On the boundaries of experimental research on scenario planning: A commentary on Derbyshire et al. (2022)

The value of experiments in futures and foresight science: A reply

“…The tensions at play here come starkly into focus when we consider that Salo (2023) quite rightly also highlights the level of granularity (and, therefore, the increasing sample size and effort) needed to test anything other than a quite general and high-level hypothesis, such as that related to the conjunction fallacy. Once one starts trying to take account of idiosyncratic contexts and their varying effect on the outcome from scenario planning, sample size, and other considerations can become very taxing.…”

“…Moving onto the two remaining responses to our paper, Salo (2023) elaborates on and summarizes very well the many difficulties associated with conducting experiments, and even more so replications of experiments, on a tool such as scenario planning that is used in highly idiosyncratic organizational contexts. An important danger highlighted by Salo (2023) is that of increased emphasis on experimentation giving rise to experiments that have limited correspondence with the settings in which scenario planning might naturally occur.…”

“…Moving onto the two remaining responses to our paper, Salo (2023) elaborates on and summarizes very well the many difficulties associated with conducting experiments, and even more so replications of experiments, on a tool such as scenario planning that is used in highly idiosyncratic organizational contexts. An important danger highlighted by Salo (2023) is that of increased emphasis on experimentation giving rise to experiments that have limited correspondence with the settings in which scenario planning might naturally occur. In other words, there is a danger of conducting scenario‐planning exercises under circumstances in which they would not otherwise occur, and which therefore badly replicate the real‐world context in which they might happen, just for the sake of increased experimentation.…”