Multiple Possible Futures

Transcript:

Planning is a complicated activity. Traditional approaches ask us to predict what might happen in the future, based on what’s happened in the past. Which is fine for short term planning, where days, weeks and months won’t likely change too much. But even the start of the new decade has shown that we’re living in a rapidly evolving world, and our environmental, political, technological and social landscapes are sure to continue changing, and quickly too!  Planning for an uncertain future requires a different approach than trying to ‘predict’ the one likely reality that might happen in the future. Scenario planning offers us the opportunity to consider multiple possible scenarios in the future, and work back from those points to the present so that we can make plans that help us prepare for different outcomes. It’s an approach that considers important questions about those multiple possible futures, like ‘If this occurs, how might we respond to it, and If this is possible, how might we move towards it’ With possibilities in front of us, we can easily spot themes and patterns across multiple possible futures and build flexible decision-making processes that help us choose our next best steps. 

Scenario planning has been used by companies all over the world. It was the process that helped American Express to deal with the replacement of traveller’s cheques with credit cards. Universities used it to prepare for the spread of online digital learning, and the entertainment industry used it to imagine all the ways people might watch their favourite shows and movies – on the big screen, the home screen or the pocket-sized mobile screen!

It’s a process that doesn’t rely on our ability to hold a crystal ball, which is almost impossible when it comes to knowing what the world will look like. I mean, think back even to this time two years ago. Would anyone have imagined that schools around the world would deliver lessons online to students at home? Or that face mask trends would show up across the world’s largest fashion labels? While we could never have predicted specific events that would lead to these two things occurring, we can always plan for building our creativity, agility, resilience and collaborative efforts so we can respond in an innovative way.