MIT Sloan Management Review Article on How Ghost Scenarios Haunt Strategy Execution

Executives engaged in strategic planning typically have a blind spot. They focus almost exclusively on possible courses of action and pay little attention to the future socioeconomic and environmental context in which those actions will play out. During our combined 70 years of research, practice, and teaching, we, as well as others, have observed that business leaders are inclined, and their organizations configured, to work with only a single implicit view of the future.1 That view is typically deeply embedded within their strategies as a set of unquestioned assumptions about the future context. We call these sets of unexamined assumptions ghost scenarios because they are invisible — and because they may come back to haunt executives and companies in unanticipated and unwelcome ways.

About the Author

Trudi Lang is a senior fellow in management practice at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School and director of the Oxford Collaborative Strategy Lab. Rafael Ramírez is professor of practice at Saïd Business School and director of the Oxford Scenarios Programme.

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