The Power of Strategic Simulations in an Age of Uncertainty For most of modern history, strategy has been an exercise in educated guesswork. Leaders gathered data, debated assumptions, extrapolated trends, and committed resources based on what they believed was most likely to happen next. When environments were stable and change was incremental, this approach worked well enough. Today, it is fundamentally insufficient. The defining feature of the contemporary strategic enviro

The End of Retrospective Strategy For most of modern management history, strategy has been an exercise in retrospection. Organizations gathered historical data, extrapolated trends, and produced plans designed to hold until the next planning cycle. This approach was intellectually coherent in a world of relative stability. It is catastrophically inadequate in one defined by geopolitical shocks, technological discontinuities, regulatory volatility, and nonlinear competitive dy

Introduction: A Tool Built for a World That No Longer Exists Scenario planning was once among the most sophisticated tools available to senior leaders. Developed in the mid-20th century and refined through the work of thinkers such as Herman Kahn at RAND and Pierre Wack at Royal Dutch Shell, it represented a breakthrough: a disciplined way to imagine multiple plausible futures rather than betting on a single forecast. For decades, it helped organizations navigate oil shocks,

The Rise of AI-Augmented Leadership Teams For most of modern organizational history, leadership effectiveness has been constrained not by authority or intent, but by cognition. Even the most capable executive teams operate under hard limits: bounded rationality, finite attention, delayed information, and structural bias. Herbert Simon’s seminal work on bounded rationality demonstrated decades ago that leaders do not optimize—they satisfice, relying on simplified models of rea

Introduction: The Hidden Cost of What Leaders Cannot See Strategic failure rarely originates from poor intent or inadequate resources. More often, it emerges from blind spots—systematic absences in perception that distort judgment long before decisions are made. Decades of research in strategic management and cognitive science demonstrate that leaders do not fail because they lack intelligence, but because complex environments exceed the limits of human sensemaking. As Herber

Introduction: The Limits of Human-Centered Strategy For more than a century, strategic decision-making has relied on a familiar architecture: senior leaders supported by small advisory teams, external consultants, and periodic analytical artifacts. This model was sufficient when environments evolved slowly and uncertainty could be bounded. Today, that assumption no longer holds. Strategy now unfolds in conditions of radical uncertainty, high velocity, and deep interdependence