Future scenario creation

Adapted from The Leaders Edge.




Summary: Scenarios are possible futures, deliberately explored. Used by organizations to navigate through complexity toward a preferred future, scenarios are an increasingly common leadership tool. Creating scenarios of possible futures is a way to help with preparedness, strategic planning or visioning (Schwartz, 1991). Typically scenario creation has an imaginative aspect in which people (leaders, managers, employees, citizens) literally make images and tell stories about alternative versions of the future. Scenario creation also has a dialogical aspect, such that the scenarios are put into the middle of deep and probing conversations. Finally, scenario creation involves “serious play” (Palus & Horth, 2002) such that the creation and exploration of the scenarios is playful and creative, and yet is grounded in serious inquiry. Visual Explorer has features that support these imaginative, dialogical, and playful aspects of future scenario creation.

Benefits:

• Imagining alternative futures for smarter planning
• Tapping into personal experiences and passions

• Paying careful attention to details and to big pictures
• Putting something tangible in the middle of an otherwise abstract conversation
• People frame and illustrate their thoughts with each other
• Surfaces individual and shared assumptions
• Images bridge differing context and cultures
• Create new metaphors and shared images
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• Tangible images that can be reused in paper and digital forms

• Get people out of their “stuck” perspectives
  

Background.

Arie De Geus, former Royal Dutch Shell strategist, observes that the average life span of a company is less than that of the average person. The reason, he believes, has to do with perception: People will not see that which is foreign to their experience or which calls forth unpleasant emotions. In business, this trait gets expressed as the corporate one-track mind: companies plan only one path into the future and then see only signals relevant to that path. Donna G., a team leader at Chemstar, talks about getting stuck in a rut that she calls “the same set of eyes”:

This company is famous for collecting more data. My team would collect the data and look at it with the same set of eyes all the time and ask the same questions and get the same answers. We learned to look at the same data in a different manner. Once we learned that, it opened up other avenues to looking at different sets of data that they wouldn’t even have considered before.

Example: Movie Making as a future scenario technique

An effective imaging technique for exploring future scenarios is one we call movie-making. The “movie” made is a wall-sized collage of images and words that tell an imaginative story about where an organization might be headed, or how certain challenges might worsen or resolve “once upon a time in a place not too far from here.” Movie-making produces searching dialogue in a group faced with a complex challenge.

A movie in this case is fiction with important truths embedded. Each movie explores its theme in an imaginitive, fictive way, yet capturing true ideas and valuable intuitions for further dialogue and testing.

Typically when we work with a group, one or several themes in their challenge become apparent over the course of our discussions. For a movie-making exercise, we lay out the themes, split the group into sub-groups of 4-8 people, and give each sub-group a theme (or have them select one) for their movie.

Visual Explorer can first be used as a lead-in to the movie-making exercise, to help determine the themes of the movies. Groups might explore one or several framing questions in a VE dialogue, such as: What are the big trends that will determine our future? What are we missing or overlooking or forgetting as we try to see the future? What might this organization be like in 10 years?

From this initial VE session list and prioritize key themes that will influence the future of the organization. Use these to plot the movies.

Materials:

Long wide paper for each group (roughly 3 meters long; 1 meter high)

Scissors, tape, glue sticks

Magazines, variety, lots of images or graphics

Set of Visual Explorer images

Pens, pencils, paints

Directions:

Each sub-group combine words and images on a roll of white paper to create a “movie.” Use some words but mostly images and illustrations, in a narrative sequence over time, moving from left to right. You may re-use the VE images from the theming exercise.

Your movie should have three parts to the plot: First: “Once upon a time, there was an organization something like us … Second: Then one day something happened, a catastrophe, an invention, a revolution, or … Third: This is how it all turned out, for better or worse.”

Show the movie to the rest of the group. Then, use it as a springboard for dialogue exploring your theme.

Tips:

Use large amounts of white paper—doublewide, 3 meters long.

If you get stuck creating a plot, start arranging images on the roll of paper. Play with the visual ideas, and the pieces of paper, and explain it all later. (This is the technique of collage; see also collide and stick.)

If you have conflict as you wrestle with the content of the movie, then invent characters to represent the different ideas and put them ALL in the movie. Let the characters work out your conflict.

\Movies need not be about probable events. In fact, we find that the process works best when the group is instructed to build the plot around something “unexpected or even catastrophic.” These days it is probable that something unexpected will happen.

In debriefing the movie, ensure that the period from “and then one day…” is explored carefully so the movie doesn’t simply jump from the stuck point to “…and they all lived happily ever after.” Ask: What practical, new processes and events occurred that contributed to our progress from being stuck to finding a meaningful outcome?

Robin W., a VP of software development, explains how she used movie-making with a large, diverse group of people:

I used movie making to explore a critical issue facing our division. All the attendees at the meeting are leaders of functional groups. Some are my direct reports; the rest are supervisors who report to my direct reports. I created two groups of four each…. We covered the walls with big, white rolls of paper. I also provided images from magazines, markers, ribbon, glue sticks, stickers, string, and other craft stuff. I instructed them to work fast and make their movies "as provocative as hell." And they did!

One group created a "movie" that went something like this: Once upon a time there are four friends who work at a computer software company which looks like … this … then one day, December 31, 1999 to be exact, they commit the perfect crime. They break into the company directory and payroll system and change all the employee titles and salaries. Boss becomes Subordinate, and all Subordinates become Bosses. This creates an interesting series of situations … in which everyone sees issues and problems from a totally different perspective, and they are better able to solve problems because of these new perspectives. The closing frame is the words "Live the Dream."

This movie stimulated a powerful dialogue on these points:

· The need to see issues from more than one perspective;

· The importance of acknowledging the perspective of corporate management;

· The importance of acknowledging our clients' needs;

· The importance of acknowledging our staffs' needs and balancing them with what our clients need;

· The need to "shield" our clients from our internal problems and issues;

· The need to help staff see their clients' perspectives;

· The need to improve communication of needs and expectations.

When making movies within organizations, keep a few things to keep in mind.

Group Hesitancy. Before the process begins people might be concerned that movie-making will be too “touchy-feely.” These concerns almost always fade during the dialogue, as real business issues get explored in depth and detail. In fact, increased “touch” and “feel” about complex issues are a key objective of the exercise.

Opposition Within a Group. Having something in the middle of the group—the movies—allows opposing ideas a common focus. The dialogue that follows the making of the movies is the real point of this exercise. If groups experience conflict as they make the movie, suggest they craft their conflict into opposing characters, put them into the movie, and see how it comes out.

Analytical Overdrive. When groups start designing movies, their conversation often begins in abstractions and analysis. You can facilitate the imaging process by encouraging them to go up to the wall and physically start sketching out the ideas. At the wall, people usually becomes more intuitive, imaginative, and playful.

Valuable Metaphors. Metaphors created in these movies usually contain insights about the state of the organization, where its headed, and the means to get there. Your group can take away these metaphors and use them to craft and communicate your mission, vision, and values.

Unpolished Drafts. Keep in mind that movies are more like unpolished drafts than finished scripts. They tend to be non-linear and less integrated than a traditional story. These qualities are actually helpful to the ensuing dialogue since they invite revision and further “what ifs.”

Finish with Convergence. Harvest the best ideas. Plan next steps and responsibilities.

Additional Resources:

de Geus, A. “Strategy and Learning,” Reflections, 1(1), 1999.

Mieszkowski, K. “Wild Cards: Report from the Futurist.” Fast Company, issues 13, p. 30. February, 1998.

Palus, C.J., & D.M. Horth. The Leader's Edge. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002.

Peterson, J.L. Out of the Blue: How to Anticipate Big Future Surprises. The Arlington Institute. 1997.

Schwartz, P. The Art of the Long View. New York: Doubleday/Currency, 1991.

van der Heijden, K. Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996.