Axiomatic foundation and a structured process for developing firm-specific Intuitive Logics scenarios

•We present an axiomatic foundation for developing corporate scenarios.•Using the axiomatic foundation, we create a structured process to develop scenarios.•We illustrate the scenario development process by creating four scenarios.

This paper presents an axiomatic foundation for developing firm-specific scenarios in the tradition of the Intuitive Logics School (ILS), a structured scenario creation process built on that foundation, and its application to a case. The ILS outlines a high-level scenario-development process, but without a theoretical basis or prescriptions for executing different process steps. The lack of theoretical grounding has led to a proliferation of methods for developing scenarios, without any basis for comparing them. We fill this gap in the literature by articulating a set of axioms characterizing the nature of human knowledge about the business environment and scenarios as depictions of that environment. Using this theoretical foundation, we devise a structured process for developing scenarios. Finally, we demonstrate this process by applying it to develop four scenarios for a firm in the U.S. healthcare sector.