Strategy: Narrative Scenario

Methodology

Shell Scenario Method (Wack/van der Heijden). Construct rich, internally consistent narratives that illuminate qualitatively different futures. Focus on storytelling that reveals causal mechanisms and decision points rather than exhaustive enumeration.

Key principles:

• Narrative coherence: Each scenario tells a believable story with cause-and-effect logic
• Divergence: Scenarios must be qualitatively different, not variations on a theme
• Decision relevance: Scenarios illuminate choices the research team faces
• Memorable framing: Each scenario gets a vivid name that captures its essence

Execution Flow

1. Identify drivers → spawn scenario-driver-identification

• Input: research context, planning horizon
• Output: key uncertainty drivers ranked by impact × uncertainty

1. Select axes → identify the 2 highest-impact, highest-uncertainty drivers as scenario axes

• Creates a 2×2 matrix of four qualitatively different futures

1. Construct narratives → spawn scenario-narrative-construction (×4)

• Input: axis position, driver context, research approach
• Output: rich narrative per quadrant

1. Assess impact → spawn scenario-impact-assessment (×4)

• Input: scenario narrative, research approach
• Output: impact analysis per scenario

1. Score robustness → spawn robustness-scoring

• Input: all impact assessments
• Output: robustness index

1. Synthesize → spawn scenario-synthesis

• Input: all scenarios, robustness scores
• Output: final report with strategic implications

Budget Gate

| Step | Token Budget | Notes | |------|-------------|-------| | Driver identification | 8K | PESTEL scan | | Axis selection | 4K | Ranking and selection | | Narrative construction | 15K × 4 | Rich storytelling | | Impact assessment | 10K × 4 | Per scenario | | Robustness scoring | 8K | Aggregation | | Synthesis | 12K | Final compilation |

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Available Tactics

Optional, no fixed order; the final leaf is always a sop.

| Tactic | When to use | | --- | --- | | cross-consistency-filtering | Orchestrates pairwise consistency evaluation and narrative construction to filter the morphological field | | strategy-robustness-testing | Orchestrates impact assessment and robustness scoring to evaluate research approach resilience across scenarios |

Available SOPs

Optional, no fixed order; the final leaf is always a sop.

| SOP | When to use | | --- | --- | | robustness-scoring | Compute robustness index across scenarios with sensitivity analysis | | scenario-driver-identification | Identify key uncertainty drivers using PESTEL framework scanning | | scenario-impact-assessment | Assess each scenario's impact on the research approach across multiple dimensions | | scenario-narrative-construction | Build rich narratives for surviving morphological configurations using Shell method | | scenario-synthesis | Comprehensive scenario analysis report synthesizing all scenario work |

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