Planning for Multiple Futures: Staying Grounded While Preparing for Uncertainty
May 19, 2026
This is the second post in our follow-up series to Strategic Planning in 2025: Five Ways to Navigate Chaos with Clarity.
In our last blog, we explored the importance of clarifying your North Star: the purpose, values, and vision that anchor your organization in times of uncertainty. That clarity is essential. But clarity alone is not enough.
When predictions are shaky and change is constant, nonprofit leaders are navigating conditions that feel more complex than ever:
- Shifting funding and political landscapes
- Increasing demand for services
- Workforce burnout and capacity constraints
- Rapid political, social, and technological change
Traditional strategic planning, built on stability and predictability, no longer meets this moment. This is why we are seeing organizations shift toward strategic direction-setting: an approach where the direction is clear, but the path remains flexible
Within strategic direction setting:
- North Star = Direction (what stays constant)
- Scenario Planning = Conditions (what may change)
- Strategies = How we move (what adapts)
And within this approach, scenario planning is a critical practice. But the question remains: How do we stay purposeful when the conditions around us are constantly shifting?
Why Scenario Planning Matters
In times of uncertainty, our ability to radically imagine multiple futures becomes essential. Not only to stay grounded and hopeful, but also to prepare for changing conditions while holding onto our North Star.
Scenario planning is one of the most useful tools for doing exactly that.
Our colleagues at Building Movement Project, in their 2026 Brief on Solidarity: Lessons from a Year of Crisis and Change, noted that organizations can no longer afford to treat scenario planning as an occasional exercise. Increasingly, it is becoming a necessary practice for preparing, protecting, and adapting in these times.
At its core, scenario planning is the process of imagining and exploring multiple potential futures based on a range of uncertainties. Organizations often try to plan for one expected future, but in times of uncertainty, it is more useful to prepare for multiple possible futures while staying grounded in your core purpose, values, and North Star.
Scenario planning helps us imagine and shape the future we want, rather than only reacting to the future we get.
Ask: What do we know, what can we imagine, and what remains uncertain? How can we hold the future lightly as we plan and move with purpose?
This is what makes scenario planning for multiple futures such a powerful component of strategic direction setting. It helps organizations maintain both clarity and flexibility.
Making Scenario Planning Real
Scenario planning does not require predicting the future perfectly. Instead, it invites organizations to reflect on a range of possible conditions and consider how they might respond while staying grounded in their values, purpose, and North Star.
This can look like:
- Identifying the external forces most likely to shape your work
- Exploring a few plausible future scenarios
- Reflecting on what opportunities, risks, and decisions each scenario raises
- Identifying strategies and priorities that would remain important across multiple futures
Organizations might ask:
- What happens if funding decreases significantly?
- What if community needs increase faster than capacity?
- What political, technological, or social shifts could affect our strategy?
- What remains essential no matter the conditions?
The goal is not to predict exactly what will happen. The goal is to build readiness, adaptability, and shared understanding so organizations can move with greater clarity.
What Scenario Planning Makes Possible
The scenario planning process provides organizations with an opportunity to:
Stay Grounded in your North Star across different possible futures. This process clarifies what is core to your organization’s purpose and what cannot be compromised, even when strategies need to shift.
Move from Prediction to Preparation. In moments like these, with shifting conditions, scenario planning helps provide clear direction while remaining flexible to changing circumstances. Instead of trying to predict exactly what will happen, organizations can focus on building readiness and flexibility for changing conditions.
Strengthen Decision-Making by reflecting on what decision makes sense across multiple futures and conditions. This leads to resilient long-term decisions, rather than reacting only to immediate pressures.
Build Organizational Nimbleness & Emergence. By anticipating change and responding early, organizations can become more adaptive, identify risks sooner, and better recognize emerging opportunities.
Deepen Strategic Thinking & Collaboration across the organization. Scenario planning encourages organizations to move beyond timelines, tasks, and fixed long-term plans to reflect on current realities, risks, opportunities, possibilities, and strategic actions. In doing so, organizations strengthen their capacity for shared sense-making, collaborative leadership, and collective action.
No matter the scenarios you explore. We don’t need to have all aspects certain to move forward. You need clarity of purpose and readiness to adapt.