Do you do scenario planning or forecasting when you do business planning? If so, do you use software, exercises? what works best?

We have an exercise we go through every 5 years that has the group answer the question: If you pick up a newspaper 10 years down the road what would they say about our industry - what will be the key drivers, the challenges and the criteria for success it really opens your mind to the potential scenarios

We do something I would not call it scenario planning but we try to look outside our industy and try to find other industries that have faced some of the things we are facing in the past and try to learn how they reacted/handled the industry dynamics

No we would not waste our time

We have an exercise that we go through that goes something like this:

1. Define the biggest threats and opportunities over the next 5 years
2. Rank them
3. (Individually) what would happen to our firm if the top 3 threats came true
4. same thing for opportunities
5. Group discussion
6. Most probable scenario
7. How do we prepare for it

This looks like a very good exercise - how successful have you been with it what are some of the pitfalls of the exercise - any feedback would be helpful I may try it on a client.