Scenario Planning vs. Collective Vision: Imagining What’s Possible

Several years ago when I was doing some strategy work for my multinational employer I read Peter Schwartzí book The Art of the Long View , This remains the definitive text, I think, on the process and value of scenario planning. It is not, as many believe, about predicting the future. It is, rather, the field of doing what I have often felt is my gift: imagining possibilities:

You can tell you have good scenarios when they are both plausible and surprising; when they have the power to break old stereotypes; and when the makers assume ownership of them and put them to work. Scenario making is intensely participatory, or it fails.

So the purpose of scenario planning is not to predict and preempt the future, but rather to consider how the future might be different from the present, and what the implications of those differences might be for your organization or your community. A scenario is essentially a script or story about the future, and scenario planning is “ordering oneís perceptions about alternative future environments”. The scenario-building process entails these eight steps:

1. Identify the Focal Issue or Decision : What do you really want to know? Define a specific decision or issue where having scenarios will be helpful.
2. Identify Key Factors in the Local Environment: What factors influence the focal issue or decision? What will decision makers want to know when making their choices? This entails doing some ‘cultural anthropologyí, “hunting and gathering intelligence” outside your immediate areas of knowledge, ensuring the scenario-building team is diverse, imaginative and informed, and challenging established “mental maps” about the issue or decision.
3. Identify Driving Forces: What major trends and driving forces influence the key factors? The work of Porter, Drucker and Christensen can help identify these.
4. Rank by Importance and Uncertainty: Rank the key factors and driving forces on their degree of importance and the degree of uncertainty. Make an x:y plot with importance vs uncertainty. Those key factors or driving forces that fall in the quadrant high importance and high uncertainty merit further study and inclusion in alternative scenarios.
5. Select Scenario Logics: Define the key variables for building scenarios and their relationships. Steps 5-7 involves having “strategic conversations” with people throughout the organization or community to get other perspectives on how the scenarios would ‘play out’.
6. Flesh out the Scenarios: Each key factor and driving force should be given some role in the scenario. 
7. Implications: What could happen if the different possibilities occurred? Build these into your scenarios. Schwartz talks about a process of “rehearsing the future” to do this.
8. Selection of the Leading Indicators and Signposts: What trends or events, if they occurred, would add credibility to each scenario?

The objective is to come up with a few alternative scenarios that differ in important, substantive ways, not just in degree, which will increase your group’s knowledge and allow more confident personal and collective decision-making. Itís a disciplined attempt to reduce the ëcost of not knowingí. And, unlike the visioning and predictive processes, itís not about what youíd like the future to be, or think it will be, but rather how it might be, in challengingly different and surprising ways, from how it is today.

Well, thatís the theory anyway. Those who have used the technique will of course tell you that this has provoked novel thinking and insights that have led to much better decisions and savings of millions of dollars and avoided untold grief. Iím not so sure. Iím all for imagining possibilities and developing stories that get us thinking outside of our normal mental models and considering new ideas, approaches and methods. And Iím all in favour of strategic conversations around plausible future trends or events or insights about how the world really works or what could be. But despite scenario plannersí denial that theyíre in the business of predicting, there seems to be a lot of assigning of probabilities to the assessment of scenarios and the making of decisions stemming from them.

As youíre probably tired of hearing me say, most organizations, societies and environments are complex, which means prediction is impossible and the variables that determine what will happen cannot even be identified. The best we can do in complex situations is look for patterns that might suggest the need or opportunity for an intervention ñ creating an attractor or barrier that will tend to encourage or discourage certain behaviours and lead to a preferable outcome. Christensen makes the same point a different way, saying that “disruptive innovations” ñ the ones that can topple the incumbents and transform an industry completely ñ are essentially unpredictable because they come from outside the conceivable attention horizon of the players in that industry. They are not only unexpected, they are ëunexpectableí.

Back in 1989, when The Art of the Long View was written, Schwartz (with Stewart Brand, Howard Rheingold and others) produced three scenarios for the year 2005 that they called Global Incoherence, New Empires, and Market World. These make fascinating reading, coming as they did before the dot-com boom and bust, before social networking, and before 9/11. The scenarios greatly overestimated our willingness and ability to do anything about global warming and the environment in general. They also overestimated the impact of new technology on society, the amount of change that the ëinformation economyí would bring about, the impact of then-teenage Gen Yíers (and the trend to cultural homogeneity in general) and the degree of innovation in business and the media. It underestimated the degree of political upheaval, cultural clashes, genocide and war that turned out to be the hallmarks of 2005. It incorrectly foresaw the “replacement of political ideology with pragmatism” as a result of “a world weary of war”. The End of Oil is contemplated but discounted as highly improbable. And while interactive TV is contemplated, there is no mention of anything like what we now call the Internet.

The fault of these scenarios, and of most attempts at imagining alternative futures, is the human tendency to assume the future will be like the present, only more so. Those of us who say this will be the final century of human civilization produce raised eyebrows because the majority cannot conceive of a significant discontinuity between what has happened in the past, what is happening right now, and what is to come. When sudden discontinuous reversals occur (the fall of the Soviet Union, the dot com bust etc.), our tendency is to discount them entirely as unsustainable anomalies and do our political and economic prognosticating as if neither the rise nor the fall had ever happened. When other unexpected discontinuous events occur (9/11, Katrina), our tendency is to exaggerate their significance, to ignore our learnings from everything that happened before them, and to start predicting more of the same, mentally creating new continuities to replace the ones we have lost. Thatís just the way we are.

So rather than create scenarios that help us imagine the future as it seems likely to be, Iíd prefer to create scenarios that can help us imagine the future as it could be. In organizations, thatís what ‘visions’ (a kind of best-case future-state story) are about. And in larger society, thatís a function of utopian (and dystopian) novels, and of some sci-fi. Their value is not in their predictive ability (and that is not their purpose) but rather their ability to stimulate the imagination to think discontinuously, and to provoke the intentionality that comes from thinking about what is possible, and consciously or subconsciously taking the first steps to make that imagined possibility real.

The problem with most visionary imaginings is that they are the product of just one person, or a few people in an organization with similar knowledge and perspectives. They lack The Wisdom of Crowds. For example, my novel-in-progress, The Only Life We Know is about a post-civilization society of diverse and loosely-connected, sustainable, self-selected communities, as an illustration of how intentional communities and natural enterprises could obviate the need for hierarchical states and markets. I had hoped it would be a ëvisioní or model of whatís possible that other ëdeep greensí, anarchists, and progressives could modify and then introduce into their own new ex-civilization or post-civilization communities.

But suppose instead of writing a utopian book solo I wanted to make the visioning a collective effort. Iíve had some preliminary discussions with some fellow idealists about how we could go about collaboratively creating a post-civilization vision and an intentionality program (not a plan, precisely, but more like the set of announced collaborative and individual intentions that come from an Open Space event) to get us there. Using a real Open Space event would be ideal, of course, but getting a couple of hundred people with the imagination to ëcreateí a future vision of a better world, one that envisages better ways to live and make a living, together in one place, would be a challenge unless we were to find a major, progressive, idealistic funder for the event. So perhaps instead we could use a wiki or some other collaborative tool where we would apply the methodology of Open Space virtually to (1) create the future state vision collectively, and then (2) develop an intentionality program to make it real.

This may be too much to expect of an asynchronous tool, and in the worst case it could turn into an anarchic ëherding catsí exercise. But I think with a manageable-sized group and some appropriate ground-rules it could work. The end-product would be not scenarios but an imaginative vision of whatís possible, a model of a virtual ëplaceí for living and making a living sustainably and joyfully in community, and a map, drawn by each of us from where we are now, of how to get there.

Itís worth a try.