Part 4 — Creating scenarios.

Imagining several plausible futures

Ask ChatGPT to come up with future scenarios for a particular sector and there is a good chance you will get reasonably decent results back, at least in English. Yet you would be short-changing yourself and your organisation by doing so. Of course you can have interesting discussions on the back of scenarios you receive at the press of a button, but there is nothing like thinking through together what the future could look like and how it could come about. This is the best way to create a shared language about the future, to learn from each other's perspectives and assumptions and even to develop a sense of "signposts" that suggest the world is moving towards a particular scenario (more on this in our later article "Adjusting course with scenarios"). Moreover, the creativity that thinking through, describing and visualising multiple futures unleashes will pay back many times over when you take the next step in the process: applying the scenarios.

Creating scenarios is not an exact science. It is rather an art, as Arie de Geus, one of the founders of scenario thinking within Shell, argued. It involves a fair amount of analytical thinking, but above all creativity. Good scenario stories explain developments, convince, offer inspiration and challenge. They are also allowed to make you feel a little uncomfortable. Their value lies in the meaning they give to events that are hard to interpret, in doing justice to uncertainty about the future, and not so much in their factual underpinning or predictive value. If you create multiple scenarios, in hindsight you will always be off the mark on a few and right on others. What matters is that the scenarios help you and your organisation have a good conversation about the future(s), interpret and think them through together, make well-considered, future-proof choices and move to action.

When you start developing scenarios, there are two steps to take. The first is, of course, the content. You will have to put together four extreme yet plausible and inspiring future stories. The second step is to also visualise this content in different forms. Prose is, after all, not the form that prompts everyone to think and act. Videos and animations, news headlines, diaries of a day in the future or infographics can help you to land the scenarios with a wider audience.

Want to know more about writing and visualising scenarios? Download the article here.

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Jeroen Toet is a senior strategist at Jester Strategy and co-author of the book Scenario planning in practice. For more than 10 years he has been helping organisations in the private and public sector make future-proof choices through a range of foresight methods, including scenario planning.

Questions about the article? Please contact Jeroen: j.toet@jester.nl or 06 11 451311.