How We Used ‘Critical Uncertainties’ To Explore The Edges Of Our Strategy

Last week, during our 2-day strategic retreat, Christiaan Verwijs and I used a mix of Liberating Structures to help us reflect, diagnose, and explore improvements. One of them was Critical Uncertainties.

This structure helps you develop strategies for a range of plausible, unpredictable futures. It’s a quick way to test how resilient your current plans are — and to build capacity for adapting to whatever might come next.

Here’s how we used it. Hopefully, it gives you a nudge to try it yourself.

👉 Step 1: Clarify your purpose

This becomes the center of the activity, a steady, specific, and ambitious goal, regardless of what the future holds. For us, the purpose was clear: to establish a solid financial buffer within three years.

👉 Step 2: Identify two critical uncertainties — these will form your axes

Each axis should represent a spectrum between two extremes.
Here’s what we landed on:
🔹 X-axis: High morale ←→ Low morale
🔹 Y-axis: Lots of money ←→ Bankrupt

These gave us four possible future scenarios to explore.

👉 Step 3: Explore each scenario

In small groups, we imagined what each future might look like.
What would people say or do? What behaviors would stand out?
We called these “markers” — clues you’d notice if you suddenly landed in that future. They help you recognize which scenario you’re heading toward.

👉 Step 4: Name each scenario

Ask each group to give every quadrant a name that captures its essence — something vivid, like a movie title, book, or quote. Think “The Road”, “Shoot from the Hip”, or “Love Boat.”

Our worst-case? We called it “Fiasco.” 🙈

👉 Step 5: Develop strategies for each future

Once the scenarios were clear, we asked: What would help us navigate this world? We brainstormed practices, experiments, and strategies that could be useful, whether things go great, fall apart, or land somewhere in between.

👉 Step 6: Spot the patterns

We reviewed the strategies and asked:
🔹 Which ones are robust and useful in multiple scenarios?
🔹 Which ones are hedging — only needed if a specific future unfolds, but critical in that case?

This helped us identify where to focus now and what to keep in reserve.

👉 Step 7: Reflect and act

We wrapped up by asking: Which scenario do we think we’re in right now?
From there, everyone defined a 15% Solution — a small, concrete step they could take right away to move a helpful strategy forward.

Full transparency: we found ourselves in the bottom-left quadrant — high morale 🥳, but still building up our financial buffer. 💰

Luckily, the exercise sparked plenty of ideas we can start acting on right away. It gave us clarity, energy, and a sense of direction — even in uncertainty.

Give it a try, and if you do, share your experience! 
We’d love to learn from you too.