StratEko and the Context of Strategic Planning
Trend Definitions
Strateko defines trends as social, economic, cultural, political and natural factors that may impact projects, programs and policies. A single trend may directly affect an initiative or it may interact complexly with other trends to produce unusual outcomes.
AI: Automation and decision systems in communication, commerce, politics, defense, health, and education; labor displacement effects.
Climate Risk: Impact on agriculture, migration, biodiversity, water resource limitation, environmental and sea level impact, flooding, resource access; creation of climate winners and losers.
Trade & Tariffs: Rise of protectionist policies, trade disputes, and non-tariff barriers.
International
Population & Migration: Demographic expansion (e.g. Africa, South Asia) vs. aging/declining populations (e.g. Europe, East Asia), resulting in voluntary and forced migrations, boundary issues and tensions over cultural integration.
Governance: Weakening of democratic norms, rise of centralized executive power and suppression of dissent.
Media Reliability: Increased reliance on unverified sources, "fake news," erosion of trust in institutions, and short attention cycles.
Financial Stability: Increasing market volatility and liquidity crises.
Pandemics & Public Health: Persistent threat of global disease; strain on publichealth, health systems and trade.
Energy Volatility: How unstable and unpredictable the energy system is across fossil fuels, renewables, storage, grids, and policy; higher values indicate supply shocks, price swings, and transition friction.
US Influence: Technological leadership, political alignment, military presence, and soft power influence.
EU Influence: Economic, political and soft power projection, emphasizing global partnerships.
China Influence: Economic, military, and diplomatic power projection via trade, technology, and global partnership
StratEko in the Context of Strategic Planning: Intellectual Lineage
Scenario thinking has always emerged at moments when complexity outpaced the tools available to decision-makers. Whether the complexity came from geopolitics, resource constraints, technological shifts, or environmental instability, every generation wrestled with the same essential problem: how do we make sense of a future that cannot be predicted but must be prepared for? StratEko is a modern answer to that question—an AI-powered descendant of traditions that stretch from Cold War futurism to corporate strategy, environmental stewardship, and contemporary foresight practice.
To understand where StratEko fits, it helps to trace the arc of scenario thinking itself: its origins, its transformations, and its current limits, which an AI-enabled system is now able to transcend.
Roots: RAND, Nuclear Strategy, and the Invention of Scenario Logic
Scenario planning took recognizable shape during the early Cold War, when organizations like RAND began developing “alternative futures” to understand nuclear escalation, adversary behavior, and geopolitical shock. Herman Kahn—one of the foundation’s most controversial but influential thinkers—famously used scenario narratives to probe unthinkable possibilities. His work was less about predicting the future and more about expanding what leaders were willing to imagine.
Kahn’s genius was to understand that traditional forecasting failed when dealing with human behavior, technology surprises, and existential stakes. Instead of extrapolating, he constructed stories of causality: sequences of events, pressures, signals, and decision points. This approach laid the groundwork for what modern strategists now call structured uncertainty.
Today, StratEko’s hybrid mode—combining analytic logic with narrative detail—echoes this legacy. It recognizes that insight does not come from numerical models alone but from richly imagined causal chains situated in real geographies, social systems, and political environments.
Corporate Turn: Shell, Pierre Wack, and the Institutionalization of Foresight
Scenario thinking made its decisive leap from nuclear strategy to corporate practice in the early 1970s, when Royal Dutch Shell became the first major company to adopt it as a core planning method.
Led by Pierre Wack and later by Arie de Geus, Shell’s Scenario Group developed what remains the most influential model:
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identify driving forces
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test assumptions
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craft divergent futures
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identify “predetermined elements”
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expose managerial blind spots
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enable strategic adaptability
The breakthrough came when Shell anticipated the 1973 oil crisis—not because they predicted the date or the OPEC meeting, but because their scenarios made the previously unthinkable plausible. Shell outperformed its rivals for decades because scenario planning reshaped how its executives interpreted signals.
StratEko directly inherits this tradition. Its sliders—AI, Climate Risk, Trade and Tariffs, Population and Migration, Financial Stability, Public Health, Media Reliability, Authoritarianism, and geopolitical influence—mirror the Shell schema of “driving forces” and “critical uncertainties.” But instead of requiring months of workshops or consultant teams, StratEko compresses this interpretive machinery into a single, flexible interface powered by contemporary AI.
Where Wack needed weeks of discussion and synthesis, StratEko can simulate hundreds of variations, each grounded in global megatrends and local context.
Stewart Brand, the Long Now, and Ecological/Technological Futures
If Shell brought scenarios into the corporate world, Stewart Brand broadened them into cultural and planetary contexts. Through the Whole Earth Catalog, the Global Business Network (which he co-founded with Peter Schwartz), and the Long Now Foundation, Brand reframed scenario thinking around:
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environmental limits
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long-term stewardship
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technological acceleration
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distributed networks
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community resilience
GBN in particular was pivotal in the 1990s and 2000s, spreading scenario practice across Silicon Valley, NGOs, and government agencies. Their work showed that uncertainty was not merely a business issue—it was fundamental to ecological, technological, and civilizational planning.
StratEko can be seen as an heir to the Brand/GBN tradition: a tool that recognizes global trends as interconnected systems, not separate silos. AI, climate pressures, migration flows, institutional trust, health shocks, and geopolitics are not discrete sliders—they interact dynamically, shaping futures in ways that require integrated thinking.
StratEko effectively digitizes the GBN workshop model: instead of 20 experts in a room synthesizing insights, you have a single tool able to internalize cross-domain relationships and produce structured future narratives on demand.
StratEko's Information Foundations
StratEko uses the GPTmodel’s broad exposure to global economic, demographic, environmental, and geopolitical information to support plausible scenario reasoning. This includes patterns reflected in widely available international publications (e.g., UN, World Bank, IMF, IEA, IPCC). StratEko does not quote, cite, or access live proprietary data. Scenarios are interpretive outputs, not summaries of any specific document.
Privacy Policy
StratEko is a no-login, no-storage scenario tool. We do not save or sell your data.
StratEko does not create user accounts or store your scenario inputs. Anything you type or upload is used only to generate a scenario and is not saved once you leave the page. We do not use your content for AI training, advertising, or profiling.
Because the site is hosted on Wix, Wix automatically collects basic technical data (such as IP address, device type, and pages visited) for security, performance, and site functionality. These analytics are aggregated and do not identify you personally. Essential Wix cookies may be used for site operation.
StratEko uses third-party services such as OpenAI (for scenario generation) and Google Maps/Mapbox (for mapping). These services receive only the information needed to perform their functions and do not receive personal identifiers from us.
Eric Carlson - Founder, StratEko
Eric Carlson is an environmental strategist, technology innovator, climate investor, and international consultant with decades of experience advising organizations like the World Bank, UNEP, and the U.S. Department of Energy. As the founder of StratEko, Eric brings together a lifelong commitment to systems thinking, sustainability, and foresight. Drawing on his background in environmental planning, international development, and AI powered analysis, Eric created StratEko to help leaders navigate complex geopolitical, economic, and environmental futures. His vision is to make structured scenario planning accessible, insightful, and actionable - combining human context with the power of AI. His academic background includes advanced degrees from the University of Washington and Yale University.