If you'd like to learn best practice tips for effective scenario analysis, read this article on building actionable scenarios. Below, you'll find step-by-step instructions for how to run scenarios in ARC and monitor which ones are becoming more likely over time.
1. Prepare: start with your research question
Enter your research question in ARC (e.g., “How will evolving European security dynamics impact our global technology company’s operations and competitiveness over the next five years?”).
ARC will automatically research your question and provide a brief on the subject to prepare you to dig deeper.
2. Create your initial set of scenarios
Click on Scenario Builder in the main menu.
Select the parameters of your scenarios:
Decomposition: If you have already created a decomposition, you can have ARC consider your key drivers and indicators when creating scenarios.
Source materials & search results: If you have saved source materials, you can have ARC only consider your source materials, opt to include all search results, or only recent or older results.
Mutually exclusive: check this box to make sure there is no overlap between your scenarios.
Exhaustive: This ensures that the scenarios generated cover all reasonable possibilities.
3. Edit and assign likelihoods to your scenarios
Once ARC has created your scenarios, you can edit them directly based on your own analysis, chat with ARCbot to iterate on the scenarios, or delete them entirely and replace with new ones.
If you have done a decomposition after generating your scenarios, you might consider re-generating your scenarios entirely using the decomposition as an input.
By clicking Details for a scenario, you can view its likelihood history and request forecasts from other ARC users via your own, or ARC-generated, questions.
You can also have ARC do research on this specific scenario to delve deeper into how it might come about and what the implications would be if it did.
4. Solicit outside views
Invite colleagues to read and edit your scenarios by clicking Invite Collaborators on the right side of the overview page.
Solicit forecasts on specific scenarios by clicking Details on a scenario and then Crowdsource Forecasts. ARC will suggest forecast questions and allow you to create your own.
5. Monitor, update, and report
Track and monitor global news and research automatically via the Search Results in the main menu.
Return to the Scenario Builder section to make any necessary updates.
Check the likelihood history for each scenario by clicking into the Details section.