“…of all forms of art, only film could show the remote horizon of dreams as a habitable country and, at the same time, could turn familiar landscapes into a vague scenery fit only for dreams.”
Gerald Murnane, The Plains
The word scenario came into strategy thanks to Leo Rosten, the humourist and screenwriter who also did work for the RAND Corporation during the mid-20th century. Rosten took a term, already slightly outdated in Hollywood, which meant “an outline for a proposed film”, and applied it to RAND colleagues’ future projections which invited Cold War policymakers to “think the unthinkable”. (If we go a little further, the word’s etymology takes us back to an Italian theatrical term meaning a stage set, scenery, or backdrop).
Even in the age of TikTok and bite-sized streaming video, the cinematic metaphor still has power. As Gerald Murnane’s words suggest, plausible yet challenging visions of the future context can enable us to imagine what it would mean to dwell in a place that once seemed to linger on the far horizon. In turn, that experience allows us to recognise that everything we take for granted in the here-and-now is in fact as malleable and overdetermined as the stuff of a dream.
Scenarios are more like movies than TV shows: a TV show is, by and large, a machine that is intended to run and run. A great televisual format, like Doctor Who or Days of Our Lives or The Antiques Roadshow, will keep producing episodes until the economics no longer make sense to the people with the purse-strings. The best TV shows’ basic conceit provides a perfect structure through which endless hours can be produced. A great movie concludes, however, though the experience of watching it lingers in our minds.
In the same way, scenarios are not designed to run and run. They serve a purpose at a given point in time, enabling their users to reperceive the world around them from the vantage point of imagined futures. They don’t outstay their welcome. The credits roll. The lights come up. And what we saw in the dark lingers in our minds, helping us to appreciate our reality anew.
That doesn’t mean that old scenarios lose their value completely. Participating in this week’s Oxford Scenarios Programme, now in its twentieth year, highlighted the benefits of examining even scenarios produced long ago. Revisiting past work lets us see what once seemed plausible, relevant, and challenging to those who came before us, identifying relationships, dynamics, and uncertainties which may have been forgotten on the long journey to our present day.
Exploring old scenarios is like revisiting old movies: it teaches you not just about the craft of making such things, nor merely about the values of the time in which they were made; it also helps you to see the parts of past and present which continue to speak to one another today – in the same way that a movie like North by Northwest can seem astonishingly fresh and relevant at the grand old age of 65.
Scenarios are not strategy: they offer challenging yet plausible visions of the future context, rather than recipes for action. They inform decision-making and practical activity by changing our understanding of what lies around us, including the uncertainties which permeate our situation. They take us to places that may be discomforting. In this, they are like the idea of cinema put forward by Claire Denis in a discussion I’ve cited before: “Films are not repairing [of social injustice; they merely depict]. Films are offering the best they can, not to hurt, but to be with.”
If we use scenarios to face up to the uncertainties which surround us, the issues and dynamics which sometimes escape our attention, we may better understand our situation and take wiser decisions today. Sometimes the materials which do this are simple and catchy; sometimes they’re more complex. I chose to offer Doctor Who and North by Northwest as examples above, but this kind of work could equally resemble something abstruse yet rewarding like Jacques Rivette’s lengthy, charming shaggy-dog story Celine and Julie Go Boating:
Finally, with scenario work as much as moviemaking, the question lingers of who is behind the camera, shaping the work and directing our attention. Each one of us bears an identity, or identities, that let us see some things easily and may blind us to others; we move through the world and are received by the world very differently depending on our gender, ethnicity, sexuality, education, accent, and many other markers of those identities.
Scenario work is also a matter of who gets to participate and at what stage are they involved. Are some only present to validate work made by the privileged, imbuing it with a false patina of inclusion? Do questions of privilege limit participation, as some find it easier than others to make time for contribution to foresight processes? Do the very tools and approaches of strategic foresight elevate, intentionally or otherwise, some voices, perspectives, and ways of thinking or seeing above others?
These questions cannot be avoided, and they shape the work of helping people to understand their environment better through the manufacture of plausible futures; addressing them is a fundamental part of designing and implementing any serious foresight process.
Scenarios are a process as much as a product; making them requires us to shoulder “the burden of dreams”. This was the title Les Blank gave to his documentary about the making of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, a chaotic and fraught collective endeavour, rife with conflict and chance.
This burden is also a privilege and, often, a delight. It is exhilarating and emotionally, as well as intellectually and strategically, rewarding to help someone see something useful which they could not see before. In the times we live in, full of uncertainty, part of our work must be to extend the opportunities for people to take this journey, together, with courage and care — into the futures we couldn’t see coming.
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 