Scenario Planning

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.

Since all methods of predicting the future are flawed, Scenario Planning is a model for considering multiple realistic potential futures and assessing the risks and opportunities of each scenario. This can lead to better positioning today for an uncertain future.

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.

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.

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

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

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!

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.

When it comes to big social and economic shifts, no one can predict the future; the level of complexity is just too great. Scenarios let us construct plausible, internally consistent visions that help us frame the range of possibilities and the kinds of issues we are likely to confront along the way.