Method

How the wind tunnel works

This page describes the method behind the Strategy Review — for practitioners, peers, and anyone who wants to know what happens under the hood. It is deliberately more detailed than the landing page, and it does not skip the limits of the method.

Strategic fit — origin and problem

The idea that strategy arises from the match between organization and environment is older than most of the tools that carry it today. It comes from the Harvard business policy tradition of the 1960s: a good strategy brings a firm's own capabilities into alignment with the opportunities and threats of its environment — Kenneth Andrews described this match as the core of strategy work, and contingency theory generalized it into a principle: there is no best organization, only a fitting one.

The most popular tool of this school is the SWOT analysis. Its weakness has been on record for a long time — Hill and Westbrook diagnosed as early as 1997 that it was "time for a product recall": in practice, the inside (strengths, weaknesses) is assessed with reasonable care, while the outside (opportunities, threats) is compiled in a workshop. The result is a snapshot plus gut feeling — unfalsifiable, prone to confirmation bias, and outdated before the derived measures are approved. The structural weakness is not the grid; it is how the outside is produced.

That is exactly where the review starts: the grid stays — what is examined is fit. But the outside is no longer guessed. It is machine-generated, continuously updated, and available in several consistent variants. The fit is not checked against the future but against several — and the differences between the test results are the actual finding.

Scenario technique as flow generation

The futures the company is tested against are scenarios in the classic sense: internally consistent, distinguishable pictures of possible environments — not forecasts, not probability statements. The technique stands in the tradition of Herman Kahn and the scenario work at Shell around Pierre Wack; what is new is not the method but its economics. What used to cost months of expert work per run, a scenario engine now does continuously: in each run it generates and discards hundreds of raw scenarios and condenses them into a few load-bearing future worlds.

In the wind tunnel picture, this is flow generation. A wind tunnel is only as good as the flow it produces: laminar where it should be laminar, documented in its parameters, reproducible. Translated: every future world can be traced back to its factor projections, its derivation is inspectable, and the same run can be repeated with a changed configuration.

Factor map and consistency check

Everything starts with the factor map: the environmental factors relevant to the guiding question, captured systematically across six STEEP dimensions — society, technology, economy, environment, politics and law. The fact base comes from continuous environmental monitoring (squawk.de), not from a one-off research effort: signals, trends and shifts are collected continuously and assigned to the factors.

For each factor, alternative future projections are formulated. The combinatorics are large — and most combinations are contradictory. A pairwise consistency check sorts them out: which projections are compatible, which exclude each other? From the consistent combinations, clustering forms the future worlds — typically three to five, different enough to span the space of possibilities, and consistent enough to be told as worlds. That is the core of the engine at picturesoftomorrow.com.

Company profile and assumptions sheet

On the inside, the company is captured as a model: the business model (value proposition, revenue mechanics, cost structure), the load-bearing resources and capabilities, the critical dependencies — supply chains, key customers, regulation, people.

The most important artifact is the assumptions sheet. Every strategy rests on assumptions, most of them implicit: about price stability, customer behavior, technology maturity, the persistence of regulatory frameworks. In the review, these assumptions are made explicit and phrased so they can be tested — as statements that can be true or false in a given future world. The idea follows assumption-based planning: the plan is not defended; its preconditions are examined.

The run: matching per future world

The actual wind tunnel run is a systematic match: every element of the company profile is held against every future world. Does the assumption hold in this world? Does the resource carry? Does the dependency remain manageable? Wherever the answer is no, there is a finding: a break point. Break points that appear in several worlds are urgent; those that appear in only one world are observation posts.

Strategic options are tested in the same tunnel: same worlds, different configuration of the model. This produces a robustness assessment — which option holds in many worlds, and which is a bet on a single one.

Early indicators

Every break point contains an observation instruction: if a critical assumption holds only in some worlds, it can be stated what would reveal early which direction the world is actually taking — a draft regulation, a price movement, a technology milestone. These early indicators are derived per finding and plug into continuous monitoring: the review does not end with a document, it ends with a watchlist.

Limits of the method

A wind tunnel does not replace the road. That applies literally here:

The model is not the company. What is tested is a profile — as good as its capture. What the profile does not contain, the run cannot find.
Scenarios are constructions, not predictions. The future worlds span a space of possibilities; they do not claim that any one of them will occur. The method deliberately assigns no probabilities.
The real future can lie outside the space. Consistency checking reduces arbitrariness but does not guarantee completeness — genuine surprises remain possible.
What is measured is fit, not truth. The run shows where assumptions break — whether an organization draws consequences from that is a leadership decision, not an arithmetic operation.

The value lies before that point: a wind tunnel prevents the expensive mistakes before they are built. No more — and no less.