Just A Taste: Scenario Thinking with Eric Best

"There was an old sailor who offered me the line, “the sea lies in wait for the unwary, but she stalks the reckless.” It’s reckless not to be prepared – not to know what the commitment is to deliver on what you say.” ~Eric Best

By Catherine Austin Fitts

Scenario thinking is one of the most valuable techniques for managing a life, a business, or a portfolio of assets.

Scenario thinking is a form of strategic planning that creates stories about the future, called scenarios, to simulate and to test with adaptations. One aspect of scenario thinking is to define and to master key variables that influence events. Each year in the Solari Report Annual Wrap Up, I use four scenarios to describe the outlook for the global economy. I apply probabilities to them to help me allocate investments of both time and money and to look for opportunities in the unexpected.

Eric Best, founder of Best Partners SC LLC, is the finest “scenario thinker” I know. After his successful career in journalism, he became a leader by helping people to understand and reinvent their futures. Eric has spent two decades helping leaders in a range of industries to practice scenario thinking. An avid sailor, Eric has also written a book about his 5,000-mile sailing solo to Hawaii, Into My Father’s Wake.

I have seen truly great scenario thinking reinvent and reinvigorate a family or a firm’s understanding of its world and how to build its future. Such effort is rare, but instead of our listening to experts predicting our futures, I recommend we invest time in preparing to emerge into our multiple futures, even to invent our futures.

This Thursday, November 17, Eric will join me on the Solari Report to introduce you to scenario thinking so that you can use it to grasp opportunities and to manage risk in our uncertain world. The US elections will press us to take more responsibility for our futures–rather than our deferring to centralized systems, so I am pleased that Eric agreed to join me at this time.

In Let’s Go to the Movies, please watch Eric’s introductory video The 4 Best Principles.

In Money & Markets this week I will discuss the latest in financial and geopolitical news. I will be speaking to you from Amish country in Pennsylvania, having flown in from Dublin!

Please make sure to e-mail or post your questions for Ask Catherine.

Listen to the full interview on solari.com