xiii As you... prepare to... engage yourself or disengage... how
can you think best about the impact of your actions? How can you see, most clearly, the environment in which
your actions will take place, and how those actions will fit with (or stand against) the prevailing forces, trends,
attitudes and influences?... This method is the scenario - a vehicle... for an "imaginative leap into the future."
xiii-xiv In a scenario process, managers invent and then consider,
in depth, several varied stories of equally plausible futures. The stories are carefully researched, full of relevant
detail, oriented toward real-life decisions, and designed (one hopes) to bring forward surprises and unexpected leaps of understanding.
Together, the scenarios comprise a tool for ordering one's perceptions... the point is to make strategic decisions
that will be sound for all plausible futures. No matter what future takes place, you are much more likely
to be ready for it - and influential in it - if you have thought seriously about scenarios.
xiv The scenario process provides a context for thinking clearly about the
impossibly complex array of factors that affect any decision.
xv Scenarios are thus the most powerful vehicles I know for challenging our "mental models" about the world.
p.3 To act with confidence, one must be willing to look ahead and consider uncertainties... Scenarios are a tool for helping us to take a long view in a world of great uncertainty...
Scenarios are stories about the way the world might turn out tomorrow, stories that can help us recognize and adapt to changing
aspects of our present environment.
p.6 Scenarios are not predictions. It is simply not possible
to predict the future with certainty... scenarios are vehicles for helping people learn... they present alternative
images of the future... Scenarios allow a manager to say, "I am prepared for whatever happens."
p.9 The purpose of scenarios is to help yourself change your view of reality -
to match it up more closely with reality as it is, and reality as it is going to be.
The end result, however, is not an accurate picture of tomorrow,
but better decisions about the future.
p.26 we thought about the key factors that would affect decisions. Some
of these were what scenario-planners call "predetermined elements," factors we could count on.
p.28 You cannot create scenarios from recipes - but you can practice
creating scenarios. As with any art, some people have a knack for it, but anyone can learn the basic practice,
and improve. Helping you do so is the purpose of this book.
p.29 People have an innate ability to build scenarios, and to foresee the future.
p.31 Once you are used to the idea of scenarios, using them comes more easily.
p.36 Scenarios are not about predicting the future, rather they are about perceiving futures in the present.
p.37 "Yes. I can see how that might happen. And what I might do as a result."
p.37 Scenarios... wrote Pierre Wack... Their purpose is to gather and transform
information of strategic significance into fresh perceptions... When it works, it... leads to strategic insights
beyond the mind's previous reach.
p.38 the paradigm for truth was that it should be law-like, preferably reduced to the form of a solvable
equation. However, since complexity has emerged as a driving force in the way the world works, the dominant
belief in a deterministic and reliably quantifiable truth has begun to yield. There are many ways of knowing.
p.39 Scenarios are stories that give meaning to events... scenarios are myths of the future
p.45 what helped focus our attention on useful subjects was paying attention to those situations that made
us uncomfortable or which we did not really understand.
p.49 People often do not realize that their decision agendas are usually unconscious. Thus, the first step
of the scenario process is making it conscious.
p.61 Like a hunter, alerted to the presence of prey by the snap of
a broken twig, you learn to pick out a key piece of vital information in the dizzying flood of words, images,
sounds, and numbers that most of us swim in... We pay attention only to what we think we need to know.
p.69 People and organizations often organize knowledge concentrically, with the most cherished,
vital beliefs at the protected center. At the outer edge are the ideas which the majority rejects. A little closer
to the center are the fringes - areas not yet legitimized but not utterly rejected by the center either. Innovation is the
center's weakness. The structure, the power, and the institutional inertia all tend to inhibit innovative thinkers
and drive them to the fringes. At the social and intellectual fringes, thinkers are freer to let their imaginations
roam, but are still constrained by a sense of current reality. The great innovators start at the fringes...
It risks even less, and in some ways is as valuable, to read about fringes.
p.71 It is difficult to predict which fringe elements will remain in obscurity,
and which will change the world.
p.79 What I look for in my book reading is surprises - perceptions that are new to me, and then become part
of my own perception.
p.101 Every enterprise, personal or commercial, is propelled by particular key factors. Some of them are
within the enterprise... Others... come from outside... Identifying and assessing these fundamental factors is both the starting
point and one of the objectives of the scenario method.
In other words, driving forces are the elements that move the plot of a scenario, that determine
the story's outcome.
p.101-102 The process of building scenarios starts with... looking
for driving forces, the forces that influence the outcome of events... driving forces are the elements that move
the plot of a scenario, that determine the story's outcome.
p.102 Without driving forces, there is no way to begin thinking
through a scenario. They are a device for honing your initial judgment, for helping you decide which factors will
be significant and which factors will not... Trust your instincts; it is part of human nature to be interested in factors
that affect the decisions we need to make.
p.107 Having identified driving forces, I usually step back to sort through
them. Which are significant and will actually influence events? Which are irrelevant?
p.107-108 Our leverage for dealing with [driving forces] comes from recognizing them, and understanding
their effect. Little by little... our actions contribute to new driving forces which in turn will change
the world once more.
p.108 After "identifying and exploring the driving forces," one must uncover the "predetermined elements"
and the "critical uncertainties." ...Weaving together these conceptual building blocks you are deepening your understanding
of the world by considering the elements of your scenarios.
p.110 Predetermined elements do not depend on any particular
chain of events. If it seems certain, no matter which scenario comes to pass, then it is a predetermined
element.
p.111-112 There are several useful strategies for looking for predetermined
elements:
- slow-changing phenomena...
- constrained situations...
- in the pipeline...
- inevitable collisions
p.115 Critical uncertainties are intimately related to predetermined elements.
You find them by questioning your assumptions about predetermined elements: what might cause [a certain unchanging situation
to suddenly change]?
p.117 Driving forces, predetermined elements, and critical uncertainties
give structure to our exploration of the future.
p.118 This chapter shows how we come to develop scenarios by exploring driving
forces, predetermined elements, and critical uncertainties.
p.135 To explain the future, scenarios... describe how the driving
forces might plausibly behave, based on how those forces have behaved in the past. The same set of driving forces
might, of course, behave in a variety of different ways, according to different possible plots. Scenarios explore...
alternatives, based on the plots... which are most worth considering.
p.136 To find the plausible plots you use the uncertainties that
have seemed so important... Here is how it works in nearly every scenario situation in which I have taken part...
We sit around talking for a day, developing ideas in response to these questions:
- What are the driving forces?
- What do you feel is uncertain?
- What is inevitable?
- How about this or that scenario?
p.164 As always, our scenario process started by looking at the driving
forces in the world today. They led us to a surprisingly large number of predetermined elements, and an equal number
of critical uncertainties.
p.195 There is an almost irresistible temptation to choose one
scenario over the other: to say, in effect, "This is the future which we believe will take place. The other futures
are interesting. But they are irrelevant. We're going to follow this scenario." ...Unfortunately, reality does not
follow even the best-thought-out scenario.
p.200 You always work out the warning signals in advance because they're less
open to misinterpretation that way... You ignore warning signs at your peril.
p.204-205 Arie de Geus... perhaps best expressed this use of scenarios in his Harvard Business Review article
on "Planning as Learning":
When people play with [mental models of the world], they are actually creating a new language among
themselves that expresses the knowledge they have acquired.
p.205-206 How do you judge whether a scenario was effective?
...The real test is whether anyone changed his behavior because he saw the future differently. And, did he change his behavior
in the right direction? Did he do the right thing? ...An effective scenario almost always changes behavior.
p.207 Scenarios can open up your mind to policies you might not otherwise
consider.
p.209 What is the right decision? It varies from case to case, but after
doing scenarios for twenty years, I believe there is one common element to all correct decisions. They include a consideration
of the bigger picture... Our fates are interconnected... Scenarios help us perceive the nature of these interconnections.
