s conditional, and what remains open to influence, strategy becomes more precise and ultimately more useful.