Futurama, 1939 World's Fair
In Futures Thinking: The Basics, I offered up an overview of how to engage in a foresight exercise. In Futures Thinking: Asking the Question, I explored in more detail the process of setting up a futures exercise, and how to figure out what you’re trying to figure out. In Futures Thinking: Scanning the World, I took a look at gathering useful data. This time, we dive into the heart of the process: creating alternative scenarios.
Note the plural. Foresight exercises that result in a single future story are rarely as useful as they appear, because we can’t predict the future. The goal of futures thinking isn’t to make predictions; the goal is to look for surprising implications. By crafting multiple futures (each focused on your core dilemma), you can look at your issues from differing perspectives, and try to dig out what happens when critical drivers collide in various ways.
Whatever you come up with, you’ll be wrong. The future that does eventually emerge will almost certainly not look like the scenarios you construct. However, it’s possible to be wrong in useful ways–good scenarios will trigger minor epiphanies (what more traditional consultants usually call “aha!” moments), giving you clues about what to keep an eye out for that you otherwise would have missed.
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As a clarifying example, I once worked with a business services company to craft different scenarios of its future competitive environment. All of the scenarios included some level of economic upheaval and technological disruption, with one suggesting that a technology company offering business services could be a real threat–a story arising from tentative signs that some of their clients were starting to use more open source software. A few of the strategists realized that a company they had thought of as a minor nuisance at worst could actually be their most serious rival, and pushed their CEO to pay more attention to that threat.
(He didn’t, and the business services company eventually went under, with the tech company gaining many of its former clients–and employees.)
So how do you actually do this?
