Scenario planning

A group of analysts generate scenario planning simulation games for policy makers. The games combine known facts about the future, such as in environmental, demographics, geography, military, political, social, and science issues, industrial information, and (limiting) resources such as mineral reserves, with plausible alternative trends which are key driving forces of the games.

It isn’t real. It is make-believe, pretend. But ... the scenario planning process/choreography can reveal anticipatory thinking elements that can be difficult to formalise, such as subjective experiences during its sessions, shifts in values, new regulations, guides, and/or sudden insights.

• 80% or more of the creativity comes during the first few hours that scenario planning teams brainstorm their story elements, implications, and responses.
• If a simulation is made from a set of likely scenarios, improved response times to real threats can be expected for years after.
• Can be used for decision making when organisations are facing a critical issue and implicitly look to scenarios for help in making a decision now, immediately, and is very effective at discovering 80% of the likely effects of our decisions.
• This choreography comes at a price: The games are likely to conjure up that which is tacitly denied.

Scenarios are a way of understanding the dynamics shaping the future. It can be likened to doing kata’s in martial arts: people are removed from "reality", placed in some "future" as if it is real, and then brainstorm and practice possible responses to potential threats and challenges, and interesting wild card scenarios aiding survival of the greatest scope of life to a greater degree than any associated destruction, and other weird stuff like that.

By imagining the worst and best cases we come better prepared for either, and in general for "facing" that which we don’t like to see or hear or tend to be in denial about. So it is not so much a predictive tool and more like a training in decision making, threat modeling and risk management. We increase our self-confidence, an essential ingredient for being action-able when needed. Supposedly, it’s "value" builds up in the people participating in scenario planning sessions.

Basic choreography focused scenario planning

Decision focus

To get to a key decision in a focused scenario planning, explore more general areas of risk and opportunities for undermining first, until you can focus.

Identify the primary "driving forces" at work in the present

These fall roughly into four categories: social, economic, political and technological issues. Of course, categories are only parts of a mindset, and you can set it up completely different. Real issues entail a bit of all forces, and have reflections in the other categories. The point of listing the driving forces is to look past the everyday crises that typically occupy our minds and to explore long-term forces that ordinarily work well outside our concerns. It is these powerful forces that will usually catch us unaware.

Identify predetermined elements

Once these forces are enumerated, we can see that from our perspective, some forces can be called "predetermined" (meaning they are completely outside our control and will play out in any story we tell about the future). Predetermined elements are those that can be predicted accurately because they change very slowly. Not all forces are so evident, or so easy to calculate, but when we build our stories, predetermined elements figure in each one.

For example, I expect to find changing weather patterns in all recently published scenarios, in many different forms. In some it will be described as a worsening state, in others as a cause of great famine that was overcome by a few, or in the form of someone mentioning the great opportunity of wine making in an area that was previously unfit for growing grapes.

Develop scenario logics

After identifying and removing predetermined elements from the list of driving forces, we are left with a number of uncertainties. Discuss and sort these to make sure they are all critical uncertainties. A critical uncertainty is an uncertainty that is key to our focal issue. Our goals are to better understand all the uncertainties and their relationships with each other and we want the few that we believe are most important to the focal issue and most impossible to predict to float up to the surface.

Here we have a fork in the road: you can take both paths (recommended) or one of the two paths. If only taking the deductive road, you make yourself totally dependent on the moves of your adversaries. If only doing the inductive path you are likely to end up a sitting duck.

Note: The deductive approach is easier with larger groups and for people untrained in reaching consensus. The inductive path is more unsystematic and calls for degrees of creativity and imagination and making it a multiple days process to include night time dreaming (How many times did I not wake up with new insights?) And it requires a lot of patience with an open ended debate. To make it easier, there is also a more guided inductive path.

Deductive scenario logics

On the deductive path, prioritise the 'key factors' in order to find the two most critical uncertainties. Those then are placed, for example, in a 2×2 scenario matrix: we can reduce affinity groups of uncertainties that have some commonality to a single spectrum, an axis of uncertainty. Simplify the list of related uncertainties into two orthogonal axes, creating a matrix that allows us to define four very different, but plausible, quadrants of uncertainty. Each of these far corners is a logical future that we can explore.

Don't throw away the original list that we have taken predetermined elements and critical uncertainties from. The rest of the key factors and issues come back when fleshing out the scenarios in "rich compelling plots".

Inductive scenario logics

What if ...

By asking and discussing answers to these questions we can build a scenario that will have future consequences that may call for some strategic decisions in the present.

Official future deviations

This is a slightly more systematic variant of the inductive approach: The "official future" is what we believe, either explicitly or implicitly, will happen. Usually we make that a plausible and relatively non-threatening scenario, featuring no surprising changes to the current environment and continued stable growth. And in some circumstances the "official future" can reflect our fears, for example that the world is a mess, or we in trouble.

In this approach we start by describing radically different and optimistic futures and then work backwards, exploring the 'key factors' that would enable such a future to unfold. Deductive scenario logics can be used as an addition.

Fleshing out the scenarios

The driving forces that we generated now become "characters" in the stories that we develop. The "real" future will not be any of the scenarios, but will likely contain elements of all of our scenarios. Our goal is to pin down the "hilariously overdone" corners of the plausible futures. Make "hilariously overdone" be the outer limits of plausibility and as a result, our scenarios will have a caricature quality.

Implications

Some factors and decisions will make sense to all of us across all of the futures. Others will make sense only in one or two. The first can be used for making robust plans and for the latter we want to know the "early warning signs" that tell us if and when those scenarios are beginning to unfold. Leading indicators for a given scenario can be obvious, but more often they are subtle and could go by unnoticed. It may be some legislation, a seemingly small technical breakthrough, or a gradual social trend. When we have those identified, we can set up (watchdog and data mining) operations to monitor these critical signs.

Name of the game

Then focus on what the name of our game is and address the inverse question. Beef up the skeletal scenarios to discover the insights we need.

Data mining for key factors

Bayesian logic

For its vulnerabilities see Confusing surveillance systems.

Diagramming of effects

Normally called causal-loop diagrams. In 'diagramming of effects' observables were added, next to measurables, allowing for inclusion of "phenomenal consciousness".

Can phenomenal consciousness begiven a reductive natural explanation? Many people argue not. They claim that there is an ‘explanatory gap’ between physical and/or intentional states and processes, on the one hand, and phenomenal consciousness, on the other. I reply that, since we have purely recognitional concepts of experience, there is indeed a sort of gap at the level of concepts; but this need not mean that the properties picked out by those concepts are inexplicable. I show how dispositionalist higher-order thought (HOT) theory can reductively explain the subjective feel of experience by deploying a form of ‘consumer semantics’.First-order perceptual contents become transformed, acquiring a dimension of subjectivity, by virtue to their availability to a mind-reading (HOT generating) consumer system.

Short term scenario planning: Journalist, observer or sousveillant in europe

This is for threat modeling the quick and dirty way and for discovering (ideas for new) tools cutting across digital and analogue space.

Decision focus

What are the threats? What can we do to protect ourselves, our sources and our data? In what order do we work on that?

Key factors

• What information do we not want other people to know? (This can be anything from passwords to contacts’ details, data and documents)
• Why might someone want that information? Who?
• What can they do to get it?
• What might happen if they do?

Simulation: The Alpha Complex

This example is unseriously seriously meant for designing a real world roleplay simulation game with (much more fun than workshops and serious scenario planning). The Alpha Complex is an excellent base to build simulation games as this proposed one on.

It will allow us to try out different scenarios, roles (mindsets), forces, designs (virtual environments) and ways of organising the simulation in different environments ...

We can include information already gathered by traditional-for-opportunity-and-profit scenario planners. Claimed "market" research data may not be that important to know, but what markets they are aiming to "penetrate" in the near future could be. For example, the so-called "Gen Z" is already a target in trend watching reports by some big corporations . And while some corporations benefit from pillage and plunder of earth's resources, other corporations are into "market penetration" games because any locals that do benefit from such pillage and plunder are "emerging markets". Have a hamburger!

Besides including key factors found by others for purposes of further fucking us over in the future, we can include sources these "futurists" have no access to, namely lots of stories and realities grubby grabbers are in denial about.

Decision focus

Resistance fighter: Is it time yet?!?

Key factors

Imagine a world designed by Kafka, Stalin, Orwell, Huxley, Sartre and the Marx Brothers … We’re talking about a virtual reality of course. A Role Playing Game. The game is set in Alpha Complex, an immense and futuristic domed or underground city controlled by The Computer. The Computer runs everything within Alpha Complex ...

• What are the possible futures for the Alpha Complex?
• What are our own possible futures if and when the Alpha Complex collapses?
• What do we see in the future (time frame: the next ten years)?

Social forces	Technological forces	Economic forces	Environmental forces	Political forces	Other key factors
Quantitative, demographic issues, softer issues of values, lifestyle, demand, political energy	Direct, enabling, and indirect factors	Macroeconomic trends and forces shaping the economy as a whole, microeconomic dynamics and internal forces.	Universality of emotions	Electoral, legislative and regulatory factors	Petty tyrants
While I'm still confused and uncertain, it's on a much higher plane, d'you see, and at least I know I'm bewildered about what you want ...	A triumph of the silicon chunk, a miracle of modern magical technology ...	I'm flabbergasted. The really fundamental and important facts of the universe? Universe???	Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.	hAS aNYONE sEEN MY cAPSLOCK kEY?	The consensus seemed to be that if really large numbers of men (or the weapons replacing them) were sent to storm the mountain, then enough might survive the rocks (defenses) to take the citadel. This is essentially the basis of all military thinking. Also see covert operations war games.
IRONYGuard - Removes All The Painful Irony In Your News https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFPdnIwP-kw	2020 Media futures http://2020mediafutures.ca/Strategic+Foresight	Clarke and Dawe - Quantitative Easing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2AvU2cfXRk	The Fallacy of the Tragedy of the Commons http://steadystate.org/the-fallacy-of-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/	The EuroDiVision Contest - feat. Merkel, Žižek & IMF https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1OnDgBNlRU	The 2nd Heliocentric Revolution https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_xI_8aLjds
Will people get bored with fiddling with their phones?	Big Brother is WWWatching You https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o66FUc61MvU	The Economy: Ron Paul vs Zeitgeist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELEwjVRxxGE		On the Commodification of Human Discovery http://bollier.org/blog/commodification-human-discovery	The Dark Mountain Manifesto http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/ And a reply: Re-civ not un-civ https://freelab2014.wordpress.com/2015/05/05/re-civ-not-un-civ/
Toy Stories: photographic proof that childhood has been commodified http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/apr/01/toy-stories-childhood-commodified	Our drone future https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgLkWT246qU	Bitcoin – finally, fair money? http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/bitcoin-%E2%80%93-finally-fair-money
Libraries Make Room For High-Tech 'Hackerspaces' (US) http://www.npr.org/2011/12/10/143401182/libraries-make-room-for-high-tech-hackerspaces

Predetermining elements

Inductive logics

A resistance fighter could easily ask "What if a change in socio-political institutions does take place? What if Brian Holmes' "political ecology" is possible? What if 1% of the people in various locations of the complex join us for this change? What might lead up to such a change? What would be a plausible chain of consequences following from such a change?"

Fleshing out the scenarios

Everything Inc.

The Alpha Complex has been taken over by corporations. There are no citizens anymore, not a single one on the entire planet. There are only consumers. There's even "tailored" services for dissenters and rebels.

Their phones may be built-into their bodies, but people still fiddle with their phones, and that looks very odd because it looks like they are constantly fiddling with themselves. All corporations and companies are agile, nimble, and anticipate the market's whims aggressively. Computers, robots and drones have replaced all manual labour, police and military functions, and are now replacing the technocracy class.

There's still democracy, in name. Politics means electronic voting. Our biometrics are tracked our entire lives, down to the littlest details. Not that people care about any of that. And I don't think there's any DIY done anywhere anymore. It's against the law anyway, and the police drones see everything, really everything. No color codes anymore. No security clearances.

I haven't seen any real money in years either. We survive on spending vouchers. All goods are made in a specific area, automated of course. Another area manages everything. All other areas focus on tourism and entertainment, also run by corporations.

The underground movements flourish. We keep developing new spyware detection tools from what little that ends up on the scrapyard. But it's very hot, and the hunt for drinkable water takes a lot of time and energy.

Ecotopia

In response to centuries of pillage and plunder, collective values triumph over strictly individualistic values. Hackerspaces developed a political ecology for the dome that resulted in a small digitised distributed Alpha Complex.

Direct taxation on property and capital (not on income) funds healthcare and public works. The Computer is organised as a public ecology too.

Corporations, or what's left of them, are struggling. A lot of less developed areas didn't make it either. The new environmental regulations were not do-able for them as they had just been pillaged and plundered and had no "cushions".

The underground movements have grown huge. Their names all refer to "free market", "free economic zones" and other "free" and "freedom" labeled combinations. I keep wondering why, because they are free, just not free to take someone elses freedom away, or to rape the planet. Especially sex is considered normal, as long as it is consensual.

Still, there's a huge "dark" net on The Computer on hero and cowboy movies. Forget porn. Apparently that is not interesting.

Bohemians

The Alpha Complex has collapsed in the face of privatisation and has been replaced by a largely electronic marketplace that connects and clears transactions of every type, bitcoin-like. The dome organises itself by job via The Computer.

Communication focuses on personal empowerment. The Computer is the chief exchange medium for decentralised work, personal gratification, and domal commerce. Physical infrastructure stagnates.

Art and attention have turned inward and personal expressions flourish in new media on The Computer. All physical hackerspaces have been abandoned while technology is the leading domal culture. A homogenous patchwork of unbridled bohemianism.

Civil wars break out all over The Dome as a legacy of previously imposed borders unravels. In some locations the history of underground movements repeats itself and revolutions come around again, and again, including their co-options.

United Nations

The Computer no longer is. Surveillance has stopped. There are no nations. Oddly enough, there is still a United Nations serving as Alpha Complex. The Dome is organised in tribes, clans, (extended) families, networks, and roving bands and warlords, both online and offline.  They crumbled into city-states that consider rurals second-class people. Rurals do have connection to their own local private networks, mostly as a warning system for when gangs, warlords and city folk come to "visit" the area.

Motor clubs and gangs in developing areas and old inner cities (now small city-states) transform into political law-and-order machines. Corporations pay the police, and they have quota to meet. So does the justice system. The prison-industrial complex needs to meet their quota. In the cities and in rural areas, everybody watches over everybody else really, and this has paid off. We're all very healthy. Corporations do extremely well, but are severely regulated by the United Nations and fund all kinds of United Nations programs. And just like in the days of the pharao's, large public works are undertaken, some even spanning the globe, serving corporations mostly.

The internet is a loosely connected network of local networks with local services. Local social media have a lot of closed groups. Both online and offline skirmishes and conflicts between groups are quite normal. The underground is everywhere if you look closely. The global UN projects seem to be a favourite target of some movements.

Name of the inverse game

Solidarity network

Resources

Original scenario planning concepts

• Visioning in planning: is the practice based on sound theory? (The resulting analysis shows that while there is a basis to support some of the assumptions about visioning there are also profound weaknesses in parts of the underlying theory.) http://www.envplan.com/abstract.cgi?id=a3461

Systems thinking approach to scenario planning

• The Importance of “Wild Card” Scenarios (Discussion paper -- does not represent the views of the US Government) http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/cia/nic2020/dewar_nov6.pdf
• Using Scenarios for Strategic Planning http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/usda/using_scenarios.htm

Diagramming of effects

• AYWQuartet: How did this happen? http://www.ayequartet.com/articles/how-did-this-happen/ with a short explanation of causal loop diagramming http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/gray_diagram_of_effects.html

Bayesian logic

• Bayes’ For Beginners https://www.ualberta.ca/~chrisw/BayesForBeginners.pdf