The financial markets generally are unpredictable. So that one has to have different scenarios... The idea that you can actually predict what's going to happen contradicts my way of looking at the market.
Storytelling enables us to play out decisions before we make them, to plan routes before we take them, to work out the campaign before we start the war, to rehearse the phrases we're going to use to please or placate our wives and husbands.
The military has to think in terms of worst case scenarios. In a sense, they have to play the pessimist.
The CIA laid out several scenarios and said life could be lousy, life could be OK, life could be better, and they were just guessing as to what the conditions might be like.
A plan is only a scenario, and almost by definition, it is optimistic... As a result, scenario planning can lead to a serious underestimate of the risk of failure.
Higher energy costs are unavoidable in all future scenarios.
Remember, the goal of structured futures thinking is to come up with a picture of possible futures that will help to inform strategic decisions.
Every organization has to prepare for the abandonment of everything it does.
Whenever I think about an issue, I always argue the opposite side of it. So, when I ultimately decide on a course of action, I've already been through all the conceivable scenarios, and I'm going to go for it.
I was never much of a reader when I was a boy. Books bored me. I liked action. But I spent a lot of time thinking about things. I'd imagine all kinds of situations and how I would handle them.
Many futurists use a checklist approach to make sure they're covering a sufficiently wide set of topics in terms of both research and brainstorming during a foresight exercise.
To deal with future we have to deal with possibilities. Analysis will only tell us what is.
Strategic planning is the continuous process of making present entrepreneurial (risk-taking) decisions systematically and with the greatest knowledge of their futurity; organizing systematically the efforts needed to carry out these decisions; and measuring the results of these decisions against the expectations through organized, systematic feedback.
I have been doing technology foresight for a number of years now on the level of scenario design, primarily. I want to become more rigorous with research methodology and statistical methods. I want to shift from creating clever SF scenarios to being a professional forecaster able to make rigorous predictions.
Risk is a function of how poorly a strategy will perform if the 'wrong' scenario occurs.
Someone once said that history has more imagination than all the scenario writers in the Pentagon, and we have a lot of scenario writers here. No one ever wrote a scenario for commercial airliners crashing into the World Trade Center.
Nobody understands how the world will change. The only way you can plan for the future is to have scenarios. You have to have the courage to take a leap of faith on one of them.
You spend a lot of time as a coach going through every possible scenario. That's the kind of level of depth and versatility you have to go through. When I did that, things started to really fall into place.
An athlete needs to read situations before they happen.
What gets you out of bed in the morning? This is a question I'm often asked as a politician. It tends to be closely followed by a dozen other questions about what I'll do in 'x' scenario or whether I'll resign if 'y' happens.
Future forecasting is all about testing strategies - it's like a wind tunnel.
In a sense, there are as many forecasting methods as there are forecasters. But I would argue that most projections are derived from two major methods: macro-econometric models and eclectic judgment.
Democracies don't prepare well for things that have never happened before.
I am interested in seeing how a certain situation can develop with potential accidents. First, I am inspired by the acts of potential collaborators. It tends to be an action they have already done in a different context. I am very clear about the rules of the game, but once it's launched, I don't intervene at all.
My time at Shell was a most valuable experience because it taught me to look at the world in a long-term way. Shell takes a 20-year view on events and plans for different scenarios. It makes you see the world as a kind of large matrix.
