Scenario Methods
Futures Research, Week 7
A Taxonomy of Scenario Techniques
We’ve been learning about the history of scenarios and getting practice creating them using the Houston method, but as a practicing futurist it’s important to know that there are many different ways to build scenarios, based on the characteristics of the participants, the desired outputs, and your own preferences1. I already covered the canonical papers that catalog these techniques (Bishop, Hines, and Collins, as well as Jim Dator’s description of the method used by the Manoa School) in Intro, and I don’t really have much to add to what I wrote there, so I’ll just link to it.
One method I didn’t cover last semester is morphological analysis (often just “morpho” in conversation). In some ways, it’s an interesting tweak of the Houston Method2: once drivers are developed, rather than imagine their outcomes in various archetypes, imagine different possibilities for each driver that independently map the plausible space; that is, describe the main ways it might develop in the future (doesn’t have to be a set number). Then the team picks sets of logically consistent driver values (one value per driver; it’s ok if a value is in more than one set) and each set comprises one of the scenarios. We did this as a group exercise, and one thing that helped us structure the scenarios was to order the values in a way that made narrative sense - this condition in global food markets leads to this kind of political pressure, etc.
Scenario Results
The work of creating scenarios can be wildly different between techniques, but how does this affect the output - are the scenarios themselves significantly different based on how they are generated? Andrew Curry and Wendy Schultz looked at this in 2009, using drivers from a 2007 project about the future of civil society in Britain and Ireland. They compared a standard GBN 2x2 approach, Causal Layered Analysis (CLA), the Manoa method, and a method using an earlier version of Jim Dator’s archetypes3.
The 2x2 matrix approach tends to create pretty homogeneous scenarios in terms of geographic scope and tone - particularly, a tone that was a little distant and didn’t contain much novelty, as people just worked through the “puzzle” of how each of the scenarios would be different4. CLA scenarios, due to their postmodern underpinnings, have more focus on the winners and losers, and are more likely to exist at different levels of analysis such as national and global5. The Manoa method, focusing on imagining cascades of effects emanating from different possible changes, ranked high in plausibility of the scenarios, the vividness of the detail, and in the level of engagement they fostered, though the implications for the domain have to be deduced separately once the scenarios are crafted. The archetype approach wasn’t very successful because the setting didn’t allow the time to deeply understand the vibe differences between the different scenarios; it’s possible that the current 4-archetype set suggested by Dator or the Houston program would simplify this.
In class we dug deeper into the factors that might make one method more successful than another. 2x2 is a reliable method, and feels right at home in traditional organizations and consulting companies; no one will accuse someone using 2x2 of being too soft or unserious. It has a similar arc to the Houston method (about 15 weeks of work in three main chunks) and slants more toward interviews and away from research as the source of uncertainties. Archetypes may make more sense if people don’t want to invest in workshops6. Morphological approaches make sense if a group has mastered 2x2 and wants to go deeper. In my reading, I’ve seen CLA used most often in community organizing and participatory futures work, and less often in corporate settings.
Bonus Content: More Inclusive Futures
One of the student presentations this week focused on Pupul Bisht’s work around decolonizing futures. Her core contention is that, even as the discipline commits to always talk about multiple futures, there is a dominant Eurocentric way that those discussions are framed and products developed: largely focusing on linear concepts of time, rational methods of knowing, and a focus on experts over broad participation7. Bisht uses the traditional Rajasthan storytelling method of Kaavad as a guide to a different kind of futures work. A Kaavad is a portable shrine that enables telling a huge number of different stories via illustrated panels, and Bisht’s work incorporates these into a practice centered around facilitating listening to people as they tell their stories including their present, their history, and their desires for the future in a less linear way. I am a big fan of participatory work, and it makes sense to use shared cultural conventions and metaphors to facilitate that work. If you’re interested in learning more, Bisht presented on this work to the Global Foresight Advisory Council in 2022.
Most practitioners regularly use 3 or 4 techniques and then occasionally branch out to something else.
This is not a good historical description, for the record.
Worth mentioning, they tried doing morphological analysis as well but ran out of time, suggesting that it can be more time consuming than other methods.
This method also carries the risk that the logic appears comprehensive, when in actuality it ignores all but the two selected axes of change.
This might make them difficult to feed into a single strategic development process.
I’m doing a futures project at work right now, and I’m using archetypes precisely because it’s basically a proof of concept and so the organization’s willingness to devote lots of leader time is limited. I’m hoping the work is interesting enough that I can do deeper work in the future.
I’ve talked in the past about participatory futures work coming out of Great Britain, so this isn’t a monolith, but it definitely describes the majority of corporate futures.
When I was fresh out of school, I began writing fiction based at first on Dator’s four archetypes, but then later refined by the six archetypes described by Alex Fernani. Unfortunately, the editor I hired to review my manuscript asked me, “So, you wrote a book without a plot?”
Thus started my long journey up another mountain as a learned my new craft of fiction writing.
I bring this up because I have gained the sense that academics who study fiction don’t really appreciate it in some essential ways.
Nevertheless, the application of strategic foresight to fiction seems a natural evolution of scenario planning and, in my view, the two disciplines are made for each other.
Throw in specific predictions from forecasting platforms (I tie a specific forecast from the Metaculus platform to each chapter) and you have a very interesting technique to peer into the future.