Scenario Book Review
Futures Research, Week 10
Expert Guide to Scenarios
The main assignment for the semester is to build out the main components of a futures project on a topic of interest1. There are two other assignments not directly related to this major arc: analysis of a chapter from The Knowledge Base of Future Studies (I did mine last week), and analysis of a book about scenario development. This week we presented this latter analysis2.
The book I chose was The Scenario Planning Handbook, written by Ian Wilson and Bill Ralston. Wilson and Ralston worked together at SRI international and spent decades doing scenario planning. It’s an extremely in-depth guide to conducting a classic scenario-based strategic foresight exercise. It serves as an interesting complement to Thinking About the Future, because while TATF describes the generic tasks of a futures project and essentially serves as a mental checklist of things to accomplish, The Scenario Planning Handbook serves as a very opinionated guide explaining to do one flavor of Futures. It’s like TATF is a theoretical exposition of how a five-act play is structured, and the Handbook is a copy of King Lear - you will still need to stage it yourself and adapt it to the actors you have, but it’s a pretty clear guide to what the production will look like.
This diagram I made shows how the layout is essentially arranged as an expression the 6 competencies that TATF identifies as the sequence of futures work:
The book is very dry and sometimes overly focused on details3, but it’s an incredible guide for an inexperienced practitioner to chart out a futures engagement ahead of time and give reasonable estimates of what the process should look like and how long it should take. This process is pretty compatible with the Houston Method: if you replace chapters 16 and 17 with developing logics based on the Houston archetypes, most of the rest will still serve you well.
The Handbook identifies two elements as critical for the success of a futures project: a clear set of strategic decisions to focus the project around and deep leadership support at the top of the organization. In my (limited) experience, it’s difficult for leaders to really think about a comprehensive list of the important decisions that will need to be made over the next 10 years, but even the exercise is helpful in guiding the way the futures project is conducted4. Also, I am told that robust executive support for strategic foresight is pretty rare, and “executive tolerance” is a more realistic goal5.
Bonus - I Did a Futures!
I had the privilege of finishing my first professional Futures engagement last week. Earlier in the year, I had been talking to the leaders within my department at work about bringing Strategic Foresight into our planning process, and working with them through exercises evaluating and ranking drivers shaping the future of healthcare and data. Last week was our formal off-site strategic planning meeting. Last year I presented on some industry trends I saw as important, based on my own judgment completely disconnected from Foresight as a field (amateur futures, basically)6. This year I presented four scenarios describing how the future of the industry might unfold over the next 20 years7. My main thoughts about how it went:
The scenarios themselves were pretty well received8. People were engaged in discussion and picked out several ways the appropriate organizational direction would need to change. I did have someone afterward tell me that she was disappointed that more mundane drivers like the push to value-based care weren’t included - I think this points to a need to involve leaders earlier, so there’s more ownership over how things are framed.
Because the scenarios were just one component of the “environmental assessment” phase of the strategy session, they weren’t explicitly integrated into the building of the strategy for next year. I felt pretty down about this, but then someone called it out as a gap in the process at the end, and someone else said that he had implicitly referenced the scenarios in proposing and refining the strategies and tactics.
Mostly I’m relieved that I’m done with the work, that I wasn’t laughed out of the room, and that it seems like there’s an appetite for more strategic foresight in future years. I have lots of ideas from this semester (including many from Ralston and Wilson) about major improvements, bringing best practices into more areas where I was basically making it up (such as developing the drivers).
As I’ve mentioned before, my topic is the future of religion in the US in 2050.
Meaningless clarifications: actually class was canceled this week, so even though this was week 10 content, it was compressed into the class time for week 9; also, there wasn’t time for everyone’s presentations, so there may be more to discuss next time.
For example, one of the appendices gives a list of things to consider in the room being selected to do a workshop: temperature, ventilation, lighting, lines of vision, acoustics, seating comfort, space, noise, and other distractions.
For example, my class project on the future of religion is exploratory, and so while I am coming up with lots of interesting provocations, it’s not clear how most of these would be of use to anybody. My “client” is the Pew Research Center, and while they do a lot of research on religion, only a few of the possibilities I explore would actually change their work (for example, if the concept of “religion” itself no longer maps cleanly onto the ways that most people pursue spirituality).
Shell’s experience is held up as a model of using scenarios for strategic planning, but Shell is an anomaly; their robust, decades-long support of strategic foresight is a consequence of their initial attempts leaving them so well-prepared for the 70s oil shocks that it seemed like magic.
I will note that, though I didn’t have any Futures education yet, my top prediction in 2022 was that these things called Large Language Models were kind of a big deal and we’d see them used for prose, computer code, and lots of other things. I definitely took the opportunity to remind everyone of that this year.
I had originally intended to use a 2x2 approach for this, but there weren’t two drivers that stood out as most prominent; three or four were pretty close. Because of this and because of my recent practice, I decided to base the four scenarios on the Houston archetypes.
This includes kind words from someone who had previously complained about my drivers work being too “science fiction”. I did end up removing a driver about space medicine in between, partly due to this criticism about breaking plausibility, and partly because it was voted the least impactful driver.