Doing Scenarios - scenarios can help predict the future

Whole Earth, Spring, 1999 by Art Kleiner

Scenarios are imaginative pictures of potential futures, but the future they picture is just a means to an end. These conversations, at once free-flowing and rigorously constrained, are designed to help a group of people trick themselves to see past their own blind spots. Herman Kahn, one of the founding innovators of the practice, developed scenarios to see past the cultural blind spot that thermonuclear war must never happen. What if it did happen? asked Kahn. What sort of world might the survivors face? One dismayed critic, Gerard Piel of Scientific American, coined the phrase "thinking the unthinkable" to describe Kahn's approach, but Kahn gleefully embraced the phrase. Thinking the unthinkable, he argued, was the only way to keep one's strategic vision from getting stale.

Pierre Wack refined Kahn's methods at Royal Dutch/Shell in the 1970s and early 1980s. He used to talk of future study as an analogue to Zen archery, a way to hone your senses until you can see the world as it really is, not as you would like it to be. Scenario planning forces us--not just corporate people, but activists, artists, nonprofit staffers, and just about anyone--to learn to visualize the possible worlds in which the unimaginable, the unthinkable, the ungodly, and the unpredictable actually come to pass. If we can imagine such worlds we can partially prepare ourselves for whatever future does come to pass.

Confronting the future with rigor tends to leave most people energized and enthusiastic about facing their future--even if the future looks grim. The steps, methods, and "scenario lingo" are easy to learn and use (sometimes deceptively so); they're practically jargon-free, especially by the standards of usual management practice.

The practice is, however, time-consuming. People often want to condense scenario work to a half-day or weekend, but it's becoming clear that such efforts usually don't give people enough time to delve past their preconceptions. At Royal Dutch/Shell, Wack's group took almost a year to develop each set of scenarios. In contemporary business, about five or six full-time days seems necessary, ideally spread over a three-month period to allow time in between for research and reflection.

The practice of constructing stories of the future has no single method and dozens of techniques. The French, comme toujours, follow a very different path. Science fiction writers have been very effective in exploring future utopias and dystopias. Kees van der Heijden has identified several general types: project-specific scenarios (What's the best way to outcompete a rival or clean a polluted river?); crisis scenarios (How can local, independent bookstores survive in the face of Amazon.com?); exploration/consensus-building scenarios (What are the possible futures for Colombia as a nation? How can we build democratic institutions in South Africa? How can American elections become free of financial influence?).

1. THE SCENARIO QUESTION

Scenarios only provoke genuine learning and strategies when they answer genuine concerns. If they are not responding to a specific crisis, figuring out the key question or issues is a crucial step. If the group doesn't care about the question they're trying to answer, the rest of the exercise is a waste of time. In the class I teach, with twenty people in the room, I generally spend at least three or four hours on this step. Sometimes you can "jumpstart" this process by interviewing people ahead of time: if they could answer one or two real questions about the future or could reach a decision on one or two issues confronting their organization, what would they ask?

Part of this stage involves picking a year from which the scenarios will look back. How long a time frame do we care about? Scenarios for next year may be so close to current reality that they may not reveal much; scenarios for twenty years out may embody so many "wild card" possibilities that it's difficult to care about them, though some corporations like Shell try scenarios for sixty-year futures.

2. THE PROXIMATE ENVIRONMENT

The group usually tries to depict the environment in which the decision will be made. Sometimes called key factors, this is the group's internal nitty-gritty. It is not the big picture. It's about the starting line, the micropicture of the familiar and close, not how participants may think after the scenario process. Participants ask: What in the local environment seems well-defined? How do we define success or failure? How do we make decisions? Is the process structured so that our decision can have an influence? One technique uses giant Post-its on which everyone writes two or three ideas and sticks them on a wall. The Post-it technique can be revealing. Many times participants discover that they see their environment with completely different worldviews.

In some more focused or crisis scenarios, it is also important to reflect on who you are. The crucial question to ask is: What are the organization's distinctive competencies? These might include brand name (Sierra Club or Nike), patents, knowledge of customers or citizens you want to serve, charismatic leadership, or access to power. Without consensus on what you are good at and what gaps exist in your abilities, thinking about the future can drift into group fantasy or cheerleading.