Various sources relate the story of Herman Kahn – a pioneer of strategic planning at Los Angeles-based RAND Corporation in the 1950s and 1960s, and an iconic figure in the development of scenarios – discussing the challenges of communicating the results of his work with colleagues. This being LA, one of the people he spoke with was Leo Rosten, a

Soft data (cultural differences in different markets, for example) is as important as hard data. Scenarios should focus less on predicting outcomes and more on illuminating the forces at work across the organisation and the environments in which it operates. They must be relevant and challenging, pragmatic not ideological.

You can research, assess, construct and communicate versions and variations of futures to better understand probable, plausible and possible landscapes that lie ahead, regardless of the question, space or realm you wish to imagine, explore, plan for – or against. It takes a future, even a speculative, strange, uncanny or orthogonal one, to fill a

Why are these kinds of stories so hard to sustain, so often subsumed by negative and dystopian visions when the fact is, nobody can predict the future. Assuming dystopias has an element of self-fulfilling prophecy, but it’s also unlikely things will unfold exactly as anyone predicts.