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(2008) 'Scenario planning interventions in organizations : an analysis of the causes of success and failure. ', Futures., 40 (3). pp. 218-236. Further information on publisher's website:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2007.08.019Publisher's copyright statement:Additional information: Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. given by workshop participants in a pre-intervention interview can be helpful in determining the receptiveness of an organization to a subsequent scenario intervention. We theorise that strategic inertia -characterized by coping patterns of bolstering failing strategy, procrastination (over a strategic dilemma) and buckpassing (the responsibility for the dilemma"s resolution), can be caused by the psychological attenuation of the perceived level of environmental threat to the organisation, culminating in unconflicted adherence to the currently-followed strategy.We contend that the expression of such coping behavior is antithetical to a subsequent successful scenario exercise since, if the exercise fails to identify an unconflicted strategic alternative, the sharp focus of the scenarios on futures unfavourable to business-as-usual strategy will re-activate the cognitive stressreduction mechanisms. Strategic inertia will thus be reinforced. We conclude with a review of the implications of our diagnosis for reflective practitioners.Our paper is divided into four sections. In section one, we overview writings on inertia in strategic decision making. We pay especial attention to identifying potential causes of inertia. Next, we present Janis and Mann"s [2] views of the psychological processes invoked by conflicted decisions and analyse the relevance of this laboratory-based theory to provide a psychological explanation of strategic inertia.Finally, we briefly describe the scenario intervention process and argue that it contains the potential to overcome strategic inertia. In section 2, we review an already-published study of an unsuccessful scenario planning intervention which illustrates the operation of components of Janis and Mann"s model. Next, in section 3, we focus on our own case investigation of a successful scenario planning intervention. The early part of this section documents the "success", whilst the latter part analyses the causes of the success -again using the components of Janis and Mann"s model. We conclude in Section 4, where we compare and contrast the application of Janis and Mann"s model to both cases and we demonstrate that application of the model to pre-intervention in...

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