A strong indication that scenarios are capable of (1) empowering individuals to become more socially innovative and (2) creating deliberative processes that in themselves are social innovations, comes from van der Heijden (as quoted in [10]):
“Survival in a turbulent environment requires a new response based on mobilizing the same systemic forces that generate the turbulent change in the first place. In trying to cope, we must fight like with like. That means that successful coping involves building feedback loops in the environment that can counteract the destructive autonomous loops that cause the turbulence we experience.”
Translated to the problem mentioned here, van der Heijden calls for a new way to learn, appropriate to what he calls the ‘turbulent environment’ and what we called earlier ‘a world that is quite different from the world of the past’. To be able to judge whether it makes sense to use scenarios in the accelerated creation of social change, we give a short overview of the method below. For an in-depth guide to creating and using scenarios see [11–14]. Additional detail can be found in [15–27] (Fig. 1).
The process can be visualized in seven steps. The phases overlap to a considerable degree with Chris Rose’s ideas expressed in “How to win campaigns” [28], and with David Kolb’s ideas expressed in “Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development” [29, 30].
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1.
Driving question
The most important requirement for a successful scenario process is a good question. The question that drives the entire process should be:
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About the future (if you ask questions about the past or the present, you will spend much time merely identifying irreconcilable differences, and you have no time and energy left to transform the future),
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something that the participants can influence, and
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something the participants care deeply about.
Some points to consider:
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A good question is open-ended, and cannot be answered by ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
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A good question has a time horizon in it, preferably explicit.
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A good question has an actor in it, someone who causes something to happen, or not. It can be an individual, a group, an organization, or even humanity as a whole, again explicitly or implicitly.
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2.
Interviews / Conversations
To prepare the scenarios, you interview ‘remarkable people’ about different aspects of the driving question. The interviews are open-ended and are more like conversations in which the interviewer speaks very little. The purpose is to bring the full range of concerns, views, hopes and fears of the interviewees with respect to the driving question to the fore.
Some points to consider:
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‘Remarkable people’ are those who can see things from different perspectives, can verbalize their thoughts clearly and can develop and communicate a line of causal reasoning. They are able to self-reflect.
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Remarkable people need not be experts in their field.
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The more diverse the group of people you speak to, the better.
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Talk to young people. They will actually live in the futures being explored.
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Talk to at least three-dozen people. Once the number of conversation exceeds, say, a hundred, the additional insights you gain begin to diminish.
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The content of the conversations is confidential to all third parties, including those who pay for the exercise.
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Despite the fact that the conversations are confidential, you should get the interviewees’ permission to record what is being said. This is an effective way of avoiding to hear only what you want to hear.
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Interviews are one-on-one and take place in a location the interviewee chooses. Normally, this is their office or home.
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Interviews last for about an hour and should only in truly exceptional situations reach or exceed 2 h.
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3.
Analysis of the interviews
All recordings are transcribed and the identity of each interviewee removed. Often the questions themselves are stripped out. A good way to do the analysis has proven to be to organize each answer as a paragraph and then sort the paragraphs in some form. Although this removes the flow and context of the interview, making it much harder to read, it forces the analyst to pay attention to what the person said or meant.
Some points to consider:
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With your analysis team summarize each paragraph, each thought on a sticky note.
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Have members from the analysis team one by one step up to a very large white board and have them place their sticky notes in an order that they roughly explain while posting. Other members of the analysis team are allowed to ask questions, suggest different orderings and probe the presenter’s connection between what was actually said and his or her shorthand noted on the sticky note.
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Ask whether any kind of structure around any kind of concept seems to emerge. This goes in the direction of the important and uncertain drivers, which we will deal with in phase 4, but it is not restricted to two. On the contrary, you will most likely end up somewhere between seven and a dozen themes, drivers, or concepts, which, in the judgment of your analysis team, best represents what the interviewees were trying to tell you.
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This is a qualitative as well as iterative process. The art is to find words to describe the themes, concepts and structure that encompass the hopes and dreams, fears and concerns of all the interviewees. The odd thing about this type of clustering, which is called inductive because it goes from the specific to the more general, is that you may end up with words and ideas that in the specific form you will be using them, were never ever actually said by anyone of the interviewees. You try to surface the spirit, the essence, the underlying facts and emotions of their contribution rather than an orthographically and grammatically correct quote.
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Finally, the analysis team prepares a very light-handed summary in the form of a presentation to the participants of the first workshop which happens in the next phase.
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4.
Two uncertainties
The two drivers you need are those that are at the same time the most uncertain and the most important ones for the driving question of the scenario exercise.
There are two difficulties: ‘most uncertain’ and ‘two’. Somehow we are conditioned to be highly suspicious of uncertainties; we seem to have to know – even if we have to fake it. Not to know is often considered a weakness. But the paradox is that to have any chance to ensure that what we do has an impact and leads to a successful social change, we actually need to embrace uncertainty. If everything is already certain, then there is, quite literally, nothing you can do to make any difference at all.
Once that mental resistance is overcome, the next difficulty is ‘two’. We resent, even fight having to commit ourselves to such a small number. Instead, we want options, choices, room to maneuver; ten, or more, action items and long lists of demands the other side must meet before we deign to consider their grievances! And so we have become ‘list generators’, forgetting that some things are more important than others; and also forgetting that having ten or more key points you have to act on – after all, they are key – you may be busy, but not necessarily effective.
Some points to consider:
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What if small groups come up with 4, 6, 8 drivers? Use inductive clustering i.e. search in the plenary for words and ideas that in the specific form you will be using them, may never actually have been said by anyone of the small groups.
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What if participants want a third axis in the plenary? Sometimes workshop participants may suggest a third driver, especially after you’ve told them that the drivers will be placed at right angles to each other to create the scenario space. If you allow a third driver, coming out of the flat space (like a z-axis), this creates a sphere, and you have eight spherical segments as homes for the scenarios, bounded each by three uncertainties.
The resulting eight scenarios get very difficult to keep apart - we humans are not good at distinguishing clearly between so many possibilities. Hence, the restriction to two drivers of uncertainty is a practical limitation to increase the practical usefulness of scenarios.
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5.
Plotlines
The two uncertainties become the axis of the scenario space. Starting at the center of the axis, each of four small groups takes a quadrant and sketches a first story describing that future. They will then work all the way to the edge of the quadrant – i.e. throughout the entire time-space. The groups can either draw a path themselves or have the plenary group suggest one after a group has presented their initial story.
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6.
Causal stories with titles
The key to a good scenario story is the switch from chronology to causality. In the vast majority of cases, the first sketch created in the first workshop is a chronological sketch: A did this, then that happened, then C pushed B, D got elected, promoted or expelled, and finally F did that. The pattern is familiar because this is how we look at life and it is how history, overwhelmingly, gets taught. But chronology condemns you to be reactive. If time drives everything – as a chronological view presumes – then what can you do? Nothing at all – you can only wait. Instead, get participants to give you reasons and logic. Repeatedly ask why.
Once people think causally, get them to flesh out, repeatedly, the story with actors, events, dilemmas, the givensFootnote 1 – all of them – titles and whatever else they can think of.
The resulting stories must be stringent, novel, challenging and plausible. Stringent means internally consistent; there must be a causal (see above) logic to them. To demand that stories are novel is a way to pull the participants into the future. We are strongly influenced by the immediate past and present, so that without continuous and insistent prodding to move into the future, you will end up with stories about things that are in the newspapers by the end of the month. A challenging story is one that is making the reader sit up and take notice, rather than put it on the pile of things to attend to ‚later on‘. And finally, plausible means that the story needs to be grounded in today’s world. It should and must leave the here and now behind, but that is where it starts.
Most of the stories you know and tell are carried by and revolve around characters, mostly human, and their ‚characteristics‘. They are the ones that do something or not, are influenced by others, learn their lesson or not and face dilemmas, which are, at times, insurmountable. Scenarios, however, in order to serve as vehicles for social learning are also meant to be used as learning vehicles for others, who were not involved in the creation of the stories.
To make it easier for these others to use the stories to create social change, they are asked to enter the scenario. It is this ‚stepping into‘that is made more difficult the more convincing the characters of your story are. Your characters are not just placeholders, they are there! So before others can ‚step-into‘, they need to get rid of the people already populating the story. And if the characters carry the story, once you get rid of them - to be able yourself to ‚step-into‘- the story may well collapse. Hence, it is better to create stories with as few characters as possible and to concentrate on the stage on which the story unfolds.
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7.
Application
Scenarios give us a tableau of possible futures. They allow us to pre-test decisions and social innovations. We can do this with three aims in mind:
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1
We adapt our decisions, plans and ideas, at all levels, to the future landscape, so that we succeed by adapting better than others.
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2
We shape the future landscape to amplify our inherent strengths. This is possible because the future is not deterministic; it is full of uncertainties, surprises and chance.
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3
We transform the future into what we think - with others - it should be.
The second and third routes are the real challenges. They require a keen and truthful understanding of one’s strengths and weaknesses; it also requires a deep understanding of the room to maneuver one has; and it requires the ability to consider the set of decisions one takes as variable.
Procedurally, in all three cases you set up a matrix. Do this with the same people that will be taking decisions or are contemplating the social innovations later on. The more homogeneous the group, the easier it is. The homogeneity can come from your age, your field of study, your function in the organization, your interest, etc. The price of homogeneity is, however, that the range of decisions you come up with are often narrower than if you have a few lateral thinkers, a few contrarians in your group.
Adapt
Arrange the matrix so that the scenario titles are listed across the top horizontally. Then write down the decisions you want to test against your futures vertically down on the very left-hand side. Be as precise as you can be. Start with decisions that are pending or overdue anyway. While writing down the decisions, note that they are independent of the scenarios. They are decisions you and / or your group will take in the here and now. They are your ideas, hopefully informed by robust and challenging hypotheses. They all should be within your, or your groups, power to take. It serves no purpose to contemplate decisions you have no power to take. Next, you go through each and every cell of your matrix, making a judgment in response to the following question: If I, or we, were to take decision 1, how would that play out for me, or us, if scenario A became true?
You should note the answers as either double positive (++), i.e. really great, or simply positive (+), i.e. ok, neutral (0 or ?), i.e. not sure, simply negative (―) i.e. kind of bad, or doubly negative (― ―), i.e. really, really bad. You do this with each cell, one at a time, so budget some time for this, especially when you do this with others. Next, you do the assessment of your set of decisions horizontally, by row. Then, you take the decisions that are predominantly positive across all columns and avoid taking those that are predominantly negative.
Shape
The cell-by-cell analysis is the same as under adapting. But this time, you do the assessment of your set of decisions vertically, by column. You evaluate which column, i.e. which scenario, is the most positive for you and engage in activities that make this scenario more likely.
Transform
You need to redo the analysis for each cell, but, this time, asking a different question: If I, or we, were to take decision 1, would that make scenario A more likely in reality? Besides answering a different question in the cell-by-cell analysis, shaping and transforming differ in another crucial detail: how you choose your preferred future. The way to do it in ‘shaping’ is a very pragmatic, almost mechanical and certainly detached manner. You pick the future in which your decisions, pending, overdue and just around the corner, lead to the biggest advantage to you. This approach originates in a good, deep and honest look at yourself - what am I good at? - and answers the question of how can I shape the future so that what I am good at gives me an advantage over others in that future.
For ‘transforming’, the choice of your preferred future originates in a - often moral based - sense of how the future should be. Morally, or normative, based choices are often harder to arrive at, and much harder to convey to others. You then need to rearrange, i.e. drop from, add to, modify, etc., your set of decisions to strengthen your chances in real life that your preferred future scenario will come true – that your social innovation will become social change.