From Noise to Clarity | Track 15
Only the Best Case #20
Thinking Traps | Post 20 of 35. (How we decide)
Before you read: think of a plan you’re working on. Would it still work if things went noticeably worse than you hope?
The founders of a craft brewery had reached the moment they had been building towards for years. Demand was growing, the small brewhouse was running flat out, and the bank was willing to lend them enough for a new brewing hall three times the size.
The finance manager had prepared a forecast. It was a careful piece of work, with a single line rising steadily across five years as new bars and shops took their beer. Every part of the plan sat on that line: the loan repayments, the new staff, the extra delivery van, the second shift.
Everyone around the table was excited. Someone joked that they should start thinking about a third building. The loan was signed within the month.
Eighteen months later, a large supermarket chain that had become their main customer changed its supplier list, and a run of hot weather was followed by a long, wet summer that emptied the beer gardens. The line on the forecast had never imagined either. The brewery survived, but only after a painful year of cutting shifts and renegotiating the loan.
That’s the trap of only the best case. We plan for the one future we hope will arrive, and build everything on it, as though no other future were possible.
The future isn’t a single line. It’s a range of possibilities, and the one we hope for is only one of them. The way out is to draw three futures side by side, the one you hope for, the one you fear and the one you think is likely, and plan for all three.
Why we plan for only one future
A single forecast is tidy. It gives a plan something firm to stand on. Budgets, staffing and targets can all be set against it, and everyone knows what success looks like. Drawing several futures feels messier and less confident, and it can seem like a lack of conviction.
Planners have long described this as single scenario thinking: building a plan around one expected future and treating it as the only one. It’s an easy habit to fall into, because forecasts often look precise. A number with a decimal point feels like knowledge. But a forecast is a guess about a future that hasn’t happened yet, and the precision can hide how uncertain it really is.
“A number with a decimal point feels like knowledge.”
Optimism adds to the pull. The people building a plan usually believe in it. They chose this direction because they think it will work, so the hopeful future feels natural and the difficult futures feel like pessimism. Raising them in a meeting can seem like a vote of no confidence.
The same thing happens in careers. People planning a move often picture one version of how it will go: the new role found within a few months, the savings lasting long enough, the new field welcoming them. That picture is worth having. It just isn’t the only one, and the plan should still work if the search takes twice as long.
How do you know you’re planning for only the best case?
Try this: Take one plan you’re working on and describe, in one sentence each, what happens if things go much better, much worse or roughly as expected.
If the much worse sentence was hard to write, or made you uncomfortable, you’ve found the first tell. When a plan has only been imagined in its hopeful form, the other forms feel like threats rather than possibilities.
The second tell is a plan with no room to adjust. If every cost, hire and commitment assumes the hoped for line, and nothing could be scaled back without causing serious damage, the plan depends entirely on one future arriving.
The third tell is a forecast nobody has argued with. When a single line has been accepted without anyone asking what would push it up or down, it has probably been mistaken for a prediction rather than a guess.
A client of mine, the head of events at a trade association, was planning the association’s annual conference in a new, much larger venue. Her plan assumed a full hall. The venue deposit, the catering order and the speaker fees were all set against that number.
I asked her to draw three futures. In the hoped for future, the hall was full, as she had planned. In the feared future, a rival event announced the same week, a key sponsor pulled out and attendance fell by a third. In the likely future, attendance was healthy but a little below the venue’s capacity.
Looking at the three, she saw that her plan only worked in the first. She went back to the venue and negotiated a flexible layout that could close off part of the hall without penalty. She moved the catering to a final number confirmed two weeks before the event. The conference sold slightly fewer tickets than hoped, but the flexible plan meant it still made money, and the half full hall she had feared never appeared, because the room had been sized to fit.
“Looking at the three, she saw that her plan only worked in the first.”
The sketch that springs the trap: three futures
I call the escape sketch three futures. It replaces a single forecast with a small fan of possibilities.
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Draw two lines at right angles: time running left to right along the bottom, and whatever matters, such as sales, customers or cash, running up the side. Put a dot near the left for where you are today.
From the dot, draw three lines heading right. The first rises: the future you hope for. The second falls: the future you fear. The third runs between them: the future you think is likely. Keep them rough. These aren’t forecasts. They’re reminders that the future can go more than one way.
At the end of each line, draw a small box and write what your plan would need to look like for that future. What would you do if the hopeful line arrived? What would you change if the feared one did? Then look at your current plan and ask which of the three it actually works in.
Picture the brewery drawing this before signing the loan. The hoped for line would have matched the forecast. The feared line might have shown a big customer leaving and a bad summer arriving in the same year. The likely line would have sat somewhere in between. Faced with all three, the founders might have chosen a smaller hall with room to grow, or a loan that could be paid back more slowly in a hard year. The ambition would have been the same. The plan would simply have been able to bend.
Finally, draw a dotted upright line somewhere along the way, at the point where you’ll be able to tell which future is arriving. That’s your signpost. Decide now what you’ll look at when you reach it, and what you’ll do if the lines start to split. A signpost might be the first quarter’s orders, the number of early bookings, or whether a particular customer renews. Choosing it in advance means you won’t have to argue about what the evidence means once it arrives.
The aim isn’t to predict which future will come. It’s to build a plan that can bend. Often, a strong plan is one that works reasonably well in all three futures, rather than one that works brilliantly in one and fails badly in the others.
As a visual strategist, I find three futures changes the mood of planning in a useful way. A single line invites an argument about whether it’s right. Three lines invite a conversation about what you’d do in each case. People who seemed pessimistic suddenly have something useful to contribute, because the feared future now has its own place on the page.
What happens when a team draws three futures
I once anonymously observed a case at an organisation where the regional head of a coffee chain was preparing to roll out a new, larger store format across her region. The pilot store had done very well, and the rollout plan assumed every new store would perform the same way.
Before presenting the plan, she drew three futures with her property and finance teams. The hoped for line matched the pilot. The feared line showed what would happen if the pilot had been helped by its unusual location next to a busy station. The likely line sat between them.
The feared line turned out to be worth taking seriously. When the team looked closely, the pilot’s location really had given it an advantage that many of the planned sites lacked. She changed the rollout so that the larger format went only to sites with similar footfall, and designed a smaller version for the rest. Two years later, both formats were doing well, and none of the stores had to be closed or shrunk.
“She changed the rollout so that the larger format went only to sites with similar footfall.”
A note on the book that shapes this series
This track draws on The S.T.A.R. System: Applying Visual Thinking for Career & Business Success, which I co authored with Sherrie Low. Sherrie and I describe the move from Takeaway to Application as the point where an insight becomes a plan that has to survive the real world.
Only the best case is a trap that builds the Application on a single hopeful future. Three futures reframe the plan around the range of what might happen, so the Application is still standing whichever line the future decides to follow.
Your trap card
The trap: planning for one future as if it were the only one.
The tell: the feared future is hard to describe, the plan can’t bend, and nobody has argued with the forecast.
The sketch: three futures. Draw hoped for, feared and likely, then plan for all three and set a signpost.
Hope is a good reason to start something. It’s a poor reason to assume everything will go to plan. Three lines on a page take a few minutes to draw, and they give your plan the flexibility to meet whichever future actually turns up.
Which plan of yours only works in the future you’re hoping for?
Next in Thinking Traps: Decisions You Can See, where we close the third circle, name the pattern underneath the six traps of how we decide, and gather them into one field guide.
This idea comes from The S.T.A.R. System: Applying Visual Thinking for Career & Business Success, co authored by Ai Yat Goh and Sherrie Low, published by Marshall Cavendish Business. If building plans that can bend is useful to you, the book goes further into applying visual thinking across career and business decisions. Get it on Amazon.
Ai Yat Goh is a Visual Thinking Strategist, educator and entrepreneur based in Singapore, and Asia’s first Master Trainer for Dan Roam’s Power of Visual Series. She works with professionals, teams and organisations navigating a pivot, helping people see clearly before they act. Connect on LinkedIn or read more on Medium.
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BK HAN Candy Chan RH Malini Lawrence Lee Jessica Leong PUN Kai Loon Angela Toh
