About GBN

GBN helps organizations adapt and grow in an increasingly uncertain and volatile world. Using our leading-edge tools and expertise—scenario planning, experiential learning, networks of experts and visionaries—we enable our clients to address their most critical challenges and gain the insight, confidence, and capabilities they need to shape the future.

All strategic decisions are bets about the future, yet the future is increasingly uncertain. Technology is compressing time and space and accelerating the pace of change. Global politics, economics, and social dynamics are more connected and complex. New network structures are transforming organizational and business models. In confronting so much uncertainty, organizations often find themselves paralyzed, or worse, default to oversimplification and denial about significant changes in their industries. As a result they become vulnerable to surprises—contextual shocks, new competitors, disruptive innovations, shifts in market structures and demand—and miss real growth opportunities.

At GBN, we advocate an alternative response: helping clients to systematically re-perceive and embrace uncertainty in order to achieve sustainable success. Since 1987, GBN has been internationally acclaimed for its leadership role in the evolution and application of scenario planning, a process that combines research, creativity, and ruthless curiosity to help organizations imagine, shape, and prepare for alternative futures. We integrate this expertise with experiential learning, insights from a diverse network of thought leaders, and other strategic tools to help clients understand both the threats and the opportunities that lie ahead of them—and to convert that understanding into adaptive advantage.

A member of the Monitor Group, GBN works with Fortune 500 companies from virtually every industry and continent, as well as with many national governments, nonprofits, and foundations. Our engagements include single- and multi-client consulting projects, experiential learning events, and training programs focused on five critical outcomes:

Developing long-range plans and strategies

Move beyond traditional, linear forecasting models to explore a diverse set of plausible future business environments. Understand the structural issues and dynamics that will affect your organization—including those outside your control—and use these fresh insights to minimize threats, find new opportunities, avoid strategic surprises, and adapt to accelerating change.  

Decision-making amidst uncertainty

Make explicit and systematically challenge your assumptions about external trends and forces and their implications for critical decisions. Stress-test your options against alternative scenarios in order to assess risks, develop contingencies, and act with greater confidence.  

Catalyzing innovation

Think differently and creatively about future product and service offerings by better anticipating evolving customer needs and cutting-edge technologies and processes. Develop the capacity to continuously learn. Create a culture that encourages experiments, mistakes, rapid prototyping, and disruptive breakthroughs.

Organizational and leadership development

Explore and prioritize the issues and challenges that your organization and future leaders must be able to address. Develop the leadership skills required to be flexible and adaptive in the face of uncertainty. Build the internal capacity and structures to support ongoing executive and organizational development.

Alignment and visioning

Design and facilitate strategic conversations between key stakeholders that shift the focus from identifying constraints to imagining and pursuing shared opportunities. Facilitate dialogues that reveal and connect divergent perspectives into a more cohesive vision and commitment to action.

Drawing upon a unique combination of tools and tradecraft, GBN partners with clients to achieve these outcomes and shape the future.

In doing so, we continue to build on almost 20 years of unique history and vision, our network of visionary thinkers, and deep learning and collaborative relationships with many of the world's leading companies, including the 200-plus organizations that participated as GBN WorldView members (1988-2006).