It is, rather, important to deal with management complexity and unpredictability, and to foster organisational learning. Understanding business systems does not imply the need to draw up detailed and long term plans. Planning does not usually mean learning to anticipate possible futures. It is, instead, typically seen as the work of reducing uncertainty through prediction. Decision-making based on such an approach gives an illusion of control .
Many companies use spreadsheet simulation tools to forecast the financial implications of plans.
Quite often, such analyses are based on simplistic and misleading hypotheses that can lead decision makers to dangerous conclusions. In fact, usually such tools do not make explicit interdependencies between relevant variables, delays, non-linearities and policy levers. Scenario analysis is a tool to support organisational learning and decision-making during times of rapid strategic change, when discontinuities in the business environment make extrapolation from available historical data misleading or meaningless. Through scenario analysis decision-makers are able to focus the relevant environment and to generate a spanning set of alternative futures, upon which strategic analysis and diagnosis will be developed. Scenario planning can be successfully implemented through the use of system dynamics simulation models, linked with spreadsheet accounting-based tools.