By defining expertise, the scientists had subtly altered the group dynamics of the decision: instead of looking for the common ground of shared knowledge, the participants were empowered to share their unique perspective on the choice.

Borrowing from Donald Rumsfeld, you can think of them as knowable unknowns, inaccessible unknowns, and unknowable unknowns.

The three-part structure turns out to be a common refrain in scenario planning: you build one model where things get better, one where they get worse, and one where they get weird.

be more widely utilized in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. You can think of a red team as a kind of hybrid of war games and scenario plans: You sketch out a few decision paths with imagined outcomes and invite some of your colleagues to put themselves in the shoes of your enemies or your competitors in the market and dream up imagined responses.

What Nutt’s research made clear was how important it is to deliberately carve out a phase of the decision process within which entirely new alternatives are explored, to resist the easy gravitational pull toward the initial framing of the decision, particularly if it happens to take the form of a “whether or not” single alternative.

When facing a decision that involves multiple, independent variables, people have a tendency to pick one “anchor” variable and make their decision based on that element.

But the emphasis on successful prophecies misses the point. Most scenarios end up failing to predict future outcomes, but the very act of trying to imagine alternatives to the conventional view helps you perceive your options more clearly.

Buckminster Fuller proposed the development of a kind of mirror-image version of the Pentagon war games: a “world peace game”

It was, instead, a disorganized muddle of action and inaction.