Scenario Planning

This method is the scenario—a vehicle, as my colleague Napier Collyns says, for an “imaginative leap into the future.”

Scenarios are thus the most powerful vehicles I know for challenging our “mental models” about the world, and lifting the “blinders” that limit our creativity and resourcefulness.

Transformative scenario planning is not a way for actors to adapt to a situation or to force its transformation or to implement an already-formulated proposal or to negotiate between several already-formulated proposals. It is a way for actors to work cooperatively and creatively to get unstuck and to move forward.

While experience is useful, scenario analysis is one of an architect’s most powerful tools to allow iterative design without building whole systems. By modeling likely scenarios, an architect can discover if a particular solution will, in fact, work well.

Paradoxically, the most reliable method to envision and plan for futures, isn’t just studying and extrapolating scientific facts, historical developments, psychology and demography, but by building stories beyond our wildest imagination.

To construct a perfect scenario would require having answers to all the uncertainties—and if we had those answers, we wouldn’t need to create scenarios!

It is a fallacy to plan for ‘the future’ (singular). We need to be prepared for multiple futures (plural) and build into our strategies a flexibility that allows us to move resilient from the present moment towards the future. Being aware of the different paths the future might take, leads to more realistic and flexible strategies that will be more

Transformative scenario planning is, then, a way for people to work with complex problematic situations that they want to transform but cannot transform unilaterally or directly.

Strategic Foresight is open to alternative futures, that is, you work with several futures (certainly more than one!) because you know that you can’t predict the future and it most certainly won’t be an extrapolation from the past. It can evolve in different directions and, using Strategic Foresight, you can determine which are possible, which are