Several years ago when I was doing some strategy work for my
multinational employer I read Peter Schwartz’ 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 one’s
perceptions about alternative future environments". The scenario-building
process entails these
eight steps:
- 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.
- 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
anthropology’, "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.
- Identify Driving Forces: What major trends and driving forces
influence the key factors? The work of Porter, Drucker and Christensen can help identify these.
- 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.
- 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'.
- Flesh out the Scenarios: Each key factor and driving
force should be given some role in the scenario.
- 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.
- 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. It’s a disciplined attempt to reduce the ‘cost of
not knowing’. And, unlike the visioning and predictive processes, it’s
not about what you’d 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, that’s 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. I’m not so sure. I’m 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 I’m
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 planners’ denial that they’re 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 you’re 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 – 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" – the ones that can
topple the incumbents and transform an industry completely – 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 ‘unexpectable’.
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 ‘information economy’ would bring
about, the impact of then-teenage Gen Y’ers (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. That’s just the way we are.
So rather than create scenarios that help us imagine the
future as it seems likely to be, I’d prefer to create scenarios that can
help us imagine the future as it could be. In organizations, that’s
what 'visions' (a kind of best-case future-state story) are about. And in larger society, that’s 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
‘vision’ or model of what’s possible that other ‘deep
greens’, 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. I’ve 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 ‘create’ 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 ‘herding cats’ 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
what’s possible, a model of a virtual ‘place’ 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.
It’s worth a try.
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