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Decision-making for livestock management on Southwest national forests is challenging because those decisions must involve both the private rancher (permittee) and the Forest Service. When making decisions to increase preparation for drought on livestock allotments, those two parties should work together to co-develop management strategies that can both reduce a livestock operation's vulnerability to drought impacts and be approved by the Forest Service through the NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) process. To facilitate co-development and conversations about drought preparation, we used a hypothetical, but realistic ranch and a scenario-planning exercise inspired by the Protection Motivation Theory at a one-day workshop that involved ranchers, District Rangers, and rangeland specialist staff from the Tonto National Forest, Arizona. I developed an interactive Microsoft Excel�-based Drought Scenario Planning Tool to facilitate the scenario planning exercise. Results of the exercise indicate that the scenario planning exercise successfully helped the participants to co-learn about drought impacts and frequency (via the Standardized Precipitation Index), co-develop strategic preparatory coping practices, and develop more realistic expectations of the Forest Service approval process for practices; the Tool was a critical to that success. In addition, the use of co-development resulted in high levels of constructive interactions and communication between participants. There is some evidence that the workshop participants have begun to feel motivated to prepare for drought on actual livestock grazing allotments. However, a major challenge to collaborative drought preparation is the high turnover in Forest Service employees and a frustration with inconsistency in discretionary decision-making by Forest Service District Rangers; these challenges might be overcome by adopting standards for drought planning and preparation into Forest Service policy. A follow-up study might help the participants begin developing drought plans for actual allotments.