Scenario (story, narrative, outcome, path)

Scenario or scenarios in the context of foresight are consistent pictures, descriptions, stories illustrating future situations, future scenes. Scenarios describing future situations are usually linked to the present in cause/effect logics. It is the coherent articulation of hypotheses for the evolution of variables in a given horizon, leading to describe a future situation and the road leading to it. Objective of scenarios: To outline what the future might be – not will be – to show alternatives due to uncertainty and to make decision-making more robust and future-proof, to sensitize decision makers with regard to the uncertainties of the future and to enable them to become future fit. A scenario is never a prediction or a forecast, but a way of organizing many statements about the future; it is a plausible description of what might occur. Scenarios describe events and trends as they could evolve. Hermann Kahn defined scenarios as narrative descriptions of the future that focus attention on causal processes and decision points. Good scenarios are plausible, internally consistent and sufficiently interesting and exciting to make the future real enough to affect decision making. The purpose of scenarios is to systematically explore, create and test both possible and desirable future conditions. Application: Scenarios can help generate long-term policies, strategies, decision-making, planning, change management, future_oriented internal and external communication, quantum leaps in R&D, etc. Exploratory or descriptive scenarios describe events and trends as they could evolve based on alternative assumptions on how these events and trends may influence the future. Normative scenarios describe how a desirable future can emerge from the present. The most useful scenarios are those that display the conditions of important variables over time. In this approach, the quantitative underpinning enriches the narrative evolution of conditions or of the variables; narratives describe the important events and developments that shape the variables. When a set of scenarios is prepared, each scenario usually treats the same parameters, but the evolution and actual value of parameters described in each scenario are different. The goal of generating scenarios is to understand the mix of strategic decisions that are of maximum benefit in the face of various uncertainties and challenges posed by the external environment. Scenario building, in conjunction with a careful analysis of the driving forces, fosters systematic study of potential future possibilities, both good and bad. This forecasting approach enables decision makers and planners to grasp the long-term requirements for sustained advantage, growth, and avoidance of problems. For each parameter or variable several (usually 2-5) possible descriptions of a future situation have to be developed. Alternative hypothesis are based on projections of trends and their alternative variables with profound arguments (why this might happen). The only answer to the uncertainties of the future is thinking in alternatives. The best scenarios are carefully constructed with a strong internal consistency, high plausibility, an inner logic, a maximum of difference between the scenarios in order to cover the range of future possibilities and creating a kind of important change for the user; if the logic is convincing the decision maker takes them serious, is ready to see the consequences and to go for a significant change either for the organization or personally. Scenarios are one of the most productive, inspiring and sustainable futures tools with a wide range of applications: One is to put forward a future situation and use that as the jumping-off place for further planning, thinking, or research. Another use of scenarios is to present a completed image of some future situation representing a full story about the future. A third application is to present a situation radically at odds with traditional thinking. Scenarios can come in many forms from a brief diagram, to picture, a collage, a film, a theater play or to a multipage report. The decision depends on whether one is using the scenarios as a way to tell its complete story or as a way to open up people’s thinking to future changes, thinking out of the box and planning beyond the obvious time horizon and its restrictions. They can be described as an instrument that aids decision-makers, by providing a context for planning and programming, lowering the level of uncertainty and raising the level of knowledge, in relation to the consequences of actions, which have been taken, or are going to be taken, in the present. Scenarios should enable us to detect all (or as many as possible) alternative futures and clarify, therefore, possible consequences and their impact on our present decision making. Scenarios can be completely qualitative or partly quantitative. Scenarios are usually presented in sets, differing in terms of their initial boundary conditions. How to do it: Scenarios are normally developed by: 1) studying the facts of a situation internally and externally, 2) selecting the key factors shaping the future, and 3) imagining the various ways for that development to occur and the sequence of events that might follow. Scenarios have the advantage over all other techniques in providing an integrated, consistent, and plausible picture of some future situation. There are a number of techniques that help assure plausibility and consistency. The use of TIA (??) in conjunction with a scenarios study is particularly powerful. Requires identification of a series of events that can deflect historical trends. Many of these events will affect more than on the time series and more than one scenario. Cross impact analyses, and or consistency analysis while more complex in many ways can serve the same purpose. The narrative statements often included in a scenario can be given quantitative power if they are derived systematically. Simulation modeling serves also this purpose.