Narratives of the future: Suspending disbelief in forest-sector scenarios

Scenario analysis considers highly uncertain future conditions. The method involves developing and analyzing plausible narratives of the future and evaluating them for a range of implications. The power of scenarios lies in creating and considering compelling stories about the future. Thus, narrative, defined as an account of a series of events, is central to the process and plays a pivotal role in engaging participants in a scenario analysis exercise. While a good scenario story can engage individuals and influence their suspension of disbelief, we know little about how participants actually respond to the scenarios so they can, and will, suspend disbelief in scenario outcomes.We explored the role of narrative in suspension of disbelief in a scenario-based study of the long-term future of Canada's forests and forest sector. We discovered that specific aspects of the scenario narratives themselves influenced participants’ suspension of disbelief. While interacting with the scenario narratives, participants actively worked to suspend disbelief by creating new narratives or accessing other existing ones, and by projecting themselves into the scenarios as characters in the stories. Our results may help scenario writers, practitioners, and researchers understand what, in one project, cued people's abilities to suspend disbelief and engage productively in discussions about possible futures.     

Multi-scale narratives from an IA perspective: Part I. European and Mediterranean scenario development

Desertification in the Northern Mediterranean region can be effectively managed only through an understanding of the principal ecological, socio-cultural and economic drivers. Scenarios can play an important role in the understanding of such a complex system. Following the fundamentals of Integrated Assessment, narrative storylines were developed that are qualitative, participatory, and highly integrated. Multi-scale long-term (2030) storylines were developed for Europe, the Northern Mediterranean, and for four local cases. This paper discusses the methodology and results of the process of developing European and Mediterranean scenarios. In Part II, the local scenario development by means of scenario workshops is elaborated upon. European and Mediterranean scenarios were based on a set of three existing European scenarios, that were adapted to fit the specific issues in the Mediterranean region, using the so-called Factor-Actor-Sector (FAS) framework. Resulting scenarios were Convulsive Change (disruptive climate change); Big is Beautiful (oversized EU and powerful multinationals); and Knowledge is King (technological development and mass migration). It proved possible to use and enrich a set of existing European scenarios and to translate them to fit the Mediterranean region. A possible use of this type of narrative storylines is further illustrated in Part II.     

The New Narrative: Applying narratology to the shaping of futures outputs

Both scenario development and design practices incorporate elements of storytelling, but this use remains undertheorised. This paper will draw upon literary theory, film theory and science fiction criticism to develop an analytical model of narrative structure and rhetorics which speaks to the concerns of scenario developers and designers when engaged in shaping the final outputs or deliverables of a futures project.After highlighting the differing role of telos in art and futures and defining the metacategory of “narratives of futurity”, this paper then defines the terms “story”, “narrative”, “narrator” and “world” in the literary context. It then shows how those concepts map onto futures practice, before going into detail regarding the variety of narrative strategies available across a range of different forms and media, and the qualitative effects that they can reproduce in audiences. There follows the construction of a 2 × 2 matrix based on the critical concepts of narrative mode and narrative logic, within which narratives of futurity might be usefully catalogued and compared, and from which certain broad conclusions may be reached as regards the relation between choice of medium and rhetorical effect. The implications of this analysis are explored in detail.     

Narrative futures and the governance of energy transitions

Today's societies confront an enormous challenge with regard to governing complex energy systems change. We argue that futures approaches based on narrative strategies that encourage individual and collective storytelling and meaning construction offer a valuable tool for enhancing societal capacity to meet this and similar governance challenges. We report on a two-day scenario planning exercise that sought to implement and test these ideas. The exercise involved a diverse group of professionals in both energy and non-energy fields, with a question focused on the narrative construction and deliberation of scenarios about Arizona's energy future in 2050.     

City foresight and development planning case study: Implementation of scenario planning in formulation of the Bulungan development plan

This article discusses the formulation of the Bulungan Development Plan (2002) that sought to formulate a 25 year city vision. The foresight process included how to prepared the process, implemented the scenario planning method, created consensus amongst stakeholders, and formulated graphic and narrative scenarios that explored alternative future for Bulungan. Based on these scenarios, the stakeholders formulated a vision for the city's preferred future. The vision is “excellence in agro industry supported by qualified human resources”.Project debriefing showed that unlike traditional forecasting or market research, the methods of foresight, especially scenario planning, is a more appropriate and powerful planning tool for integrated regional development. The main reason for this is that the future is unpredictable, and scenarios allow stakeholders to make sense of complexity.     

Scenarios and counterfactuals as modal narratives

Scenarios and counterfactuals are two types of modal narrative. Modal narratives concern themselves with contingency and determinism: with questions of possibility and necessity. While scenarios are future-oriented, focused on what might yet be, counterfactuals are narratives of what might have been. Despite this fundamental temporal difference, consideration of the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of modal narratives as a genre enables us to elucidate some critical issues concerning scenarios as a foresight methodology. In particular, the scenario literature has tended to avoid extended discussion of its implicit assumptions concerning causation, necessity, possibility and contingency. By confronting the modal nature of foresight methodologies more explicitly, the futures community may begin to lay more secure philosophical foundations for their deployment.     

Scenarios on the spatial and economic development of Europe

Countless autonomous, self-reinforcing and countervailing forces impact the future competitiveness of Europe and its spatial structure. Poignant examples include globalization, ageing and climate change, but also policy decisions taken by nation-states or the European Union. Scenarios are an appropriate method by which to explore possible future developmental pathways in a dynamic context. This contribution describes and discusses four economic policy scenarios produced by the ESPON 3.2 project and link these to the Lisbon Strategy and the European Social Model. In each scenario, a policy package is assembled from existing EU policy areas according to a particular ideological context. Afterwards, its territorial consequences are discussed in terms of socioeconomic disparities, migration and the environment. In so doing, some observations will be made regarding possible spin-offs, trade-offs and side effects of European policy when placed in a spatial context. These scenarios should hold interest for policy discussions on territorial cohesion, a concept which seeks to integrate economic development and spatial planning, as well as on European competitiveness and cohesion.     

Applying Burke’s Dramatic Pentad to scenarios

Describing the evolution of possible futures in the narrative form is widely practised. However, while stories are intuitively recognized, the ability to compose a comprehensible story is often difficult. Ambiguities or inconsistencies within a scenario-as-story are not simply aesthetic faults, but are failings which can weaken the use of the technique in a learning or decision-making process. This paper provides a working understanding of narrative as a particular kind of knowledge and proposes an adaptation of Kenneth Burke’s Dramatic Pentad as a way to explicitly capture this kind of knowledge within a scenario construction process.     

Connecting adaptation and strategy: The role of evolutionary theory in scenario planning

In this study, evolutionary theory is used to analyze and critique the strategic process of scenario planning. We argue that scenario planning can be strengthened as a theory- and practice-oriented process through the incorporation of evolutionary theory in the scenario narrative process, and in the subsequent implementation phases in response to environmental change. First, this paper addresses scenario planning in relation to theoretical perspectives on strategic planning and forecasting. Then, the concepts of variation, selection, retention, organizational learning and inertia are used to analyze scenario planning as a strategic process. This study argues that because scenario planning mirrors modes of variation and selection at the organizational level, evolutionary theory is a useful approach for assessing the plausibility of scenario narratives and strengthening the theoretical foundation of scenario planning as a process. By utilizing an evolutionary framework throughout the scenario planning process, this method has a better chance of encouraging exploratory strategic thinking without reinforcing non-blind variation or inertial practices. Concepts including inertia can also be used to better address bias and myopia in the scenario planning process. Additionally, evolutionary theory can be used to assess how entities learn from the outcomes of scenario planning as the environment changes over time.     

Multi-scale interaction in local scenario-building: A methodological framework

Despite the recent popularity of multi-scale scenario exercises, a review of the literature reveals missing elements regarding local-scale scenario-building. Scenarios built at the local level are often downscaled from higher-scale scenarios or developed within the boundary conditions of global and national scales without taking local circumstances thoroughly into account. On this background, this paper discusses the issue of scale in local scenario development and develops a formal methodological approach for local-scale scenario-building in general. The paper underlines in particular the role of local agency in coupling the larger scale and the local scale. To better illustrate how the proposed approach helps in designing local scenarios, lessons drawn from two local scenario development practices are also employed. Hence, the paper contributes to the formalisation of local scenario-building, which is believed to enhance the validity and credibility of local scenario outputs in the policy sphere.     

Choosing diverse sets of plausible scenarios in multidimensional exploratory futures techniques

Morphological analysis allows any number of dimensions to be retained when framing future conditions, and techniques within morphological analysis determine which combinations of those dimensions represent plausible futures. However, even a relatively low number of dimensions in future conditions can lead to hundreds or even thousands of plausible future scenarios. Creating highly diverse but conceivable visions of the future in which to explore decision-making, exploratory futures techniques rely on the selection of a small number of plausible scenarios from the larger set. In this paper we describe a new method for finding maximally diverse sets containing a small number of plausible scenarios from a multi-dimensional morphological analysis. It is based on a mathematical optimization of diversity that is robust to the uncertainty in the framing of future factors and states and in what stakeholders might consider diverse combinations of those factors and states. We also describe implementation of the method as a software tool and its performance in recent exploratory scenario development by CGIAR and partners for regional environmental change, food security and livelihoods.     

From data analysis to storytelling in scenario building. A semiotic approach to purpose-dependent writing of stories

Scenario building is one of the activities that companies frequently carry out in order to understand and communicate aspects or strategies about the future. Methodologies related to scenario building include, in one way or another, two phases, one oriented to the research of data and analysis, and the storytelling focused on communication. This paper identifies the transition from one phase to the other as a cause of loss of consistency and information that can jeopardize the whole process. It also develops a framework to build narratives or stories from the data obtained in the first phase, turning to diverse semiotic concepts in order to bridge this transition. This methodology is illustrated with an example obtained from Telefonica technology scenarios.     

SCENARIO GENERATION FOR OPERATIONAL RISK

Operational risk is an increasingly important area of risk management. Scenarios are an important modelling tool in operational risk management as alternative viable methods may not exist. This can be due to challenging modelling, data and implementation issues, and other methods fail to take into account expert information. The use of scenarios has been recommended by regulators; however, scenarios can be unreliable, unrealistic and fail to take into account quantitative data. These problems have also been identified by regulators such as Basel, and presently little literature exists on addressing the problem of generating scenarios for operational risk. In this paper we propose a method for generating operational risk scenarios. We employ the method of cluster analysis to generate scenarios that enable one to combine expert opinion scenarios with quantitative operational risk data. We show that this scenario generation method leads to significantly improved scenarios and significant advantages for operational risk applications. In particular for operational risk modelling, our method leads to resolving the key problem of combining two sources of information without eliminating the information content gained from expert opinions, tractable computational implementation for operational risk modelling, improved stress testing, what‐if analyses and the ability to apply our method to a wide range of quantitative operational risk data (including multivariate distributions). We conduct numerical experiments on our method to demonstrate and validate its performance and compare it against scenarios generated from statistical property matching for comparison. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Island futures—Does a participatory scenario process capture the common view of local residents?

Scenarios are often developed by small groups of motivated individuals, but how representative are they of community views of desirable futures? A scenario process in the coastal community of Vega in central Norway was complemented by a survey among 200 community residents in which respondents rated a preferred development option from a series of future choices and dilemmas. While the scenario process produced novelty and diversity in thinking about the future, the common community view reflects a more traditionalistic view of the future. Tourism was identified as a key economic opportunity in the scenario process, but the larger island community has little faith in tourism as a future cornerstone of economic development and would rather rely on traditional sectors like agriculture and fisheries. The scenarios brought out richness in future development options, highlighted place identity and support for heritage conservation based on wise use of natural resources. The scenarios were less suited for making decisions about economic investments, but produced salient information about opportunities, uncertainties and complexities of the future. Findings show the need to compliment scenario processes where a small group explores “possible futures” with surveys to explore the wider populations’ views about “preferred futures”.     

Is your vision consistent?: A method for checking, based on scenario concepts

Common sense tells us that the future is an essential element in any strategy. In addition, there is a good deal of literature on scenario planning, which is an important tool in considering the future in terms of strategy. However, in many organizations there is serious resistance to the development of scenarios, and they are not broadly implemented by companies. But even organizations that do not rely heavily on the development of scenarios do, in fact, construct visions to guide their strategies. But it might be asked, what happens when this vision is not consistent with the future? To address this problem, the present article proposes a method for checking the content and consistency of an organization's vision of the future, no matter how it was conceived. The proposed method is grounded on theoretical concepts from the field of future studies, which are described in this article. This study was motivated by the search for developing new ways of improving and using scenario techniques as a method for making strategic decisions. The method was then tested on a company in the field of information technology in order to check its operational feasibility. The test showed that the proposed method is, in fact, operationally feasible and was capable of analyzing the vision of the company being studied, indicating both its shortcomings and points of inconsistency.     

Cultural diversity and sustainable futures

This article outlines an approach to the analysis of alternative cultural futures using methods of cultural accounting and scenario analysis. These techniques are developed using a cultural matrix defined by the interrela- tionships between knowledge, technology and the natural environment. Although the methods are illustrated using hypothetical scenarios and stylized data, they may be applied to a variety of culturally diverse societies.     

The territorial futures of Europe: ‘Trends’, ‘Competition’ or ‘Cohesion’

The ESPON 2006 scenario project generated three integrated roll-forward scenarios (A roll-forward scenario is a scenario in which the hypotheses define the parameters at the start of the covered time period and the scenario then explores the unfolding of events based on theses hypotheses. This is opposed to a roll-backward scenario in which the situation at the end of the time period is defined and the scenario then explores the path to reach this situation.). In the trend scenario renewed efforts are made for the Lisbon strategy, demanding extra investments in R&D and education. Regional policy will also be continued with vigour. In the Competition Scenario bold decisions are made regarding Europe's continued prosperity. The Lisbon strategy takes precedence over institutional reform and other sectoral policies. In the Cohesion Scenario Europe is confronted with the challenge of fully integrating the various regions in Europe. The budgets for Regional Policy and Rural Development Policy are enhanced and targeted to the most needy regions. The scenarios are described as stories about the future, supported by model calculations and visualised by various maps. They concentrate on urban and rural development and on territorial developments in different parts of Europe, like North-West Europe, the Alpine Space and Central and Eastern Europe. In addition, a proactive, roll-back scenario explores the possibilities to combine competitiveness, cohesion and sustainability. A message, derived from the scenarios, is that independent of the explored policy options the European territory will be confronted with large challenges like a (rapid) decline of fossil energy resources and increasing impacts of climate change. The scenarios appear particularly helpful in the context of the current paradigm shift in European regional policy from a policy for balance to a policy for aggregate growth.