Every leader and every group makes decisions based on a story of the future. This is a more or less coherent, more or less conscious, narrative about what will be happening 3 months, 6 months, a year, or five years from now. But as Betty Sue Flowers points out, here’s the weird part: The future is a fiction. It doesn’t exist. Yet you can’t make rational strategic decisions without one.
To manage this, organizations analyze ever-growing volumes of information with increasingly sophisticated analytical techniques and produce forecasts that attempt to predict the future. However, data alone is not enough, and projections are always based on assumptions, a common one being that things will keep trending as they are now.
When an important decision needs to be made, especially when the people involved in making that decision have opposing ideas about what should happen, it can be challenging to hold a generative dialogue rather than staging a fight. In this context, almost any discussion can immediately devolve into an argument. Scenarios can be very useful in creating a space for dialogue in which people can listen to each other and even help tell the story of a possible future that is not the one they most wish to create.
Flowers emphasizes that scenarios are not intended to be predictions. Instead, they act as a stage setting for generative dialogues and much better decisions to be made. By creating a set of different, plausible stories of the future, they are best used to:
Flowers describes how the process of creating scenarios can have valuable benefits, but it’s not the scenarios themselves that make a difference. The quality of conversations they allow a host to elicit makes the difference.
You won’t find scenarios in OD textbooks, but they deserve a place. As Flowers describes it, scenarios can stimulate the three enablers of transformational change: narrative, emergence and generative images, to produce conversations that make a difference. While the use of scenarios is most associated with strategic planning, the models offered here can be used for any planning requiring foresight, for example, talent management, product development, operations, to name but a few. Like Appreciative Inquiry and Future Search, Scenarios offer a different path to a similar result: generative conversations and a new and better story of the future.
Introduction
Why Scenarios?
1. The Nature of the Future
2. Making the Business Case for Scenarios
A Guide to the Practice
3. Exploring the World
4. Crafting the Interview Synthesis
5. Designing the Scenario Workshops
6. Creating the Scenarios
7. Writing the Scenarios
8. Constructing the Scenario Set
9. Working with Editorial Politics
10. Using Scenarios for Difficult Dialogues
11. Designing Strategic Conversations and Generative Dialogues
12. An Example of Scenario Practice: Putting It All Together
13. Other Resources
References
Betty Sue Flowers, Ph.D., Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus and Joan Negley Kelleher Centennial Professor Emeritus in Rhetoric and Composition, and Distinguished Alumnus of the University of Texas, is a writer, editor, and international foresight consultant, with publications ranging from poetry therapy to sustainability, including two books of poetry and four PBS tie-in books with Bill Moyers. Flowers was the series consultant for Moyers’ Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth and on-air consultant for the PBS special, The Mystery of Love. She has also served as moderator for executive seminars at the Aspen Institute, consultant for NASA, CIA, and the US Navy, Public Director of the American Institute of Architects, board chair of Public Agenda, and scenario editor for Shell Global, OAS, WEC (London), CDC, OECD (Paris), Malaysia, Eskom (South Africa), Oman, Slovenia, the Five Eyes, and the WBCSD (Geneva), among others. Before moving to New York City in 2009, Flowers served as Director of the Johnson Presidential Library and Museum in Austin, and at the University of Texas-Austin, as a professor and the Director of Creative Writing in the English Department; Director of the university’s Interdisciplinary Honors Program; and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies. Publications include (with Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, and Joseph Jaworski), Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future; “Leadership in Action: Three Essential Energies,” in The Transforming Leader: New Approaches to Leadership for the Twenty-First Century; The American Dream and the Economic Myth; “The Primacy of People in a World of Nations” in The Partnership Principle: New Forms of Governance in the 21st Century; “The Shield of Athena: Archetypal Images and Women as Political Leaders” in Ancient Greece and Modern Psyche; editor of The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti in the Penguin English Poets series; Heartfulness, a series of conversations with Father Thomas Keating; and (co-edited with Angela Wilkinson) Realistic Hope: Facing Global Challenges.
