Futures and Scenarios: Practice Notes

There are many ways to approach the work of futures thinking and scenario planning. People unfamiliar with this field would associate it generally with visioning exercises, workshops, and so forth. Things to do with imagination in the aspirational sense. And they would be right.

But that’s not the only approach. By personal predisposition and driven by necessity, my practice combines sensemaking and red-teaming, both centred on the key question, “What if we’re wrong?” By that question, I mean being wrong about our assumptions of the environment and ourselves.

I provide alternative assessments. Alternative assessments are not meant to delight. I am not paid to provide insights that please. If they do please, it is incidental. If I’m hired for charm and subtlety, perhaps you read the wrong product description. I also don’t do kumbaya and rah-rah.

If my assessments are useful, then by all means incorporate them into the policy process. If you think they are useless/unactionable/unsound/inconvenient, then feel free to junk them. The cheque clears either way.

All I do is to lay out where I think the pitfalls might be. To be sure, it is a highly fallible exercise. But many of us in this field have developed an intuition for emerging novel dangers: of when supporters turn on you, when the lynch mobs gather, when friends become enemies, and when the narrative shifts.

Sometime back at a public talk, the moderator gave the most hilarious and succinct fire safety announcement: “If you see me running, then you should too.”

I could be wrong, but if you see me running...