Earlier this year, I took part in the ‘Scenarios and the Future of Work’ project, hosted by the Danish Design Centre in conjunction with the innovation foundation Nesta.
“Scenarios should stretch your thinking and challenge you to reimagine where you’re headed strategically, but they’re always grounded in the here and now: looking at the weather on the mountain to understand what might happen in the valley below.”
We also talked about technology, fear, and the surprising history of photographic manipulation which lies behind deepfakes.
We discussed different foresight methodologies, the particular challenges and opportunities in working on futures with trade unions, and, inevitably, COVID-19, but our conversation began with Aída’s sporting career, and the lessons it taught her about coping with turbulence and uncertainty.
Matt:
What was your journey to becoming a foresight practitioner? You were a lawyer, and a competitive open-water swimmer – how did that lead you to work on foresight, and how did it prepare you for the role?
Aída:
In many ways I saw myself as a swimmer first and everything else second! I studied and practiced law, completed a doctorate. As an open water swimmer I competed at international level, also racing in Open Water World Cups. Read more →
Last week, I put together this one-hour video session for America’s Engaging Local Government Leaders network, ELGL.
It’s a straightforward foresight and strategy starter pack, no nonsense, no jargon, helping to answer the questions “Where are we going?” and “What should we do?”
The session is aimed at US local government leaders, but should work for a wide range of institutions, communities, and settings.
‘Never assume the future will be an extension of the past’ Scenario planning in the Age of COVID-19
Matt Finch sat down with Trudi Lang, a senior fellow in management practice at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. Lang is a researcher and strategist with particular expertise in scenario planning, a foresight methodology that seeks not to predict the future but to usefully challenge our assumptions about what’s coming next.
“The key challenge of government is to prepare for a future in which we will be surprised time and again,” said Peter Ho, then Singapore’s top civil servant, in 2009.
Few people at the start of 2020 would have anticipated an enormous symmetric shock affecting the entire world, demanding drastic interventions from the state — yet experts had been warning of a pandemic for considerable time. Indeed, as the New York Times reported in March, the US federal government had rehearsed for a pandemic three times over the last four years.
With the world plunged into uncertainty, how do we navigate the turmoil of the current pandemic and look beyond the crisis, into a future that is hard to picture clearly?
Living and learning foresight: From Western Australia to the World Economic Forum
For Trudi Lang, the current pandemic represents a profound and dramatic transformation of the contexts in which we operate: “Even if we foresaw the possibility of an outbreak of a contagious disease, the exponential nature of COVID-19’s growth has been remarkable. It’s certainly the first time in my lifetime that I’ve seen such a stark and global example of exponential (as compared to more linear) change.”
Prior to joining the Saïd Business School, Lang was Director and Head of Strategic Foresight for the World Economic Forum, and also worked as a foresight consultant for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). But her first experiences of constructively engaging with the future came from life as a farm girl in Western Australia.
In agriculture, many factors are “extrinsic” or beyond an individual’s control — whether that’s the weather, the cost of fuelling machinery, or the price of a crop, which is dependent on the harvest in other parts of the world. For Lang’s family, the fortunes of their farm relied on them finding ways to cope with a degree of constant uncertainty.
Lang says, “I didn’t just grasp the idea of future uncertainty intellectually: I lived it. What growing up on the farm taught me is that, no matter what you do, the future is not always going to be a replication of the past. That’s a useful lesson to recall in the current pandemic. It’s an extreme
example, but it reflects what we learned on the farm: you can never assume that good years are going to last nor that the future will necessarily be an extension of the past.”
Today, Lang is a champion of foresight methods including the Oxford Scenario Planning Approach, which is designed to help organisations cope with situations characterised by “TUNA conditions”: Turbulence, Uncertainty, Novelty, and Ambiguity.
TUNA fishing in the age of COVID-19
Lang explains that scenario planning “enables us to discuss and frame in different ways what we see around us, thereby helping make sense of the uncertainty in our midst and how things may play out.”
Unlike forecasting approaches, which seek to model and predict what awaits us, a foresight approach needn’t correctly anticipate the one future which will certainly come to pass. Instead, it will identify a wider range of future uncertainties, trends, and issues which may affect and inform strategic decisions.
In the immediate context of the current coronavirus outbreak, Lang says that such considerations include the breadth, depth, and duration of current uncertainties. Which of the changes we are currently seeing might prove to be permanent? Will COVID-19 outbreaks recur for a long time? How will the pandemic relate to other pressing global issues such as climate change and inequality? Will emergence from the crisis be characterised by spurts and starts, a continuous and orderly progression, or an ongoing mess?
Lang explains that with the approach used by her and her colleagues, “The focus is on the present, for example related to a strategic action to be taken or sense to be made of an emerging situation. The scenarios are about exploring the future context of that action or situation, thereby opening up new ways of seeing the options in the present.”
This means that instead of creating scenarios for a distant time, a project may focus on a closer date — a matter of weeks or months from now, if your question is around emergence from quarantine or lockdown. Lang cautions that thinking about the pandemic’s aftermath, and what that means for your organisation, might be better addressed from the vantage point of a scenario two- to five-years hence, or even further.
While timescales can be condensed in the era of COVID-19, it may be that plausibility needs to be stretched. Scenario planning describes future situations which provide both challenging and useful inputs to the decision-making process, even if they do not come to pass. The extreme nature of the current situation creates opportunities to explore even more challenging future contexts than would usually be contemplated.
Lang notes that “Contingency planning is about risk, which involves some judgements about probability and impact, and results in a contingency plan to cover the risk. Scenarios address deep uncertainty where probabilities can’t be judged. Scenarios may highlight or identify new risks, but they will also reframe a situation, indicating potential new opportunities and collaborations. By stretching plausibility, the scenarios can become more insightful and challenging, and thus far more useful as they help people learn more about what might be.”
Getting the basics right
Even if the pandemic accelerates or accentuates some aspects of scenario planning, it’s still important to get the basics right. Above all, that means attending carefully to who will use the scenarios, and for what purpose. This is what makes the difference between a project with useful outcomes, and one which is merely a speculative visioning project.
“Scenarios are a means to an end,” says Lang, “so being grounded in what people are trying to achieve is key. What is the purpose of your organisation? What makes people excited about their work? What makes them care? Scenarios are about future contexts people may have to inhabit, so connect these futures with what your organisation is fundamentally trying to achieve.”
If you fail to carefully identify and secure the intended use and user of your scenarios, the project may, unsurprisingly, prove useless and its insights will not be acted upon. The US government’s multiple rehearsals for a pandemic over recent years may prove instructive in this regard.
Lang notes that pandemics have been included in scenarios before, but this inclusion hasn’t always led to preparatory action: “Scenarios are a means to an end, not the end in itself. If a pandemic arises in foresight work, but we remain ill-prepared, a factor to consider is whether the work had a clear user and use.”
Scenario planning has been welcomed into some governments and public bodies, alongside its uptake in the corporate world, but distinctive approaches may be required to suit the public sector’s unique features and the complexity of its stakeholder relationships.
Lang suggests that one approach is for public bodies to consider scenario planning as a conversation to be hosted. Project organisers are bringing together stakeholders to jointly inquire into a future strategic context and explore new options: “Learning through the conversation builds a shared language and a shared understanding among people, with the result that valuable new collaborations can be enabled that mobilise resources and open up new opportunities.”
Building social capital and enriching strategic thinking
Lang’s academic research has indicated that building new social capital can be a key reason for undertaking scenario planning. Scenario projects, being highly collaborative, can create new and stronger ties between participants, increasing the richness and extent of the network through which new strategic ideas and opportunities are identified and taken forward. Departments, teams, and stakeholders used to working from different perspectives can develop a shared language and find common ground in their collective discussion of the future.
Lang points to Singapore as one example of a country which is constantly considering what might change in its future, and how that change might be harnessed to beneficial ends. Given its lack of natural resources, its size, and its location, Singapore cannot afford strategic complacency and has a strong public sector scenario planning tradition. Singaporean civil servants use the technique, Lang explains, “to frame and reframe their understanding of what is evolving to generate new opportunities and identify emerging risks.”
While Singapore has been all too aware of the uncertainties in its future, is it possible that Australia’s resource wealth, and the era of the mining boom, have insulated it from such sensitivity to strategic challenges? Beyond its direct health impacts, the pandemic has bought into stark relief issues that Australians had taken for granted.
“For example,” Lang points out, “there was no real disadvantage in shifting manufacturing offshore because keeping the costs of production down was perhaps the key decision criteria. One of the effects of this decision has been to trade a form of resilience for efficiency; how will the relationship between these two develop post-pandemic?”
Exploring such questions is where foresight comes into play. For people who wish to embark on scenario planning, Lang advises them to speak with someone who already has experience of the approach: “If scenarios work is new to your organisation, bear in mind that this may be about introducing a new way of working that may be unfamiliar; every organisation will have its own ways of thinking about the future and informing strategic decision making. Consider starting in a small way, giving people the opportunity to become involved and familiar with the practice to adapt it to the needs of the organisation.”
Some people within a given organisation may be particularly keen to engage with the future using new methods, and excited about embracing a new challenge.
Lang notes: “Usually these creative and imaginative people are also good strategic thinkers, seeing rich interconnections in the issues they uncover. But remember to also bring in new, less familiar perspectives by interviewing people outside your organisation or inviting them into your scenarios conversations.”
“When you help people to realise that they are already working with a set of expectations and assumptions about the future, they get curious about unpacking those assumptions, questioning them, and opening up, getting more imaginative. Once you realise what your assumptions are, you can start to look beyond them, and locate your blind spots.”
On Tuesday 5th May, 8am Pacific / 11am Eastern / 4pm in the UK, I’m teaming up with ELGL (Engaging Local Government Leaders) to talk foresight, scenarios, and planning for uncertainty in local government.
The short session provides a practical nuts-and-bolts overview of some scenario techniques and approaches, designed to support organisations that are new to the process as they seek to make sense of future uncertainties and take wise long-term decisions.
Today I spoke with leading US information professional R. David Lankes about foresight, strategy, and coping with uncertainty beyond immediate short-term crisis response.
David created one of the first 100 web sites ever, plus the first web presence for CNN, the Discovery Channel, and the U.S. Department of Education. We spoke about what he foresaw at the beginning of the Internet age, the surprises which emerged along the way, and how we might learn from the past when the future is uncertain and unlikely to repeat what went before.
In a situation like the one we find ourselves currently in, there’s bound to be a lot of speculation.
Whether you’re now quarantined at home or still going in to your workplace, the chances are that you’re scrolling your digital device for the latest updates and information.
On Twitter today, I watched a thread of futurists roll by, “brainstorming about medium-long term scenarios” of COVID-19, offering what boiled down to a series of “what-if” questions.
But this is where I think we have to be more disciplined about how we approach the future.
One of the joys of looking at what comes next is that no-one knows for sure. The best efforts of the human race across history have failed to give us either crystal balls or time machines. Evidence, by definition, cannot be gathered from events which haven’t happened yet, so any predictive model involves a degree of faith that the future will be like the past in certain respects.
As a result, there’s a danger that we mistake the future for either a projected dot on a graph, or an intuition shaped by our hopes and fears. In fact, it’s a place we’re going to have to live, as rich and complex and contradictory as the present, and it’s totally inaccessible to us, right up until it arrives.
The word “scenarios” gets bandied around a lot in these circumstances, by people who really mean either “contingencies” or “speculations”. But scenarios aren’t daydreams, dystopias, projected data points, or simple “what ifs”.
Scenarios are methodically constructed by a group of stakeholders to locate the futures which lie outside of current assumptions. They’re not predictions and don’t expect to successfully locate the one future which will actually come to pass. A good scenario can be wild and unlikely, as long as it helps you to notice something you had previously ignored about what lies ahead.
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Scenarios have to be plausible – meaning that they challenge assumptions but are useful to inform decision-making. That means that, while they may incorporate some wild or unexpected circumstances, you’re not likely to spend much time scenario planning for the rise of Atlantis or the arrival of flying saucers from the great beyond.
Scenarios, as used on the Oxford Scenario Planning Approach at the Saïd Business School, actually have a pretty tight definition:
A small set of manufactured possible future contexts of something for someone for a purpose with a pre-specified usable interface and used.
This means:
we construct possible futures for a specific context, user, and purpose;
we only construct enough futures to usefully inform decision-making;
we attend, in advance, to how the user will receive and incorporate the scenarios into their work;
and the scenario engagement is only truly successful if the scenarios are used – that is to say, if they inform the decision which needs to be made.
This is why a lot of a scenario planner’s work happens in advance of the event at which possible future contexts will be created and discussed – because it is vitally important to define and understand the decision which the scenarios are meant to inform, and the context in which this decision will be made.
It is also why scenario planners must work hard in the latter stages of the process, once the future contexts have been created: the future stories and visions must inform the present-day decision which needs to be made.
As the great scenario planner Pierre Wack noted, in his work, articulating the scenarios – the future visions or stories themselves – was a small proportion of the time spent with executives. Once the scenarios had been presented to leaders, the rest of the time focussed on understanding and exploring the factors. The stories of the future themselves can be discarded once they have opened users’ eyes to the issues which lay outside of their previous framing.
So, as the pandemic sweeps the globe and you start to ponder what happens next – for you, your community, your organisation, your nation, the whole global order – don’t get too caught up in speculation and punditry; and certainly don’t mistake them for useful scenarios.
This was an “a-ha” moment for university researchers seeking new issues to explore around the digitalisation of education.
In scenario planning, we don’t aim to predict the future, but rather to generate plausible visions which can usefully inform present-day decision-making.
The future stories we create together are intended to highlight issues and drivers which exist in the present; the future scenario can then be set aside in order to focus on the issue at hand.
For the Oslo education researchers, a world in which parents and institutions warred over children’s health in a heavily-surveilled society – bickering with ‘the algorithm’ even over when to wipe your child’s nose – highlighted the extent to which their research should explore questions of health and wellbeing.
The campaigners argue that if businesses are sending staff home, then young children – who are less able to follow guidelines on infection control, like coughing into your elbow – should certainly go back to their families too.
Questions of distance learning, and education via screens and digital devices, may be sharpened by the current pandemic – even for the youngest children.
How will coronavirus affect the way we teach and learn, in the short and long term? Could it impact even the youngest children, irrespective of whether they contract the disease?
Self-educating gender-curious teens in a hopeful, ecologically-ravaged world; health as a battleground between parents & big business; a drift to authoritarianism and teachers doing the job of social workers.
In our “Library Leaders Workshop Day” on May 4, Brendan & I will help senior library staff to explore a range of strategic tools and techniques. These will help teams think about changing wants and needs in their communities, building the capability to respond with creative local strategies.
Join us for one or both of these sessions in May – we’re looking forward to seeing you.
Climate crisis, machinery of government changes, radical transformations around the definition of play, inclusion, and identity – New South Wales librarians share scenario planning from our @statelibrarynsw workshop pic.twitter.com/vagTB4vGgC
Prior to joining the Saïd Business School, Lang was Director and Head of Strategic Foresight for the World Economic Forum, and also worked as a foresight consultant for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). But her first experiences of constructively engaging with the future came from life as a farm girl in Western Australia.
