Scenarios: a planning tool for health care organizations.

An organization's strategic planners require an understanding of future developments in the environment in which their decisions will be made. However, there is increasing recognition that there is no single predetermined "future." Therefore, the use of alternative future scenarios can be helpful. Scenario construction is a technique for combining possible environmental developments in a systematic way to help managers assess the potential consequences of alternative decisions. This article discusses the scenario technique and shows, as an example, its application to one organization in the health care field.