Scenarios are the most familiar tool in the futures toolbox, because they became so widely used in the 1990s and afterwards by businesses, governments, and public sector agencies. In truth, they can be overused. But they have some particular strengths when it comes to formulating policy or strategy in conditions of high uncertainty, building out options, testing whether they will deliver what you want and generally making them better by imagining how things could be different. Scenarios can also help to develop innovative ideas by immersing yourself in different possibilities.
Scenarios should always come in sets, and the success criteria for a set is that they are:
- Distinctively different, meaning that each scenario describes a future with different systemic characteristics;
- Individually coherent, meaning that the underlying socio-economic system in each scenario is believable and hangs together;
- Strategically useful, meaning that they shed light on current policy or strategy issues. There’s no point in having a set of scenarios that is merely interesting.
There are usually 3-5 scenarios in a set: more, and people get overloaded; fewer, and people start to choose between them rather than exploring them both, which makes the process less creative and useful.
Of course, scenarios are not predictions or forecasts. They are a structured way to explore a range of possible futures and identify implications.
One of the misconceptions about scenarios is that they have to involve a large-scale piece of work spanning many months, including extensive engagement workshops. Some projects do need this to ensure credibility, especially for complex topics and large numbers of stakeholders. But there are multiple types of scenarios methods and many of these deliver similar benefits without requiring the same level of organisational commitment or budget.
For example, James Dator’s Scenarios Archetypes provide a structure that ensures difference between scenarios and also identifying potential transition points between them. We used this with a client to understand the future of recruitment and personnel, bringing the different scenarios to life with a set of personas that captured critical issues within each one. Understanding transition points helps to build out markers that give you an early warning that the future might be shifting from one scenario to another. A British government department used this approach to identify emerging risks during the pandemic.
If divergent values matter for your possible futures, Sohail Inayatullah’s Causal Layered Analysis allows you to build, again quite quickly, a set of scenarios where each reflects different underlying values. Assumption-led scenarios that start with an organisation’s current assumptions about the future, and then builds scenarios about what happens if these change, are a useful way to test robustness and resilience. We recently developed a set of these for a non-profit that wanted to future-proof a regional strategy.
It’s easy to get caught up with the excitement of the possible futures that have emerged from the scenarios process, and forget that the work needs to have impact. The Shell futurist Pierre Wack said that a set of scenarios should change the way that business leaders read the newspaper.
There are good tools that help people make the essential step from scenarios to implications, among them Three Horizons, which can identify critical issues, gaps and leverage points. Using scenarios as a base to build or test a portfolio of strategic options is also valuable. As the pioneering French futurist Gaston Berger said in the 1950s, “The purpose of looking at the future is to disturb the present.”
For more on scenarios methods, see Andrew Curry’s article, The Scenarios Question. Read here.