TRANSFORMATIVE SCENARIO PLANNING

What It Is, How Accompaniment and Appreciative Inquiry Support It, and Why It Matters Most for Nonprofits

What Do We Mean by “Transformative Scenario Planning”?

Most planning tools assume the future is something an organization needs to predict and adapt to. Transformative Scenario Planning (TSP), developed by Adam Kahane of Reos Partners, starts from a different assumption: in situations that are genuinely stuck, complex, conflictual, and not working, the future isn't something you forecast. It's something you help shape, together with the other actors whose cooperation you need but don't yet fully trust or agree with. As Kahane puts it, TSP “takes the well-established adaptive scenario planning methodology and turns it on its head, so that we construct scenarios not only to understand the future but also to influence it.”

The method traces back to the Mont Fleur Scenario exercise in 1991, where a strikingly diverse group of South African leaders, across the deepest political and racial divides of that era, came together to build shared stories about where their country might be headed. None could resolve South Africa's transition alone, and none fully trusted the others going in. What the exercise produced wasn't a single forecast but a set of possible futures, built collaboratively, that gave the group a shared language for talking about what was happening, what could happen, and what needed to happen next, and then for acting on it.

Kahane describes the conditions where TSP is the right tool in terms that map closely onto Dave Siburg's water sector work: situations “seen to be unacceptable or unsustainable, that cannot be transformed directly or by people working only within their own organization or sector”, systems too complex and too contested for any single actor to fix alone. That's the same diagnosis behind capacity leveraging: no single water utility, and no single nonprofit, can resolve the systemic pressures bearing down on it by itself. TSP supplies a concrete, tested process for the collaborative work that recognition requires.

How Accompaniment and Appreciative Inquiry Support It

TSP doesn't operate in isolation, it depends on two supporting disciplines to actually work as designed, and Dave Siburg's framework places them side by side for exactly this reason.

Accompaniment supplies the trust TSP requires to even convene. A transformative scenario process only works if diverse, often historically distrustful actors are willing to sit at the same table and speak honestly. That willingness has to be built, and accompaniment is the discipline for building it. Its core values, mutuality, inclusivity, empowerment, and sustained presence over time, let a convener bring reluctant participants into a scenario process without those participants feeling summoned to be evaluated or managed. Paul Farmer's description of accompaniment, “sticking to a task until it is deemed completed by the person you are accompanying,” captures almost exactly the posture a TSP facilitator needs: present, patient, and willing to let the other parties set real terms rather than merely participate in terms set for them.

Appreciative Inquiry supplies the generative energy TSP needs to imagine new futures. Once diverse actors are at the table, TSP asks them to build multiple stories of what might happen, which requires the kind of open, strengths-oriented, non-defensive dialogue David Cooperrider's Discovery and Dream phases were designed to produce. A scenario process anchored in deficit thinking tends to default to arguing about blame and past failures; one grounded in Appreciative Inquiry's premise, that “human systems grow toward what they persistently ask questions about”, is far more likely to produce scenarios people are genuinely willing to work toward.

Put together, the sequence makes sense: accompaniment gets distrustful, resource-unequal actors to genuinely show up as partners; Appreciative Inquiry helps them imagine constructive futures together rather than re-litigating old grievances; and TSP gives that group a structured, disciplined process for turning those imagined futures into stories precise enough to act on.

“Transformative scenario planning is a way that people can work together with others to transform themselves and their relationships with one another, and thereby to transform their systems.”

— Adam Kahane, Transformative Scenario Planning: Working Together to Change the Future

Why This Matters for Any Organization

Most organizations eventually run into a problem too big to solve alone, a shifting regulatory environment, a funding landscape in upheaval, a community crisis no single institution created or can fix. The instinct in that moment is often to retreat into planning that only covers what the organization directly controls, because collaborative planning with parties you don't fully trust feels slower and riskier. TSP is built for exactly that discomfort: a disciplined way to work with actors outside your control, competitors, regulators, community groups, historical adversaries, without needing agreement or trust to already exist before the process starts.

This connects directly to the systems thinking running through Peter Senge's and Peter Drucker's work: organizations are “bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions,” and optimizing one part of a system in isolation can weaken the whole. TSP turns that insight into an actual, repeatable methodology for engaging the wider system an organization is embedded in, rather than pretending the organization's own boundary is also the boundary of the problem.

Why This Is Especially Important for Nonprofits

Nonprofits are almost never the largest or most powerful actor in the systems they're trying to change. A community health nonprofit doesn't control the hospital system, the insurers, or the public health department; a small water utility doesn't control the regulators, the state primacy agency, or the neighboring systems it might need to partner with. That structural position, mission-driven but not system-controlling, is exactly the condition TSP was designed for. Nonprofits, more than almost any other type of organization, need a credible way to influence systems they can't command.

The resource reality of the sector makes this more urgent, not less. Reos Partners' own materials note that transformative scenario processes are especially valuable for building resilience and helping organizations “connect across structures to spark new growth and development” after periods of disruption, language that describes much of the nonprofit sector's current situation, coming out of several years of funding volatility and rising demand. A nonprofit that tries to plan its way through that disruption alone is planning for a future it doesn't actually control. A nonprofit that brings funders, peer organizations, and the community it serves into a genuine scenario process has a far better chance of a plan that survives contact with reality.

There's also a values fit that matters. TSP was built for situations where the people whose cooperation you need don't yet “understand, agree with, or trust” you or each other, which describes a great deal of cross-sector nonprofit work: nonprofits and the businesses or agencies they need cooperation from, or nonprofits and the very communities they serve, where a history of top-down service delivery has eroded trust. Because TSP was never designed to require prior agreement, only a willingness to build shared stories together, it gives nonprofits a way to engage those relationships honestly rather than waiting for trust to magically appear before the real work starts.

Why Purpose and Mission Focus Has to Anchor It

A scenario process can go wrong in a specific way if it isn't anchored to purpose: it can produce interesting, well-built stories about the future that nobody actually acts on, because the exercise itself became the goal rather than a means toward something the organization genuinely cares about. Mission focus is what keeps that from happening. An organization that's clear about its own purpose enters a TSP process able to ask the right first question, not “what could happen to us,” but “what needs to happen for our mission, and the missions of the people we're building scenarios with, to be achieved.”

This is where the throughline across all four practices, accompaniment, Appreciative Inquiry, capacity leveraging, and transformative scenario planning, becomes visible. Each one, done honestly, requires an organization to ask not “how do we get what we need” but “how can we help each other achieve our missions,” in Siburg's framing. Kahane's own account of Mont Fleur bears this out: the process succeeded not because participants abandoned their own interests and convictions, but because they stayed honest about what they each stood for while genuinely trying to understand what the others stood for too. Purpose wasn't set aside to make the collaboration possible, it was the thing that made the collaboration meaningful once it happened.

For nonprofits specifically, this matters because mission is the one thing a scenario process cannot be allowed to compromise on the way it can compromise on tactics, partnerships, or timelines. A nonprofit entering a transformative scenario process with funders, peers, and the community it serves has to remain willing to walk away from a scenario, however elegantly built, that would require abandoning its purpose. Held that way, TSP stops being just a planning technique and becomes what Kahane intended: a way for genuinely mission-driven actors to transform not just their plans, but their relationships with each other, in service of futures none of them could reach alone.

Bringing It Together

Transformative Scenario Planning gives organizations a disciplined way to do something that instinct usually discourages: sit down with people they don't fully trust, whose cooperation they nonetheless need, and build shared stories about a future none of them can create alone. Accompaniment supplies the patience and trust that makes the table possible in the first place; Appreciative Inquiry supplies the generative, strengths-based dialogue that lets the group actually imagine something worth building toward, rather than just re-arguing the past. Together, they turn a scenario exercise from a forecasting technique into a genuine process of collective transformation.

For nonprofits, rarely the most powerful actor in their own systems, chronically resource-constrained, and dependent on cooperation they can't compel, that combination isn't a luxury planning exercise. It's close to a necessity. And it only holds together, across every phase of the process, if the organization stays honestly anchored to its own mission, clear enough about its purpose to know which futures are worth building toward, and disciplined enough to keep asking, at every step, whether the scenario in front of it actually serves the reason the organization exists.