The Boardroom Case for Scenario Planning
Post-mortems are seductive because they feel like preparation. An institution studies exactly what went wrong last time, builds a response plan around it, and files it away with genuine confidence that it is now ready. It is a natural instinct, and it is usually preparing for the wrong crisis.
The crises that actually damage institutions are rarely repeats. They arrive from an adjacent direction nobody's post-mortem covered, precisely because the last plan absorbed all the institutional attention that could have gone toward the next one.
Scenario planning, done properly, is a different discipline entirely. It does not ask "what happened last time" but "what kind of failure would our current structure be least prepared to see coming." That is a harder, more uncomfortable question, and it is the one boardrooms most often skip.
It does not need to be elaborate. A handful of plausible, uncomfortable scenarios, reviewed twice a year with the people who would actually have to respond to them, does more for institutional resilience than an entire binder built from the last crisis alone.
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