Strategic management is a management function that can influence the elementary direction of a company.
Scenarios are an essential tool in strategic management. Scenarios are used to estimate possible future developments. There is no standard procedure for the development of scenarios and further approaches to scenario analysis. There is disagreement in the literature about the use of the different procedures and types.
This paper tries to find basic contexts for the development of scenarios and their analysis. A typical application field of scenarios is the volatile energy market. After an excursus of important definitions in the context of the topic “energy”, studies on the developments of the energy market are examined.
Organizations like the “International Energy Agency” or the “World Energy Council” give an annual outlook on the developments of the energy market. Those studies contain scenarios, which can be seen as normative, explorative or as projections into the future. In the analysis and critical appraisal of the studies, care was taken to find lead indicators, i.e., characteristics that allow an estimation of future developments. The final correlation of the respective lead indicators of the individual studies is intended to show a path for the development of the energy market that is as plausible as possible. One result of the work is, that disruptive events (e.g., Covid-19 pandemic, Ukraine-Russia conflict) were not considered by a large part of the studies. An ongoing evaluation of the lead indicators is recommended due to the dynamic nature of the energy market. There is a business advantage to implementing these indicators in scenario planning. It should be noted, however, that each lead indicator, further scenarios based on it, includes a certain degree of uncertainty.