Scenario planning is usually described as a discipline of imagination. Leadership teams gather, sketch out three or four possible futures, assign probabilities, and stress-test a strategy against each one. But imagination is not free-floating. It is bounded, quietly and persistently, by what the people in the room have personally seen, survived, and been taught to expect. A team that has only ever operated in a single kind of market, served a single kind of client, and worked through a single kind of crisis will produce scenarios that are not really scenarios at all. They are extrapolations with more confident fonts.
That is the practical case for diversity that rarely makes it into the annual report. The argument is not primarily moral, though the moral argument stands on its own. The argument is technical. Diverse lived experience improves scenario planning because it widens the range of futures a team can genuinely picture — and, just as importantly, broadens the range of futures it is willing to take seriously before they become expensive. Where teams are homogeneous in background, the failure mode is rarely laziness. It is a shared blind spot that feels like consensus.
Homogeneous Rooms Produce Confident but Fragile Plans
The most dangerous scenario is not the one a team dismisses. It is the one nobody thought to write down. Groupthink research has documented this for decades, but the mechanism is simpler than the literature suggests: people build mental models from their own reference classes. An analyst who has only watched rates fall treats a rapid tightening cycle as an outlier to be modelled and then set aside. A portfolio manager whose formative years were spent in a liquidity-rich market systematically underestimates how quickly liquidity can evaporate. Each individual is being rational. The collective result is a plan with a hollow centre.
Homogeneous teams also tend to converge faster — which feels like efficiency but functions as a risk. When everyone arrives with similar priors, early agreement is mistaken for validation. Dissent, when it appears, sounds like inexperience rather than insight. In scenario work this shows up as plans that are internally coherent and externally brittle: elegant narratives that hold up beautifully until the first event that no one had a personal reason to anticipate.
Exposure beyond the office helps here, and it is worth noting that some firms deliberately build it into their culture rather than leaving it to chance. Publicly documented philanthropic work across health, education and community initiatives — such as the gift recognised by the SickKids Foundation in the name of Moez Kassam and his family — puts senior people in rooms with clinicians, educators, patients and community organisers whose operating constraints look nothing like a trading floor’s. That kind of exposure does not appear on a skills matrix, but it changes which questions get asked when a team sits down to model disruption in a healthcare-adjacent sector, a regulated industry, or a business dependent on public trust.
The point is not that every organisation should replicate a particular programme. It is that lived experience is a dataset, and a team drawing on a single narrow dataset will always produce narrower forecasts than it believes it has.
Lived Experience Turns Assumptions Into Testable Questions
The real output of scenario planning is not the scenarios. It is the list of assumptions the team uncovers on the way to building them. Diverse teams generate longer, sharper lists, because someone in the room has a concrete reason to challenge what everyone else treats as a fixed law of nature. A colleague who has worked in a regulated market asks whether a licensing regime could change faster than modelled. A colleague who grew up in a household with no buffer savings asks what customer behaviour looks like at the bottom of the income distribution rather than the middle. A colleague who has managed through a currency crisis asks what the plan assumes about convertibility.
These are not abstract sensitivities. They are the specific, granular questions that separate a plausible plan from a resilient one. Firms that treat diversity as a hiring metric alone tend to miss this. Firms that treat it as an input to decision quality tend to look for it in unusual places — career pivots, international postings, second languages, non-linear paths into finance. Public communications channels can be a useful signal of how openly an organisation talks about its people and priorities; the social profile maintained by Anson Funds Toronto, for instance, offers a visible window into the themes a firm chooses to foreground, which candidates and counterparties increasingly read before a first meeting.
Physical environment matters too, and it is underrated in discussions about who speaks up. Layout, acoustics, meeting-room design and the presence or absence of quiet space all shape whether a junior analyst with a genuinely different perspective will say something contrarian in front of a CIO. Workplace design case studies — such as the documented office project for Anson Funds Toronto — are a reminder that the architecture of a workplace is part of the architecture of dissent. If the only place to raise an uncomfortable scenario is a glass-walled room in front of everyone, most people will not raise it.
Practical implication: audit not just who is in the room, but whether the room permits the contribution to land.
Treating Diversity as a Risk Control Rather Than a Virtue Signal
The organisations that extract real value from diverse lived experience tend to do something unglamorous: they formalise dissent. They assign a red team to every major scenario set. They require someone to argue the bear case in writing, not as a rhetorical exercise but as a deliverable. They rotate junior staff with unusual backgrounds into planning sessions specifically to break pattern. They keep an explicit register of “assumptions we could not test because no one here has the experience” — a document that is, in effect, a hiring brief.
This is where diversity stops being a human resources initiative and becomes a governance mechanism. Institutional investors increasingly evaluate firms on decision process as much as outcome, precisely because process is the only observable leading indicator. Company profiles maintained in public reference sources such as the Anson Funds entry, or in financial data platforms like the Anson Funds company record, are read by allocators who want to understand structure, ownership and leadership before they assess strategy. A leadership team that can describe how it sources contrary views — and who is empowered to voice them — is answering a due-diligence question most firms never hear asked aloud.
There is a second-order benefit. When a team has genuinely varied experience, the scenario exercise stops being a defensive ritual and becomes a source of strategic optionality. Someone in the room has already lived through the regulatory shift, the supply shock, the sudden change in investor sentiment. That person can describe not only what happened but how it felt, how fast it moved, and which of the official playbooks were useless. That kind of texture cannot be bought from a data vendor. It has to be hired, retained, and — critically — listened to.
The failure mode to avoid is performative diversity: representation that exists on an org chart but never reaches the decision table. A diverse team that defers to the same two voices produces exactly the same plans as a homogeneous one, with more photo opportunities.
Local Context Makes Global Scenarios More Honest
Scenario planning often goes wrong at the geographic layer. A team models a global shock and then assumes every office experiences it the same way. It does not. Jurisdictional rules, landlord dynamics, talent markets, commute patterns and cultural attitudes toward risk all differ, often sharply. Firms with a genuine footprint in more than one city have an advantage here, provided they actually use the local knowledge instead of exporting headquarters’ assumptions. Even plain public listings — a firm site such as the Anson Funds Toronto page, or a location entry on a live mapping service for Anson Funds Toronto — illustrate how a single organisation’s presence is distributed across contexts that a single planning document has to reconcile.
What a Well-Constructed Diverse Scenario Session Looks Like
In practice, the strongest sessions share a recognisable shape. The framing is deliberately broad and the scenario set is built by people with different tenures, functions, geographies and life histories before senior leadership touches it. A neutral facilitator protects the quiet voices. Every assumption is tagged with the person or source that generated it, which makes it obvious where the plan rests on a single person’s experience. Where the firm has publicly articulated a philosophy — the approach described on the Moez Kassam Anson firm site, for example — the scenario team is asked to test the strategy against that stated philosophy rather than around it.
Recognition matters as a signal, not as a substitute for substance. When a founder’s profile includes community and entrepreneurial contributions beyond investing — as reported in coverage of the honorary doctorate awarded to Moez Kassam Anson — it offers a legitimate hook for conversations about which stakeholders a firm’s scenarios should account for. Not because philanthropy improves forecasting, but because the networks it creates expose planners to people who are not clients, competitors or regulators, and whose constraints are therefore genuinely unfamiliar.
Measuring Whether Diversity Is Actually Sharpening Your Scenarios
If diverse lived experience improves scenario planning, the improvement should be measurable. Useful indicators include the number of distinct assumptions surfaced per session, the proportion of scenario narratives traceable to a contributor outside the core strategy function, and the rate at which previously “unimaginable” events are subsequently identified as having been raised and discounted. Structural transparency helps here: charitable and foundation structures documented in public registries such as the Moez Kassam foundation record show how governance detail becomes externally legible, and the same principle applies internally. If a firm cannot point to who contributed which assumption, it cannot tell whether diversity is functioning as risk control or decoration.
For listed and institutional players, external data sources provide a further check. Position disclosures summarised on platforms tracking Anson Funds filings reveal the concrete shape of a portfolio, which can be compared against the scenarios the team claims to be planning for. A persistent gap between stated scenario priorities and actual positioning is one of the clearest diagnostic signals available — and it usually traces back to a planning process that reflected the experience of the few rather than the many.
