xi This book... provides a detailed, step-by-step, approach to enable the reader to create scenarios
without the aid of an experienced scenario practitioner. It enables development of a broader range of scenarios that
include more extreme futures than those that are produced using conventional scenario practice. As such, organizations can
become prepared for a broader range of futures, including those of low predictability.
xii Scenario thinking provides structure to intuitive thought and also provides challenge to initial intuitions,
such that higher-level intuition is developed.
p.1 Scenario thinking offers a way for individuals and groups to face up to the threats and opportunities
of the future, and their potential impact upon the organization or community. As a decision-maker in this sort of
situation, you may not fully understand the complexities and ambiguities that the future may hold.
p.4-5 In this book, we present a clear set of guidelines and examples on "how to" undertake scenario
analysis. By being aware of and practiced in the art of undertaking this type of analysis, you should be prepared to face
up to the future in a proactive way. We outline how use of scenario method takes you beyond bounded thinking, and
enables you to think about the future from multiple perspectives at the same time. By its very nature, scenario thinking presents
an explicit challenge to "business-as-usual" thinking.
p.8 The practice of scenario thinking... is a means of overcoming strategic inertia, since it implicitly
accepts that managers' best guesses abut the course of future events and about the appropriateness of strategic choice may
be mistaken. Essentially, scenario interventions within organizations construct multiple frames of future states of the external
world, only some of which may be well-aligned with current strategy.
p.8 Each individual scenario has an infinitesimal probability of actual occurrence, but the range
of a set of individual scenarios can be constructed in such a way as to frame the uncertainties that are
seen to be inherent in the future... because each of the scenarios... is plausible, the events and impacts that they outline
must be considered possible for strategic planning purposes.
p.8-9 Essentially, scenarios highlight the reasoning underlying judgments about the future,
and give explicit attention to sources of uncertainty without trying to turn an uncertainty into a probability.
A major focus is on how the future might evolve from today's point in time to the horizon year of the scenario -
say 15 to 20 years hence. Scenario thinking analyses the relationships between:
- the critical uncertainties (as they resolve themselves);
- important predetermined trends (such as demographics); and
- the behavior of actors who have a stake in the particular future (who tend to act to preserve
and enhance their own interests).
p.10 Our structured approach to scenario thinking will enable you to:
- identify the forces in the broad business environment that are actually driving the issue forward;
- consider the range of possible and plausible outcomes of each of these forces; and
- understand how the forces interact with each other in terms of cause and effect, and chronological order;
and, from these:
- explore the "limits of possibility" for the different futures that might unfold as a result.
p.10 Those who have to make the decisions should also be those who create the scenarios.
p.16 We also recognize... that issues of power and influence are central in determining how situations
will unfold. In this recognition, we align with Flyvbjerg (1998) and others who argue that power is a key
determinant of... organizational... thinking, and that rationalization, rather than rationality, is central to decision-making.
p.44 The key aim in writing scenarios is to grab the attention of the intended
audience in order to convey clear, concise and plausible stories about what types of futures might unfold
as a direct outcome of decisions made in the present and over time in relation to the focal issue.
p.55 If the physiological needs are relatively well-satiated, then physical safety needs become the focus
of attention. If both physiological and safety needs are relatively well-satisfied, then the need for love, affection and
belongingness become a focus. The next set of needs in Maslow's hierarchy is the need for esteem from others.
p.56 Intuitively, it would seem that one's own experiences of the past resolution of conflicts
- perhaps as recalled or previously experienced, and including personal as well as non-personal conflicts - would
be a strong guide to the prediction/resolution of the outcomes of conflicts, since Maslow's hierarchy of needs underpins all
of human behavior.
p.57 the likely actions of stakeholders to enhance and preserve their own interests in a particular unfolding
scenario are thought through. These authors emphasize the need to consider Maslow's hierarchy of needs in order to
understand the likely reactions of particular stakeholder groupings to the unfolding sequence of events within a particular
scenario storyline.
p.58 Winners achieve their outcomes by exercise of power to maintain or enhance their interests.
p.59 "Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power?"
p.67 In Chapter 2, we introduced scenario method as a structured approach to exploring complex and ambiguous
business problems in terms of the range of uncertainties that define them. We showed how to explore the "limits of
possibility and plausibility" for them individually, and how to construct maps of causality and chronology in order
to make them more easily understood and dealt with, without reduction or elimination of the constituent elements.
p.76-77 we now consider in greater detail what Cairns et al. (2010) refer to as the "critical scenario method"
(CSM) as an approach... For Aristotle, prudence or practical wisdom should inform decisions made by key power-brokers based
upon... judgements about what is "good for man"... Flyvbjerg has developed a set of four seemingly simple questions that we
can ask in relation to any project, strategy or intended set of actions in order to assess it in phronetic terms. These are:
- Where are we going?
- Is this development desirable?
- What, if anything, should we do about it?
- Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? (Flyvbjerg, 2003: 364) [JLJ - Where else could
we be going? What is uncertain?]
p.103 Another way of simplifying our holistic choices is to focus on the most important attribute and identify
a cut-off point that defines the boundary of acceptability. Here, strategies that fail to deliver enough in terms of short-term
profit will be eliminated from further consideration. The decision-maker then considers the next-most-important attribute
and, in tern, eliminates, say, those strategies that may be acceptable in terms of short-term profit, but fail to deliver
in terms of market share. This decision principle is called elimination by aspects.
