Possibilities Planning and the Minimal Viable Assessment: From Portfolio Design to Adaptive Decision Making

Planning under uncertainty can narrow action to a single path too early, limiting flexibility when conditions change. This article introduces possibilities planning as a portfolio-based approach to coordinated action and decision-making under uncertainty. Rather than converging too early on a single course of action, possibilities planning helps teams maintain different possibilities and use a lightweight decision logic to determine when to persist with, pivot from, or scale them in practice. This decision logic is called the Minimal Viable Assessment (MVA). Within this framework, the MVA is a prospective indicator that specifies the minimum evidence needed to judge whether an enacted possibility remains viable, while also remaining within acceptable boundary constraints. Possibilities planning coupled with the MVA is proposed as a practice-oriented conceptual framework for supporting coordinated action under uncertainty. Implications for research and practice are also discussed.