8

The Scenario-planning QUEST:

introducing the four stages

Scenario planning, or the practice of building scenarios, is part of a strategic planning and development process. It involves learning to see the future in different ways, and using these futures as a context for doing different things today — in essence, it involves ‘learning from the future’. And it changes the way in which each of us sees the world.

As we mentioned in Part I, scenario planning is not simply about predicting the future. It is a process that, through imagination and analysis, broadens the current approaches to strategy by looking at the complex future environments with which the organisation might have to engage and seek to flourish. It moves the strategic conversations away from the immediate future, to a more distant one, allowing participants to step back from examining individual influences and events, and concentrate instead on the bigger picture. Most importantly, it is a method that has strong theoretical and philosophical foundations. A key benefit for participants is being exposed to these theories and principles, and learning how to employ them critically.

Many consider scenarios to be more practical and more useful than most other processes of planning for the future, especially when a diverse group of people come together. But there are no shortcuts: it is a demanding and rigorous process that has sound intellectual foundations, with roots in cognitive science, in systems theory, and perhaps most importantly, in experiential learning.

The scenario-planning process consists of four major learning stages — questions, environments, scenarios, and transformations — which are neatly captured in the acronym QUEST. These stages takes us through four cognitive activities: divergence (observation), assimilation (making sense of what we’ve observed), convergence (planning), and accommodation (acting).

Stage One: developing framing questions

‘Questions are never indiscreet. Answers sometimes are.’ OSCAR WILDE

We begin by focusing on our framing questions. Every inquiry needs a purpose; without one, it will flounder. Determining the purpose is of course a critical component of the scenario-planning process — it will reflect the scope of our search for knowledge, and for understanding, of the potential futures we might want to embrace. A puzzled student once asked the painter Frank Freeman how best to appreciate an abstract artwork. The reply was precise: ‘First you must ask this question: what is this a painting of?’ And so it is with scenarios; it is not enough to merely ask the question, ‘What will the future be like?’ That is too broad and open-ended. Imagine instead that you met someone who had travelled back in time from the future to the present day. If you were allowed to ask this person one question, what would it be? What about if this person suddenly arrived at your office while you were engaged in a difficult decision regarding long-term capital expenditure — what would you ask then?

Simply asking what the future will look like is not going to work. We need to ask specific questions, and the more narrowly we can orientate our interest, the clearer and more illuminating the answer. Getting the question right drives the scenario-thinking process.

But what are the problems that we need to know more about? Do they relate to our business, or to the country in which we live; to family life, or to the impact of global technology? In this stage, we will explain how we go about creating framing questions, and how far into the future we need to look in different situations. We will also explore the importance of listening carefully to people inside an organisation and of creating an issues report based on the problems that they see confronting them. This is how we end up with framing questions that really address the challenges that lie ahead.

Who Should We Listen To and What Should We Ask Them?

Conversation is the critical activity if we are to use foresight to tackle the uncertainties of the future. The most important voices to listen to as we start creating our framing questions will come from within the organisation undertaking the project, not from any consultant brought in from the outside — although it is often true that it takes someone from the outside to unleash such thinking. After all, it’s the staff within an organisation who engage every day with the complexities of research and development, competition, market share, community engagement, career advancement, stakeholder management, takeovers, mergers, ethics, profitability, margins, brand relevance, and so on.

Listening to others is critical in order to refine the framing questions, too. As our colleague Richard Bawden discovered in a scenario-planning project, his client thought that their concern was how to be the biggest company in their field. But as the conversations deepened, they discovered this wasn’t so at all; they wanted to be the most profitable. Size didn’t matter, after all.

We have developed a simple questionnaire based on work done by the scenario-planning pioneer Kees van der Heijden and his colleagues at the Global Business Network and Royal Dutch Shell (and some other companies). It attempts to map out the concerns of the client organisation, whether this is a government, a business, a pressure group, a community, or even a nation. A typical questionnaire for initiating the conversation with stakeholders in any scenario project might look like this.

Questionnaire

1. The Big Picture

What things are happening now that have the potential to make a major difference over the timeframe of our project?

2. Wildcards

Have there been any events or developments over the course of your career that have come as a complete surprise to you?

3. Asking the Oracle

If the oracle at Delphi were alive today, what questions would you ask about the world at the future date for which we are building our scenarios?

4. Nightmares

What are the things about the future that keep you awake at night, and why?

5. Who’s Sleeping in My Bed?

Innovative strategies sometimes call for strange bedfellows. What are the major unexpected alliances, partnerships, and conversations that could advance the future?

6. Missing Links

Most fields require a solid infrastructure of information technology, communication channels, incentives, revenue models, and other underlying support. Are there key pieces of infrastructure that seem to be missing in your organisation or industry?

7. But for the Grace of God …

What major constraints, internal or external, are you experiencing? How do these limit what you can achieve?

8. It’s Now or Never

What critical decisions have to be made soon? What forks in the road are coming up?

9. I Did It My Way

What core values would you like to see driving development into the future?

10. RIP

If you were looking back on your time, what lasting contribution would you hope to have made?

It is worth noting that these questions are always couched in the present tense. This is not accidental. The most important feature of foresight work is imagining that we are living in the future so that we can feel what it is like and experience the quality of life. As soon as we talk about the worlds as if they are not yet here, the experiential nature of the exercise is diluted, and the worlds just seem to be arbitrary predictions.

Compiling an Issues Report

This questionnaire activity is internal, conducted with the key staff in the organisation. We usually present it in the form of an interview, which can be done face-to-face or online. If conducted in person, these interviews are always one-to-one. We then usually gather the responses to the questionnaire in a dense summary document we call an issues report. We use this as a guide for asking the right questions when engaging with the future.

When the results are written up in a report, all responses are presented anonymously. Interviewees are aware of this when they answer the questionnaire. This is very important, to provide them with confidence to speak their minds without fear of repercussion. For example, if the CEO is a bullying, aggressive male and is impairing the function of the organisation, we need to elicit such information as part of the process.

In the report itself, we usually synthesise the responses by question and present the aggregated information as a narrative (rather than as an interminable list of bullet points). The ideas that come from this activity provide a strong anchor for scenario building and are used to create the framing question for the project. The issues report is also used during the environmental scanning activity in stage two, and in the workshops to build the scenarios in stage three.

Types of Framing Questions

The type of framing question depends, of course, on the purpose of the project. The framing question can be very specific, such as what sort of research and development prospects there are in information technology, whether the business should invest in a new factory, or whether it is justifiable to diversify from the core business to embrace new opportunities. It can also be broader, such as what sort of global prospects might be offered by genetically modified organisms or nanotechnology, what sort of new funding avenues could be available for not-for-profit organisations, or what the likely business climate for a nation or a regional economic community will look like in the future. It can be a bundle of these sorts of questions, too.

Here are some examples of questions that we have employed in our work over the past decade or so. Some of the dates are no longer especially futuristic, but that’s because some of the questions were asked many years ago.

Here are some examples of questions that we might employ in the future.

Stage Two: examining the environmental influences

‘The environment is everything that isn’t me.’ ALBERT EINSTEIN

Foresight is about imagining what the future might be like in a range of different ways. We make these predictions, explicitly and implicitly, every day. Imagine, for example, that you are bored with your job and feel the need to move. You outline for yourself the opportunities that seem realistic, based on your experience and desires. You attend some interviews and eventually get offered a position at another company, which you need to decide if you will take. Everything about what you are doing is explicit, as you weigh up this with that.

But imagine another scenario: you are happy with what you are doing when your boss offers you the chance to transfer to another department. You turn it down without a moment’s thought, having implicitly weighed up the pros and cons of the move. Both decision-paths involve foresight, but one is more ‘foresightful’ than the other.

We are now going to explore the environment around us by asking ourselves about the major influences that are shaping the world, and how foresight can help us to determine the direction in which they are moving.

Influences

Agents of change, or influences, are those things that shape the environment around us. A word about describing these agents for change as ‘influences’: in literature on foresight, the favoured description is ‘drivers of change’ or ‘driving forces’. But we think this gives the wrong message: it anthropomorphises influences, as if they had a will and a direction in which they want to travel — a life of their own. The reality is that they are completely neutral as to their role in shaping the future. In the same way that cancer cells are not inherently evil or that nature couldn’t care a toss about whether it is sustainable, these influences have no hidden agenda that turns us from being heroes to victims. They just ‘are’ and, importantly, they are dependent on the way we interpret the world and edit what’s going on for relevance and meaning.

In this stage, we map out the influences so that we will be able create a table of those that seem to be the most important on the future stage, and their key characteristics. We can work out how they relate to the framing questions, how they might play out, and which appear to be critically uncertain. And at that point, we will be just about ready to build our scenarios.

Let us now undertake the environmental scan of the world around us, to see what’s coming up that is relevant to our future.

Interviews, Presentations, and Literature Reviews

In this stage of the scenario-planning process, we conduct qualitative research in an attempt to unearth what people are saying and thinking.

We do this in several ways. For example, we often make audio or video recordings of peer interviews or of discussions with ‘remarkable people’, and distribute them to the foresight team before or during a group scenario-planning workshop. We’ve also brought people into a workshop to freewheel around the key questions. (Our ‘people net’ is wide and includes stakeholders, academics, government regulators, advisers, and sometimes even friends.) Asking staff to present work-in-progress at workshops and similarly interactive gatherings also works well because it can trigger new ideas and reveal the need for further research, which can have the potential to transform the way we see the world and lead us to different futures. The key point is that this stage is truly divergent, so we are not simply looking for people to tell us the solutions to problems.

Another valuable step can be using the internet and research libraries to put together a literature review. This will give an overview of the field of inquiry: who has been saying what, who the thought leaders on the topic are, what their prevailing theories and hypotheses are, and what questions they have been asking.

We often use all of these research findings to create a brief ‘thought-starters report’, which is made available to the group involved in the scenario-planning process. Typically, these reports are four to eight A4 pages long, and are designed to open peoples’ minds to the changes that are occurring, or may soon occur, in the external environment. They can be text-based, visual representations, or a mixture of both, and can feature any commissioned research as well as links to previously published works on relevant topics.

There is an interesting link between the internally generated issues report and the externally derived thought-starters report. The issues report is based on the worldviews of the participants from within the organisation, worldviews that have a tendency to converge because of the power of the organisational culture, a shared vision of its future, and the work already undertaken by the participants to achieve that vision. The thought-starter material is the reverse. It focuses on the worldviews of people outside of the organisation, who have no skin in the scenario-building game. The collision between these two reports creates the kind of tension out of which creativity grows, and can facilitate for participants the magic moment of suddenly seeing things differently.

Interviews with ‘Remarkable People’

As we mentioned, it can be very useful to bring together creative people and those from government and business, to explore the new external realities that may have surprising consequences for the business or organisation under review. Let us tell you why.

These ‘remarkable people’, to borrow the term adopted by Pierre Wack at Shell, taken from the work of George Gurdjieff, are those who stand out from the crowd due to their mental resourcefulness. They are not necessarily celebrities, but they can offer special insights into our framing questions. They may be science-fiction writers, painters, poets, scientists, musicians, historians, economists, or philosophers; they could be experts in almost any field, but they are also people who have distinctive worldviews. At one of our meetings, for example, an artist and a computer programmer got very excited about the link between the topology of Aboriginal painting and circuit diagrams, thus bringing together two radically different skills to focus on the future of the organisation on hand. You never know in advance when and where unusual insights like these might occur. After all, as Jorge Luis Borges wrote, ‘a wood is a garden of forking paths’.

We often conduct interviews in a workshop setting or during a panel discussion. Interview questions will depend on the level of expertise that the ‘remarkable person’ has on the topic. Obviously, the more qualified in the area he or she is, the more specific we can be in our queries. When interviewing, we may ask questions like these:

These directed questions often give rise to fascinating insights for those in the organisation, who have the opportunity to see their situation in a new light.

Brainstorming using (I)NSPECT

Having undertaken the preparatory research and generated a thought-starters report, we then ask the scenario team to build upon all this thinking they have heard with their own ideas. To facilitate this, we have developed a process, with Richard Bawden, that we call the (I)NSPECT method. We ask participants to cluster their brainstorming under seven headings.

[I]: interpretation

N: the natural environment

S: society

P: politics

E: economics

C: culture

T: technology

The ‘I’ is in brackets as we do not list data under it. It stands for the idea of interpretation, or the role of worldviews, which together shape everything we see and record.

This activity, which works well in a workshop environment, is the foundation of building scenarios. A similar process that is sometimes used in scenario planning is STEEP (examining the topics of society, technology, economics, environment, and politics) and we have also come across the use of STEEPEN (examining the topics of society, technology, economics, environment, politics, energy, and nature). Whichever variation you use, the results will be similar.

The influences we are researching are mental constructs, which are totally dependent on the ‘I’. We defy anyone to point out to us, as you might a mountain or a bird or a river, things like health, welfare, happiness, or mobility. The influences are also not simple, but complex and interrelated — and abstract.

In a recent and interesting piece of work, Vodafone sponsored the creation of a collaborative think piece about the future, in which they reported on four ‘certainties’ that would govern the future to 2020. They were: the imbalance in population growth, key-resource constraints, accelerating Asian wealth creation, and universal data access. But each of these items was an abstraction, dependent on an arsenal of assumptions and a cacophony of causes, which together rendered the idea of certainty wrong at best, and irrelevant at worst. For example, the imbalance in population growth leaves people in certain regions prey to health pandemics, the effects of climate change, problems with food supplies, and geopolitical tension. Key resource constraints are circumscribed by energy technology, transport economics, global climates, and geopolitics. Accelerating Asian wealth creation is dependent on cyber security, the future of the US dollar, regional political stability, and the capacity of India and China to provide its burgeoning middle class with political power. Universal data access is dependent on net neutrality, cyber crime, upward social mobility, and global economic wealth, among other things. And all four ‘certainties’ are defined by methodologies relating to measurement systems and the integrity of the findings.

In short, nothing is inevitable. We may anticipate that some influences are more volatile and unpredictable (for example, climate change) than others (say, demographics). But because of the inherent complexity of the systems that create the environment, and the worldviews that ascribe relevance to this construct while ignoring other possibilities, all influences, taken on their own, are unpredictable as to how they will interact with any others. The idea that some influences may be more predictable than others is potentially misleading.

When we work with (I)NSPECT, we often, as a warming-up exercise, ask the foresight team to identify the influences that have created the world as it is today. How do we describe the present? It is helpful to go back at least the same number of years as the foresight team will be directed to move forwards — so, for example, on a scenario-planning project oriented towards what the world will be like in 2052, we might ask people to identify the influences from 1972 to 2012 that have made the world as it is today. We find that this exercise frees up people’s ability to lock horns with the future.

To record the ideas that come up through the (I)NSPECT process, we use Post-it notes, butcher’s paper, and whiteboards, but the data can also be captured electronically. Whatever you use, it is important that all materials are retained, and recorded in the form of a report or summary. These reports do not seek closure; their purpose is to record what happened as it happened. They are designed to give the scenario-building team a grasp of what is going on externally and how the influences they have identified may impact upon the future.

Stage three: building scenario worlds

‘… one of my strengths is my storytelling.’ QUENTIN TARANTINO

By the end of the environmental-mapping process, we will have created a rich and diverse catalogue of influences. We usually record at least 100 influences, but in some cases we have identified and recorded over 500. As publishers know, you cannot edit material to make more copy; you can only edit down. So more is … more!

Now we will outline how we can go about evaluating this bundle of influences that are changing the world in which we live. We will also try to provide a clearer understanding of the different types of influences: the trends, critical uncertainties, and the wildcards, which all shape the future in a series of directions.

Wildcards, Critical Uncertainties, and Trends

The aim of our conversations about the future is to open up and broaden our thinking, to help us think ‘outside the square’ and to identify those influences that have a profound role in shaping the future. But not all influences are the same, and some are easier to locate than others. They can be divided into three groups by asking a simple question: how unpredictable is this influence?

The extremely unpredictable influences are the wildcards — events or phenomena that would emerge as discontinuities, and whose determinants are very difficult to identify. Usually these wildcards are one-off events. Examples include pandemics, tsunamis, world wars, dramatic scientific discoveries, and religious subversions.

Wildcards can be distinguished from critical uncertainties: influences that are highly unpredictable, but whose determinants are more open to enquiry. They are the stuff that scenarios are made from because they present themselves in different states depending on the confluence of factors. Take economic growth, for example: we know that it is a critical factor, but we also know it is very difficult to predict. We can imagine futures in which economic growth is steady-as-she-goes; as volatile as a cat on a hot tin-roof; or in deep, prolonged recession. Then again, we may get a repeat of the long boom (1992–2006), where every day seems to be a continuation of the one before.

The more predictable influences are the trends. Trends, by their nature, are not futuristic at all, as they are retrospective in character — we trace their significance back in time to a point when they emerged. Some 60 or so years ago a feisty literary critic from Cambridge University, F.R. Leavis, wrote an appraisal of the English novel called The Great Tradition. He discussed how the traditions in novel writing were never prospective. Jane Austen, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and James Joyce did not really deliberately start anything, yet as critics we like to ascribe to their ground-breaking writing the shock of the new, as if they created the fashion for realism and modernism that followed. But the reality is that the tradition we identify when we do this is retrospective. We trace back from later times to the point of difference or divergence and assign a somewhat misleading sense of purpose to these beginnings. And so it is with all trends: we trace significant events back to a pivotal moment and then posthumously declare it a trend. The Beatles did not create the future that followed, but we can trace relevant social history since back to their first steps in Germany and Liverpool.

Trends are therefore the easiest influences to uncover because they are embedded in and point to the past. They can be observed easily, and we like to think that they will play out in the future in a reasonably predictable way. However, by now the idea of absolute predictability should be well and truly consigned to the forecaster’s rubbish bin. Whether you are a chartist following stock market activities or a climatologist grappling with climate change, or even a demographer counting the number of new babies, none of the data you assemble to analyse what’s been happening can be used as cast-iron, predictable indicators of the future. As we like to say, the future is not at the end of a trend line; trends bend.

One element that affects all of these influences is the uneven pace of change. Although the last two decades have borne witness to a mind-blowing acceleration in the pace of change in some areas (for example, in information and communications technologies), in others the pace of change is highly volatile (for example, global free trade, the rise and fall of Hollywood, the use of bicycles, or the number of beer brands). It can even seem non-existent: democratic political institutions like the US presidency seem stuck in an antedeluvian past (although by saying this we will, naturally, inevitably invite some kind of rapid shift). Such complexities bedevil futurists of all colours. In every field of enquiry, we struggle to get right our judgements about the importance and uncertainty of the variables we are considering, including the frailty of the human condition and the bias that we bring to analysing influences in the first place, which forever dogs us in our pursuit of strategic nirvana.

Generally, the pace of change has four possible phases. At one end of the continuum, there is no change. We then move through incremental change to a state of disruptive change to, at the other extreme, a state of cataclysmic change. These four phases often line up with four states: business as usual, trends, critical uncertainties, and wildcards. Of course, not all influences are so amenable as to fit into this neat framework, but many of them do.

Focusing on Critical Uncertainties

As looking for potential wildcards would be close to pointless, given their unpredictable nature, and evaluating trends would be similarly silly, due to the fact that they may not continue into the future, foresight planning concentrates on analysing critical uncertainties. So, having categorised our influences, we can now narrow our focus to critical uncertainties.

Critical uncertainties are indeterminate for two reasons. The first is because we cannot easily establish a reliable behavioural outcome from them. Current critical uncertainties that fall into this category include climate change, exchange rates, attention spans, birth rates, social networking, cyber security, generational change, geopolitics, and food provision. The second is that no influence exists in isolation, and it is their systemic commingling with other influences that creates outcomes. Almost all sorts of technological change fall into this category: experience has told us that the invention of new technology itself is never a sufficient condition for change. We can see futures in which the iPad and Kindle co-exist, and others where either or both are assigned to the technology scrap-heap. But these possibilities are dependent on non-technological influences, such as timing and fashion, pricing and substitution, utility and generational change. Another way of expressing this is to say that technology itself can sometimes be neutral, but what it always does is accelerate and amplify existing feelings, needs, or trends.

In fact, critical uncertainties are usually ‘neutral’ at first — that is, they do not have a particular state that we can ascribe to them. So ‘economic growth’, ‘climate change’, ‘mobile communications’, and ‘biotechnology’ are influences, but at this stage in our process we have not yet thought about how they may play out, and whether they will have a positive or negative effect on the world in the future. Yet when we set about building scenarios, we give these chosen influences a value, placing them on a continuum. So they become ‘poor economic growth’, ‘highly volatile climate change’, ‘universal mobile communications’, ‘radical biotechnology’, and so on.

Narrowing the Influences

Our long list of influences has now been reduced to a clutch of influences — the critical uncertainties. Our first task is to go back to the framing question(s). We may wish to amend it or them as a result of our research, and it is crucial that any changes are recorded now.

The influences have been grouped or clustered according to the (I)NSPECT categories. We can now go through them to ditch any that do not seem relevant to the framing questions. Bear in mind that relevance is not based on proximity; an influence will often appear to be distantly related to the framing questions, but can in fact be intimately linked to it.

A tip to reduce the number of influences is to flick factors that are not measurable: that is, they cannot be placed on a continuum, as outlined above. If an influence has only one state, it will not change the future in a particular way. For example, if we were building scenarios for the future of happiness, oxygen is not a relevant influence — even though of course it is incredibly important, as without it there is no life. But there is no continuum for happiness with lots of oxygen at one end and no oxygen at the other. Yet if we substitute ‘money’ for ‘oxygen’, well, that is a different matter. Clearly, money is an influence with measurable values.

Armed with our revised list of influences, we now need to review them systematically. Are the factors we have brought to this stage events or patterns, and thus consequences? For example, in a project looking at the future of Africa, a workshop created a series of influences, including governance (autocratic versus democratic) and orientation (internal versus external). However, the two are linked: if democracy were to spread, surely the orientation would become more external? In short, you could use one, but not both. We can work through the remaining influences, merging and purging them to get a final list. Influences can be merged when they seem to have related effects, and they can be combined and better expressed in new wording, as in the example about Africa; influences can be purged when they are effectively duplicates.

Another question to ask is whether the influences will really have a deep structural role in shaping the future. One way to test for this is to ask what lies behind them. Is the birth rate, for example, a function of economic performance, community health, or job prospects? What’s the real influence here? Similarly, when looking at Africa, the management or governance of natural resources might be a function of the type of government that exists (autocratic versus democratic again), but is there a deeper driver than even this?

This stage is all about digging deeper to make sure that we have enough diversity, richness, and depth in our thinking. The means are not as important as the outcomes; we open our minds and ask, ‘Why?’, ‘Why?’, ‘Why?’ to create the mental maps we need to build the scenarios. As we do this, we begin to see how the influences generate interrelated themes. For example, we may become aware that curiosity about new technology has a big impact on a business’s performance in mobile communications, and that the ability to harness consumer attention is inextricably linked to device design — which in turn relies on the psychology of perception. This is the idea so exploited by Apple that their brand has become synonymous with the generic naming of the devices: just as all paperbacks used to be Penguins and all vacuum cleaners were Hoovers, so all MP3 players are iPods and all tablets iPads. We can now build a systemic view as to how these deep-seated influences (curiosity and psychology of perception) are reflected in the architecture and design of mobile and handheld devices, and how this can drive sales.

When we have our final list of influences, we are ready to begin the exciting process of building scenarios.

Creating Scenarios

There are, broadly, two ways to create scenarios. The deductive approach involves taking the clutch of influences and playing with them by selecting, say, five or six. Each is given a state: high this, low that, volatile the other. Then we can say ‘This is a world in which …’ and paint a broad picture of the emerging future. After that, we can take another set of influences (it’s fine if the same influence is used more than once) and give them distinctive characteristics in the same way. We might end up with ten different scenarios as a result. These can be merged and purged to bring the number down to a more manageable three to five. We thus have a series of alternative futures that can be deemed ‘as expected’, ‘better than expected’, ‘worse than expected’, or ‘weirder than expected’.

In the second, inductive, approach, we play with the critical uncertainties, pitching any two influences against each other in a matrix. We need to ensure that the chosen influences are as different from each other as possible. In a business-scenario context, we might oppose supply and demand influences; for political scenarios, voter and party drivers.

We have coined the term ‘impaxes’ as a way of identifying the influences that we are looking for when doing this. Impaxes are influences about which there is great uncertainty: it’s unclear how they will perform when placed along a continuum. They have an impact along an uncertainty axis — thus the name ‘impaxes’.

In teams, we and the participants review the influences and place them onto a matrix. This step is all art and no science. The aim is to identify a total of about a dozen or so impaxes to focus on further. If we were working with eight syndicate groups, we would ask each to select two or three and put them up to the plenary group. In a larger workshop setting, we may wish to implement a voting system whereby individuals allocate a total of 25 points among the influences they feel have most ‘impax’. We usually limit the amount that can be given to any one driver to ten points, and allow people to give as little as one point to other choices.

Here are some examples of matrices that we developed as staging posts along the journey to a final set of scenarios.

Whether we develop deductive, emergent-based scenarios or inductive, matrix-based ones, the key is to be playful. Suspend disbelief; there is no right answer. Despite the frustration that can be present in developing the charts, trial and error — and time — does wonders for the creative process. Just keep going until it suddenly all seems to fall into place. This more or less mirrors how our brains deal with problems and solutions. First, we gather information relating to the problem at hand, educating ourselves. Then we stop thinking about it. This is often referred to as the incubation or fermentation stage, and patience is undoubtedly a virtue. Finally, there’s illumination when an insight or idea seemingly pops out of nowhere. The trick, as with many things, is not to give up too soon.

Enriching the Scenarios

We don’t live in a two-variable world, so we can’t stop at matrices. We can only find out how plausible these worlds are when we go about the task of fleshing them out — moving from the skeletal matrix to full-blooded imagined futures full of history, sex, colour, and movement.

Once we have a scenario matrix that looks promising, we can set about enriching that matrix by loading other influences into each world in a non-deterministic way. We try to avoid deterministic outcomes: logic that would argue, for example, that in an economic scenario unemployment has to be high if inflation is high, and if unemployment is high then exchange rates would fall and interest rates would rise. We are imagining alternative futures, and the greater their difference from each other and from conventional ways of thinking, the more likely we are to prompt the moment when we begin to see the world differently from before.

Despite this plea for a non-deterministic approach, the scenarios do need to be robust and logical. They must be plausible and avoid fictional nonsense if they are to be effective. The test is not based on the probability of the world ever emerging, but on the internal logic that has been used to create the story. Creating timelines for each future world is one of the most successful ways to bring the stories to life and test their plausibility. How did this world emerge from today’s reality? Can you map each key stage in the process? If you cannot imagine a plausible way of reaching the world, then it is very likely an implausible future. Scenarios are not fantasies — they need to link to the world we’ve got. But when they hold together and pass the tests for robustness, they are fantastically illustrative, as we shall see.

It is also helpful to name each of the scenarios and summarise them in short narratives, as we have done with our Worldview Scenarios, to help to bring them to life.

In a workshop setting, the techniques to find the right matrices may appear to be mechanistic and unimaginative. This is because in the longer-term scenario-development process, this step involves the scenario team researching over weeks, and sometimes months. The scenarios and the analysis techniques will develop from the logic of the analysis. In a workshop setting, the technique must be quick and reasonably simple to implement. But however we get there, we have created ingredients for our scenarios. The next step is to use them to develop strategies.

Stage Four: creating transformational strategies

‘The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.’ MALCOLM X

The idea of futurism can come under fire because, as John Thackara, the founder of event-production company The Doors of Perception, notes, ‘It’s the present that matters, stupid, not that old paradigm, the future.’ Well, the good news is that our whole methodology is about the present — the goal of scenario planning is ‘re-perceiving the present’, in the words of Pierre Wack. We interrogate the future as a means of freeing up our view of the world, our role in it, and what we might want to do about it.

This is perhaps the little-known secret about scenario planning. Most people who have heard of it but not done it think it is about the future. Ultimately, it is not. It concerns the future and draws on what we can imagine the world to be, but it is about using the future as an excuse to think long and hard about what we are doing now, and where we may profitably and purposefully go next. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, ‘The future influences the present just as much as the past.’

The challenge is in making the journey from scenarios to strategy. It involves two steps. The first is to focus on the future worlds we have created and identify the sorts of things we would be doing in each of them, in response to the framing questions. This ‘doing’ is complex, in that we first have to discover the appropriate areas for action. If we are building scenarios for the future of our family, there are clearly domains in which we have the power to act — choosing schools, deciding where we live, adjusting employment, pursuing leisure pursuits, and so on. We are, of course, constrained by such things as our family income, house prices, our values, religious beliefs, job prospects, and available educational institutions, but we accept these as being part of family life.

Our options for action in these alternative futures are further complicated by the way in which we evaluate opportunities. Our responses usually fall into two categories. One is where we believe we have no power to change the environment, and need to put our heads down and be nimble and smart so as to optimise the outcomes for our group. Here, we are adapting to the new environment, making the best of it. The other type of response is very different: we no longer see ourselves as victims of the slings and arrows being thrown at us by a wicked world (unless philosophical determinists have their way), but as able to make generative, game-changing responses based on our ability to change the environment, rather than be cajoled by it. Our colleague Richard Neville summed this up perfectly when he said, ‘The future can no longer be taken for granted; it needs to be rescued.’ Vision, mission, and purpose all fit in here beautifully.

The second step, once we have mapped the sorts of things we might be doing in a future world, is to assess the strategic options that seem to be on offer. At one extreme, we will discover actions that are relevant in all of the scenarios, and at the other, those that seem to be appropriate in only one scenario — and, of course, everything in between.

Preferred Futures

At the beginning of this book, we mentioned the importance of worldviews and the notion of a preferred future. Let’s now explore this idea a little futher. As we create scenarios for the future, it is obvious that some worlds seem better to us than others. A scenario set will often present two extreme scenarios — one utopian, maybe, and one dystopian — and two relatively benign scenarios, which seem to be based on current trends morphing incrementally from where we are today. But perhaps none of the scenarios present a future that we actually like: our preferred future.

Nor should they. Scenario building is not about our preferences, our hopes and fears about the future of our organisation. Yet, at the same time, it is natural for nearly all of us to want a vision for a better future. It therefore makes sense to call our collective view our preferred future not because we can will it into being, but because a clear vision of the world we want to live in is the best way to help us articulate a generative strategic response. It encourages us to ask: what can we do in this or that scenario to change the world, so that it moves closer to our preferred future?

Identifying Strategic Domains

A strategic domain is an area of influence within which we have the capacity to act strategically and make decisions. The strategic domains at the global level are different from those at the national level, those at a national level will be different from those at a regional level, and the regional domains may be different from the local, too. Even within the local domains there may be smaller relevant groups, such as families and/or households, and so on. This continuum, or move from the macro to the micro, is typical of all scenario inquiries. Our client and the framing questions usually determine the locus that we focus on.

It is best to choose the domains to focus on after the framing questions have been decided. Keeping the framing questions in mind, select an appropriate set of domains from a suggested list. For practical purposes, we might select the five to eight domains that seem most appropriate. As an example, here is a draft list of domains that came out of a project on the future of the teaching profession.

In this example, we begin to see how the organisational focus will affect the selection of the domains and the activities that each domain covers. The focus for a school, a group of schools, a local council, a department of education, a teachers’ union, and the teaching profession as a whole will be quite different from one another.

Developing Strategic Implications

The next step is to brainstorm the strategic implications for the domains in each of the scenario worlds. A strategic implication is a course of action that would lead to a desired outcome if the scenario it relates to came into existence. By ‘desired outcome’, we mean something that enables us to be successful in that future and to respond positively to the challenges that the framing question(s) asks us to tackle. The desired outcome is therefore linked to our vision for the future, even though the future in question may be highly undesirable. This link may be explicit, or it may be assumed.

It is important to undertake this activity with a mindset in the present, but to respond to the questions as if you were living in that world. Desired outcomes are not just adaptations to the future — they include strategic actions that seek to change the world through intervention. This assumes that the future is not a given, but can be modified by positive action. Strategy can involve:

Normally, at least five implications will emerge for each domain in each scenario, but there is no hard-and-fast rule. The freedom to deliberate is the key. Think the unthinkable; go beyond the obvious.

Moving from Implications to Options

A list of implications is not a call to action. We need to assess them in terms of their status. Are they, for example, relevant to all of the futures we have imagined, or perhaps only to one?

We like to rank the implications as ‘high’, ‘medium’, or ‘low’, according to their strategic importance. We can then sort them into three groups. Group one are the implications that are highly relevant in all of the scenarios. These are the strategies that we believe we might put in place whatever the future might bring. Group two are those implications that are highly relevant in two or three worlds, but not in all. Group three are those that are highly relevant in no more than one world. We’ve now created a typical strategic options table for the framing question. We often find that participants get enthused at this point because they can begin to see how they are ‘learning from the future’.

The strategies in group one are things we have to do, as they feature in all the imagined futures, while those featuring in only one future, as in group three, are very specific to that future and will only be implemented if it comes about. The middle-ranking strategies in group two are relevant in most futures, and will more than likely become part of our action list. In this we practice the precautionary principle, which suggests that even if you can imagine a future in which the strategy is irrelevant, it would be foolish not to adopt it in view of its importance in the other futures we have imagined.

Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century French mathematician and philosopher, nailed the precautionary principle with his famous wager: as the existence of God cannot be proved through reason, there is more to lose by not believing than believing. His is the first example of scenario thinking. Using a matrix, as would any good mathematician, he created four worlds from the ‘yes, God exists / no, God doesn’t exist’ and ‘belief in God / disbelief in God’ axes.

We can see that if we believe in God, there is only one scenario in which espousing that belief is negative — that is in Scenario B, where my belief in God has no relevance. But the loss is of little consequence. Yet if I don’t believe in God, I get hammered in Scenario C, miss out in Scenario B, and pick up very small bikkies in Scenario D. In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritūs Sancti …

Developing Environmental Awareness

We now jump forwards to a time when our scenario-building and strategy work has been completed, and strategic options are now part of our planning cycle. All too often foresight-based strategy work is not integrated fully into our day-to-day activities, and the benefits of the work we have done are not felt. The first task, after we have decided upon the strategic options, is to develop ongoing environmental awareness in some shape or form.

This awareness has one major purpose: to allow us to be sensitive to changes in the environment, so that we can identify as early as possible the weak signals which will tell us that this future world, rather than that one, looks as if it is coming in to view. We need to be alert to events that tell us, in effect, which scenario might be emerging.

Of course, new worlds will not come into being in a linear way. Our allegiance to things temporal gives the illusion of a linear unfolding, but the present is always emerging through the interplay of hundreds and thousands of influences, which commingle to reveal new worlds. We suspect that ‘future-casting’ is like weather forecasting: it is hard to do, and yet we must do our best to read the indicators of climatic change. The earlier we can identify the signals and see their links to other events, the greater our ability to survive and thrive, and to build resilience in the face of what seems to be an increasingly turbulent environment.

There are two methods for performing the environmental sweep: scanning and monitoring.

The Difference Between Scanning and Monitoring

The basic difference between these two approaches is that scanning finds answers while looking for questions, while monitoring is based on working from questions while looking for answers.

Scanning takes a wide sweep, looking for events and trends that may signal new developments. These may be front-page news items or more subtle movements and trends. They are sometimes referred to as early warning indicators. Early warning indicators may be anomalies in polls and consumer surveys; changes in what we see on our supermarket shelves; or things that we come across in specialist magazines and journals, during innocuous conversations about football or on the train, amid the television ratings, on the book bestseller lists, or in any of myriad other sources. Monitoring reduces the range of the sweep to focus on specific events. It is a more quantitative approach than scanning, and can be linked directly to a particular scenario.

When we build scenarios, we create systematically designed snapshots of how the world might turn out, and these pictures can be confirmed or denied by monitoring relevant activities in the environment. A future built on the increasing volatility of climate change, or on escalating housing prices, will tell us where to look for early indications that the future is nigh. Scanning is less systematic than monitoring, but it is no less dependent on our understanding of the logic of the scenarios we have made and their reliance on the external environment. For example, science and technology may feature strongly in the futures we have designed, but the way in which breakthroughs will play out are largely unknown. We thus need to maintain a very broad sweep, to scan for unanticipated discoveries in this field (in particular areas such as climate change, biotechnology, robotics, ICT, and nanotechnology) in addition to monitoring the known concerns that have been revealed by the work we have already done.

Of course, these unknowns may catapult us into a completely new world not envisioned by our scenarios. Imagine if, as a result of a sudden scientific breakthrough, children born in 2015 need never die; or a world where nanotechnology actually enabled goods to be manufactured in single units close to where they were purchased. These would be game-changers. But all we can do is work with what we have to see the future.

Weak Signals and Deep Change

In the field of commerce, organisations that are first at identifying the possibilities being created by the influences for change — particularly those influences that appear to be more certain — have a unique competitive advantage. This was clear in the market advantages delivered to Royal Dutch Shell by the scenario work they undertook in the 1970s and 1980s. But how can we do this — how can we be ahead of the curve? Here is a checklist of some of the proven steps to take.

Here are some examples of places to look for indicators.

In society

In the economy

In technology

In the media

In other nations

Everywhere

Implementing an early-warning-indicator program is quite simple, provided that it is not viewed simply as a service that the strategy team provides to the rest of the organisation. While we must have (preferably internal) resources to do this — particularly for monitoring — it’s a good idea to get everyone involved. An interactive intranet site, with a facilitator, can work very well. It might include not only a scenario scanning and monitoring component, but also provide a full presentation of the scenario worlds for colleagues. Shapingtomorrow.com is a useful resource, as are springwise.com and nowandnext.com (full declaration: this last is one of Richard’s websites). At a minimum, post the scenarios in summary form and, for each, list the strategic implications and early indicators. Then invite people to supplement the work done by the scenario team. Have meetings to review what’s happening on a periodic but regular basis, and update the scenario information accordingly.

Kees van der Heijden, the great scenario thinker and champion, was asked by a client of ours, ‘How should we use the scenarios we have created on an everyday basis?’

‘Well,’ he replied, ‘let’s start by reviewing your government’s budget policy, announced last night, against your scenarios — where does it think we are heading?’

Use foresight work to inform current decision-making. The best scenario projects get integrated into existing strategy cycles and become a powerful tool for increasing our vision of the future.