Created 17/7/2011 07:24:09 AM

Futures work seems to be characterized by highly personalized practices (Wilkinson, 2009). These personalized practices are marked with methods and techniques we use in our futuring endeavor, including scenario method. According to Ramirez (2008), scenarios are not forecasts.

Scenarios are organized efforts to imagine possible future conditions which are used to challenge existing perspectives and plans (Schwartz, 1996; van der Heijden, 2005) which can be deployed to counter group and individual decision biases (Schoemaker, 1993). In scenarios the future is explicitly treated as a safe conceptual space, operating at a higher logical level than the present (Normann, 2001), in which it is possible to safely consider how to act from the present into the future. In other words, scenarios act as a transitional object or space (Amado, 2001) and the "future" is an abstraction of the possible-in the-actual that allows back-casting from "there and then" to "here and now" in ways that are consistent with probable, possible, and preferred states of the future.

Scenarios effective function is that they prepare us to understand alternative futures. Now, how can we use scenarios in an effective manner? Can we use them along with other futuring methods? How?    

References:

Amado, Gilles, & Anthony Ambrose. (Eds.). (2001). The transitional approach to change. London: Karnac.

Normann, Richard. (2001). Reframing business: When the map changes the landscape. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons.

Ramirez, Rafael. (2008). Forty years of scenarios: Retrospect and prospect. In Sue Dopson, Michael Earl & Peter Snow (Eds.), Mapping the management journey (pp.308-319).Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Schoemaker, Paul. (1993). Multiple scenario development: Its conceptual and behavioral foundation. Strategic Management Journal, 14(3), 193-213.

Schwartz, Peter. (1996). The art of the long view: Planning for the future in an uncertain world. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons.

Van der Heijden, Kees. (2005). Scenarios: The art of strategic conversation (2nd ed.). Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons.

Wilkinson, Angela (2009). Journal of Futures Studies, 13(3), pp.107 - 114