scenario planning workshops for leadership teams
Scenario planning facilitator for executive strategy workshops and corporate strategic foresight sessions.
Corporate scenario planning gives your leadership team a structured, facilitated process to help you prepare for multiple futures. Scenario planning can help you make sure your strategy is resilient and ready to withstand the ups and downs of reality.
A Turning Leaf scenario planning facilitator will help your leadership team move beyond a single-point forecast. You’ll stress-test your strategy against a range of plausible futures. Most importantly, the stretch scenarios will unlock insights you can take straight back into your immediate planning - so you’ll have stronger strategy straight away.
what is scenario planning and how can it help you?
Your scenario planning facilitator guides your leadership team through a futures creation process. Your team builds vivid, plausible scenarios and then tests your current strategy against each one.
Scenario planning is not a method for modelling or predicting the future. Your scenarios are qualitative: rich, descriptive, and designed to elicit creative and unexpected insights from your board or leadership team. Your team maps the driving forces shaping your environment, identifies the critical uncertainties that matter most, and builds a set of future worlds to stress-test your choices. They share assumptions and develop a shared understanding of your business context.
More predictable scenarios are usually already modelled and well understood by your firm or industry. The better approach to produce valuable strategic insights is to focus your leadership team on unlikely or black swan possibilities, even near-impossibilities. The extreme of the scenario is where the real insight lives.
Above all, scenario planning is a brilliant tool for alignment and relationships between your leaders. The value in the planning technique is as much about the dialogue and the ‘what if’ insights as whether a particular scenario ends up happening.
benefits: what you get with a scenario planning facilitator
1
Leadership Alignment
The dialogue during scenario formation forges a shared understanding of context, risk and opportunity that is far more durable than top-down strategic direction. This may be the single biggest reason you should try this method.
2
Clarity in Uncertainty
Make sense of driving forces and emerging trends so the goals in your strategic plan are the right ones, not just the most comfortable.
3
Improved Strategic Conversations
By focusing the team on external forces, uncertainties and long-term possibilities, it elevates the quality of dialogue and helps leaders spend time on the questions that actually shape the organisation’s future.
4
New Strategic Options
Exploring multiple futures (including unlikely ones) consistently sparks lateral thinking and ‘aha’ moments that conventional planning almost never produces.
5
Strategic Agility
Teams that have worked through scenario planning respond faster to disruption because their leaders have already thought through a range of responses.
6
Strategy Stress-Test
Use scenarios as wind tunnels to test-fly your strategic choices and expose vulnerabilities before they become crises.
when should you use scenario planning?
A scenario planning workshop is the right investment if your operating environment is uncertain and you want to make sure your strategy is robust or even anti-fragile. It’s also a brilliant method for creating leadership alignment.
1. Facing Industry Disruption or Structural Change
When technology, regulation, or competitive dynamics are shifting the rules of your industry, scenario planning gives your leadership team a rigorous way to think through what those changes might mean for your strategy, and what you could, should or MUST do now to address these trends.
2. Testing the Robustness of Your Current Strategy
When your organisation has committed to a strategic direction, scenario planning is the fastest, most effective way to stress-test whether your choices will hold up under different conditions, or whether it is dangerously dependent on the future unfolding as modelled in your financial sheets.
3. Boards and Executive Teams Preparing for Long-Range Planning
When a board or executive team needs to look beyond the usual three-to-five year planning horizon, a structured scenario planning workshop provides the frameworks and facilitated conversation to look at growth horizons and opportunities to stretch thinking and inspire teams for a mission.
4. Major Decisions with Long-Term Consequences
If your organisation is contemplating a significant investment, acquisition, market entry, or structural change, scenario planning helps your leadership team understand the range of futures and assumptions that would impact the wisdom of that decision, before you become committed.
5. Leadership Teams Stuck in Conventional Thinking
When your planning sessions produce incremental strategies that don’t reflect the complexity and uncertainty your organisation faces, a skilled scenario planning facilitator can break your discussion pattern and help your team generate genuinely new strategic thinking and possibilities to choose from.
6. Regulatory and Governance Requirements
Regulation is increasingly pushing organisations towards more rigorous future analysis. The Financial Accountability Regime Bill requires financial institutions to better prepare for existential threats, and mandatory climate-related financial disclosures linked to specific temperature scenarios mean scenario planning is now a governance expectation, not just a strategic option, across much of the economy.
why choose turning leaf for your scenario planning day?
We have been running scenario planning workshops for leadership teams across Australia for over 20 years. Our scenario planning facilitators are experienced strategists and business leaders who understand both the process and the practical strategic questions your organisation is grappling with.
The most critical part of scenario planning is that it is a brilliant tool for alignment and relationships between leaders. We treat team alignment as the primary goal (not the scenarios). Every Turning Leaf scenario planning project is designed to be practical and immediately actionable, centred on the strategic clarity and team alignment you need from your leadership team.
We know what makes the difference between a scenario planning workshop that sharpens your strategy and one that produces a set of nicely named quadrants but has no lasting impact on your leaders.
turning leaf proven 8 step process
1. discovery and pre-work
Before your workshop, we conduct pre-workshop interviews with key participants and, where appropriate, a leadership survey. This surfaces the strategic questions that most need to be answered, the assumptions your current strategy is built on, and the dynamics your facilitator needs to understand before walking into the room.
2. workshop design and briefing
We design your scenario planning workshop around your specific objectives, not a generic template. We brief all participants clearly so your leaders arrive understanding the process. They will know why scenario planning works the way it does. Preparation makes the difference between a workshop that hits the ground running and one that wastes the first hour.
3. map the system
Together, your team maps the system your organisation operates within the driving forces, feedback loops, and key relationships that shape your strategic environment. This is a highly valuable exercise for boards and leadership teams on its own, entirely apart from the scenario work that follows.
4. choose the scenario stretches
Your facilitator guides your team to identify and select the most important uncertainties, the forces that are both highly uncertain and highly impactful. Your team will typically select two or four stretch axes to define your scenario sets before choosing stretches that are genuinely challenging rather than incremental variations on your current plan.
5. build the worlds
Working through the scenario quadrants, your team creates the most evocative worlds it can using rich descriptions and images. The goal is to make each future feel vivid and tangible, not abstract. The more alive the scenario, the more useful the strategic conversation it generates.
6. impact analysis and repeat
For each scenario, your team works through the strategic implications: what would this future mean for our current strategy, our competitive position, and the assumptions your team is relying on. Your facilitator repeats this process several times across the scenario sets, building your cumulative insight.
7. extract strategic insights
Your facilitator helps your leaders isolate key insights (the strategic ‘aha’ moments that have emerged) across the full scenario set and helps capture your ideas and implications, especially the ones your team would not have reached through conventional analysis.
8. apply to your strategy
The workshop closes by applying those insights directly: identifying opportunities to improve the current strategy, and developing new strategies and contingencies as they are required. Your leaders leave with practical actions, not just interesting futures.
what leaders like you say about working with turning leaf
“It was wonderful working with Turning Leaf. Our facilitator showed great emotional intelligence, patience and understanding about the nuances of complex relationships between parties. He worked with us before the facilitation and ensured we were all happy with the outcome before finalising the work.”
Sarah Ellison,
Senior Policy and Projects Officer,
NSW Government
“THANK YOU for your efforts! You were on-point and very thorough. We are happy with the outcome. Now the real work begins!”
Vanessa Lyons,
CEO,
Think News Brands
"I enjoyed the process and loved Matt’s slightly chaotic approach. Refreshingly low-tech, but he brought us along with him beautifully. Looking forward to moving forward with some exciting initiatives."
Director,
Royal Sydney Golf Club
"Thank you for facilitating such a wonderful and productive strategic planning session. The feedback from the participants has been positive, and I’m still feeling happy about it.
Looking forward to executing the strategy for the years ahead."
Dominic Aoud, President, Australian Dental Association (NSW)
what makes turning leaf different?
1
we understand your challenge
Our scenario planning facilitators have all held senior leadership roles. They understand the pressures you face and the kinds of strategic questions your leaders face.
2
results-driven projects
We only deliver scenario planning workshops with clear, practical outputs. You leave with a stronger strategy, shared assumptions, contingencies and options, and a leadership team aligned and clear on your strategic direction.
3
strategic alignment dialogue
Scenario planning done well is one of the most powerful alignment tools available. Getting leadership teams to think clearly about the future and commit to a shared direction is what we do better than anyone else.
4
transformation ready
We specialise in facilitating organisations at strategic inflection points, when the old map no longer fits the territory and your leaders need to build a new one together.
5
proven process
Over 20 years and hundreds of engagements, we have refined a scenario planning facilitation model that is both rigorous and highly practical. It is tested, trusted, and continuously improved.
6
accredited specialists
All Turning Leaf scenario planning facilitators are trained in large-group facilitation techniques and strategic foresight methodologies.
what scenario planning participants say
“The facilitator allowed us to digress and go off on tangents, but not for too long - it created exactly the space for genuinely new thinking to emerge.”
“I really enjoyed the format and the facilitator was very good at getting every voice in the room engaged, including those who don’t always speak up - which in a scenario session makes all the difference.”
“Great to see the leadership team working on strategy together. The scenario process gave us a shared language for thinking about the future that we still use in our planning conversations.”
“The facilitator drew out some great conversation and the exercises were genuinely enjoyable. I didn’t expect to find thinking about the future this stimulating.”
“Great approach - pushing us to clarify and stress-test our ideas, findings, reasoning, and decisions.”
“The structured approach gave us a framework for the future that actually changed how we think about risk in our strategy.”
why use an external scenario planning facilitator?
1
Independence and Altitude
An external scenario planning facilitator has no stake in your current strategy. They can challenge any assumption in the room and create the psychological safety for your team to do the same.
2
Structured Process, Not Endless Speculation
Scenario planning without a skilled facilitator easily becomes either a forecasting exercise (too narrow) or a creative free-for-all (too broad). A Turning Leaf facilitator gives your team the right frameworks in the right order to produce scenarios that are both rigorous and practically useful.
3
Genuine Insight, Not Recycled Thinking
When leaders build their own scenarios - guided rather than told - they arrive at insights they couldn’t have reached through conventional analysis. The facilitator’s job is to make that happen, not to provide the answers.
4
Every Voice in the Room
Disagreements about the future are extremely helpful in a scenario planning process. A skilled facilitator draws out the diverse perspectives in your leadership team deliberately - including the voices that don’t always speak up - because those differing views are what make the scenario set genuinely useful.
5
Actionable Outputs, Not Just Interesting Futures
A Turning Leaf scenario planning facilitator ensures your team leaves with clear strategic insights and agreed actions rather than a set of named scenarios that gather dust between planning cycles.
6
Maximum Value from Your Time Together
Bringing your leadership team together for a day or two is a significant investment. A professional scenario planning facilitator ensures every hour is focused on the strategic questions that matter most.
corporate offsite case studies
insurance sector: national risk and strategy function
A national insurance body needed a structured way to future-proof its policies and priorities in a rapidly changing catastrophe-risk environment.
Turning Leaf facilitated a scenario planning workshop anchored around climate volatility, regulatory change, and economic uncertainty.
The leadership team assessed each scenario’s implications for their strategic choices and left with a scenario framework subsequently adopted as a standing tool in the organisation’s strategic planning cycle.
health sector: national peak body
A national health peak body needed to prepare its board and executive team for significant policy and funding uncertainty.
Turning Leaf facilitated a scenario planning workshop that helped the leadership group build four distinct future worlds, stress-test existing strategic priorities against each, and identify the choices that would hold up regardless of which policy direction prevailed.
The board left with a more resilient strategy and a shared language for monitoring which future was unfolding.
health sector: national peak body
A fast-growing energy business needed to prepare its executive team for a significant and uncertain market transition.
Turning Leaf conducted pre-workshop interviews and a leadership diagnostic, then facilitated a two-day scenario planning workshop.
The team built four distinct futures, identified strategic priorities that held up across all of them, and left with scenario-specific contingencies and a reinvigorated sense of strategic direction.
property brand: multi-market commercial strategy
A property brand wanted to use a standardised offer and identity across multiple markets.
Turning Leaf designed a scenario planning process that helped the board stress-test their competitive strengths in each market across a range of futures. The process revealed they were at risk of losing share in a premium market segment under several plausible scenarios - an insight they had not identified through conventional analysis.
The leadership team developed a targeted response involving a dedicated new team, offer, and branding for the premium segment, directly improving their competitive position.
fast start: we know your industry
-
Government Departments
-
FMCG (consumer goods)
-
Construction & Property
-
Building supplies
-
Manufacturing
-
Automotive
-
Government
-
Agriculture
-
Food & Beverages
-
Property (Residential & Commercial)
-
Medical and Dental
-
Software
-
Government Owned Corporations
-
Luxury Branded Goods
-
Retail, Fashion and e-commerce
-
Financial Services and Insurance
-
Utilities and Telecommunications
-
Financial Services and Investment
-
Mining and Infrastructure
-
Professional Services
-
Franchising
-
Pharmaceutical Services
-
Waste & Recycling
-
Not For Profit
the 5 main types of facilitation
ask us about our flagship facilitation modules
advanced strategy formation
Strategy development by the people who will be responsible for it. This workshop is for when you have a team that needs to work together to win against competitors and to delight customers.
ai transformation
Is your strategy ready for the coming wave of AI opportunities and challenges? Have you identified where in your value chain artificial intelligence can add the greatest value? This module unlocks the potential for AI in your business.
path to growth
Sales and marketing alignment to win in consumer categories. For when you need proven growth drivers to win in retail, e-commerce and with brands. Brings together category management, sales, and brand growth essentials.
strategy into action
Implementation planning. For when the rubber hits the road - you need a GAME plan (Goals, Activities, Measurement, Evaluation)
role clarity and silo busting
Team formation at its best. Role clarity and working in silos are now classed as psycho-social safety hazards under WHS legislation. Proper team formation is a level 1 control for these risks because it eliminates lack of clarity at the source.
team alignment intensive
Developing a high-performance team. For when you have a team with a challenge and you need to bring them together to work efficiently and effectively to get the outcome you need.
b2b builder
Specialist strategy formation for businesses selling to other business and government. For when your B2B sales proposition needs to generate more interest in buyers without alientating the procurement department.
executive facilitation
For teams ready to transform strategic visions into tangible outcomes and achieve organisational excellence. Unite your executives around common goals, enhance decision-making, and foster cross-functional collaboration.
cx magic
Putting your customer at the heart of your business through Customer Journey. For when you need to improve your customer experience by mapping their journey and identifying critical strengths and weaknesses.
scenario planning facilitation fees
The cost of professional facilitation varies considerably depending on the specific needs of your team, the numbers involved and the outcomes required.
Fees can range from as little as $6,500 for smaller groups with fewer challenges up to $50,000 for much larger groups with business-critical requirements.
Other drivers of cost include:
On-site or off-site facilitation
Pre-work and research requirements
Post-workshop follow up
Administration needs (eg safety or compliance)
Special requests
The best next step is for us to have a chat about the kind of outcomes you need and how we can ensure you achieve them.