Abstract
Words cannot express the immense gratitude and respect we have for Jim Dator. During his tenure as Editor, the journal evolved and grew into a critical and creative space to explore both thematic and methodological issues within the broader futures and foresight field. While Jim would probably not want us to say so, we feel compelled to thank him for all that he has done as well as his approach to things. Asking “what’s next?” has been central to Jim’s very being-in-the-world, and, as a means to show our immense gratitude to him, we are planning on keeping this feature as part of each Editorial.
We are humbled and honored that many members of our Editorial Board have agreed to continue supporting the journal, and we are excited to add more members who will increase the range of perspectives and voices that constitute the broader futures and foresight field.
As there are some new faces working behind the scenes at World Futures Review, we thought that it was best as well as prudent to introduce ourselves as journal’s new Editors and create a space for some members of our expanding Global Editorial Team to introduce themselves. We will introduce others in future issues. In addition to a short bio, we asked everyone to reflect on futures as a field and their contribution to the journal.
Introductions
Nur Anisah Abdullah
Co-Editor-in-Chief
Anisah, graduated with a PhD from the University of Strathclyde has been affiliated with higher education institutions since 1994 and her research focuses on futures of education, business performance and foresight for strategy development. She teaches courses in the Business School with a focus on the MBA strategy module and supervises postgraduate research projects. Anisah is associated with 2GC UK since 2009—consulting projects on performance measurement and the Balanced Scorecard in the Middle East and Asia. She founded Futures Sandbox, an independent non-profit community learning platform for Futures Studies, an initiative for transformative action learning and youth development.
I came to learn about future studies in 2012 when I was looking for some methodologies to help people think broader, deeper, and further in time. At that point, I felt that the tools I was using when facilitating planning workshops were limiting. Take for example the SWOT analysis, it works well only if the people in the room have knowledge, to some extent, the trends and emerging issues influencing the operating environment; and the effects and impacts of those trends and emerging issues might have on the community and the wider society, which in turn affect and impact the way we live and the way we work. I felt we needed some tools to help us take a few steps back before attempting to work on the SWOT analysis. We needed tools to help us explore emerging issues brought about by certain trends, and without active exploration we could not comprehend the extent to which the layers of impacts of emerging issues bring, we could not fully grasp the challenges that lie further along. When we can’t grasp the possible impacts of those challenges, the solutions we attempted to develop today for tomorrow would almost always be fire-fighting and short-sighted rather than thoughtful actions in anticipation of tomorrow’s challenges. At planning workshops and discussions I felt people’s thinking were limited by doing what they were familiar with, limited by being bogged down with the granularity of day to day activities so much so that none took time to look beyond what’s today, beyond solving today’s problems. People’s actions were often constrained by decision makers who were not willing to take risks. They prefer patterns, something recognizable and consistent with what we already know. They were captivated by the numbers generated by forecasting models. They worked within the comfort of knowing and trusting precedents of successful business models. They work with a fixed vision, a blueprint and get everyone to work toward it rather than working with something more organic and emerging. Such practice sets out the mindset of the need to replicate best practices and benchmarks with limited understanding of how useful such practices can be for the context in which we are working with; or whether such practices were relevant to solve the issues we were faced with. These observations and experiences brought me to futures studies methodologies. I used them to help decision makers move away from what was familiar, to prod imaginations of what can possibly be.
I am interested in advancing future studies and literacy to the wider community, to more levels of the society, in particular those who have no or limited access to such knowledge and information. We need futures literacy as much as we need to learn to read, write and count. We need futures methodologies to stretch thinking out of our comfort zone, to shift mindsets, to encourage imaginations of the not-yet-possibles. There’s certainly lots of opportunities for the existing education system to incorporate futures studies in the design of curricula, and to challenge and expand the narratives about the relationship between education and the future.
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Alessandro Fergnani
Associate Editor
Alessandro holds a Master’s of Futures Studies from Tamkang University (Taipei), and is currently a PhD candidate in Management and Organisation at NUS Business School (Singapore). Alessandro conducts research on futures & foresight theories and methods and their applications to management, strategy and work. His research has been published on Academy of Management Perspectives, Futures, Futures & Foresight Science, Foresight, and World Futures Review, among other journals. Alessandro is also head of scenario consulting at Shaping Tomorrow, where he assists organizations using scenario planning to enhance strategic decision making. Alessandro gives futures & foresight and scenario planning workshops globally, and co-teaches scenario planning and future vision EMBA courses at NUS Business School.
I am mostly interested in researching, teaching, enhancing, and expanding futures & foresight theories and methods. I believe that a better understanding of futures and foresight in communities outside of the field, including other scientific disciplines as well as younger generations, can be the starting point in the creation of a more inclusive epistemology of knowledge, which can ultimately serve us to better understand and tackle the problems our civilization is facing.
I wish to contribute to the journal in two ways. The first is by maintaining a high standard of rigor and quality of the published articles informed by my academic research. The second is by making our articles accessible to communities outside of our field, working hand in hand with the editorial team to make our articles known to a wider audience through my YouTube channel.
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Lavonne Leong
Associate Editor
Lavonne is a master’s degree candidate in futures studies in the College of Technology at the University of Houston. She is an award-winning journalist, has been an editor or contributing editor on several mastheads, and received a doctorate in English Literature from Oxford University. She lives in British Columbia.
I fell into futures studies when, while working on a magazine feature, I got to spend some time with Jim Dator and the department at the University of Hawai’i. The combination of realism, agency, and optimistic imagination I found was a thrilling contrast to the cloud of despair billowing around so many topics, from climate change to the future of work.
Futures thinking is a powerful toolbox to bring wherever we’re going, whether the ‘we’ is a family, an organization, or a species. I’m particularly interested in participatory futures, in the topics of education, governance, sustainable business, and travel, and in helping ordinary people surf change rather than being wiped out by it. This pandemic and all that has followed is reminding us that change can reveal and make possible as well as shake up and destroy. I want to help World Futures Review be a clear, engaging, surprising, memorable, sometimes wacky, always rigorous, voice of possibility in that ongoing conversation.
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John A. Sweeney
Co-Editor-in-Chief
With over a decade of experience working within 45 countries across five continents, John has engaged with numerous universities, international development and humanitarian aid agencies, non-profit foundations, Fortune 500 companies, and educational and cultural organizations. Additionally, he has worked with public sector and civil service foresight and innovation units on policy-focused projects. John has developed a critical practice and research agenda centered on participatory futures as part of the Action Foresight Global Swarm. At present, he is a Visiting Professor and Senior Research Fellow at Westminster International University in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. John completed a PhD with a specialization on Alternative Futures under the direction of Jim Dator at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.
Although I did not know it at the time, my journey into the futures and foresight field began when I dropped out of high school at the tender young age of 15. Lacking a formal education, however, has probably been more of an asset as a futurist, especially since I remain unencumbered by formulaic approaches to almost everything and anything, including, and perhaps especially, futures research. After taking degrees in history of ideas and religious studies, my turn toward futures studies is the culmination of an academic sojourn centered on questions that cannot be answered (futures are always beyond our reach in both actual and perceptual terms) and answers that must be questioned (how can we enrich our imaginings through greater plurality and diversity). In light of this bias, my intent and aim is to further support World Futures Review as a dynamic and creative space for ideas and provocations that challenges the status quo and, perhaps most importantly, help researchers, practitioners, and everyone enact more inclusive, imaginative, and impactful futures for us all.
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Leah Zaidi
Associate Editor
Leah is an award-winning futurist and a Senior Associate at the Future Today Institute. She combines academic rigor with unhindered creativity and grounded organizational practice to imagine and realize new worlds. She has worked with and for a variety of startups, arts and culture, financial services, academia, government, corporate, and not-for-profit organizations. She is also the Founder of Multiverse Design and has a Master of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation from OCAD University. Leah writes science fiction in her spare time.
We have entered a post-normal world. The combination of emerging challenges, including environmental degradation, the erosion of democracy, and the rise of unethical technology, will threaten our very survival. Though our future is uncertain, change is possible. Futures thinking is a critical capacity we must democratize in order to flourish in the 21st century and beyond. Collaborating with the Global Editorial Team, I aim to push futures studies toward greater inclusivity and help the field evolve alongside our world.
What’s Inside?
In this issue, we are pleased to publish articles that cover a veritable cornucopia of topics. Bengston, Westphal, and Dockry continue showcasing their extraordinary work with the U.S. Forest Service while also making a methodological contribution to the field. In Back from the Future: The Backcasting Wheel for Mapping a Pathway to a Preferred Future, the trio present a case study of a hybrid approach to backcasting that blends in aspects of the futures wheel.
Dolan offers a detailed look at the economic challenges facing Azerbaijan as it looks beyond oil. Bringing together insights from his own research as well as graduate students, When the Wells Run Dry: Reimagining Azerbaijan’s Post-Oil Futures provides a much-needed case study examination about how “resource cursed” contexts can and might forge sustainable pathways.
Finally, Schwarz looks at scenario planning and business wargaming within the context of open strategy to provide a timely and prescient analysis on the constraints and potential benefits of enhancing participation within decision-making processes. Revisiting Scenario Planning and Business Wargaming from an Open Strategy Perspective makes a strong case for looking beyond workshop-based approaches, which our present crisis validates and necessitates.
What’s Next?
In this section, we plan to publish short reflections (not quite essays) that examine what lies ahead with attention toward today’s most pressing questions. From our perspective, asking “what’s next?” is as much as reflection on the limits of our assumptions, biases, and blindspots as it is on the critical challenges and opportunities facing the field.
World Futures Review Co-Editor-in-Chief, John A. Sweeney, kicks off this initiative with a short reflection entitled: On Scenarios.
On Scenarios
John A. Sweeney
For better and worse, we are clearly living in a golden age of scenarios. The novel coronavirus pandemic has not only accelerated, mutated, and proliferated a range of trends and emerging issues but has led to a Cambrian Explosion-esque of scenario-based explorations for a variety of time horizons from the coming weeks to decades “beyond” our current crisis. What many, if not most, have in common is the unspoken assurance, if not hope, that scenarios provide a means to reduce uncertainty, illuminate complexity, and generate insights. Of course, scenarios are a proven tool that is core to the broader futures and foresight field. With that said, our contemporary moment, which can arguably be considered an indication of the macro-scale entrenchment of post-normal times (Sardar 2010: Sardar and Sweeney 2016), demands big questions be posed and provocations welcomed. A recent article (Slaughter 2020) does both in asking: do macro-scale “alternative futures” continue to have utility? Although Slaughter notes the efficacy of embracing “post-normal thinking and methods,” he does not invoke critical aspects that might enhance rather than negate alternative futures: plurality and diversity (Sardar 2015). What these two variables introduce is a means by which to counter reliance upon “plausibility,” which is treated as a feature rather than a bug, in such processes. An anecdote from my own practice helps to make this point more tangible.
As part of the research process leading up to 2011’s Hawai’i 2060 event, which was an experiential futures project aimed at using a futures approach to stimulate a shift in policy on climate change, our team collected data on a range of indicators by engaging with a plurality of experts and sources and seeking out diverse voices. None of the scenarios presented “plausible” futures and all were modeled using the “Mānoa School” scenario modeling (Dator 2009, 2014). In one scenario, dramatic sea-level rise pushed the islands to adapt radically leading to an ocean-based livelihood and economic paradigm. This transformational imagining of the future appeared to receive a positive response from attendees, but a prominent member of the University of Hawai’i’s School of Ocean and Earth Science Technology (SOEST) called into question the efficacy of the approach and overall validity of the exercise. From his perspective, the scenarios were not merely implausible—they were nothing short of unthinkable.
It would not be unfair to say that our scenario missed the mark, which is to say that we did not intend to alienate one of the world’s foremost climate scientists, but this is precisely what happened. The event was not a failure, however, as it led to substantive policy changes within the state’s planning guidelines. I often relay this anecdote when talking about “scenarios,” which continues to be a somewhat contentious term. In research aimed at settling the question as to what actually constitutes a “scenario,” Spaniol and Rowland (2018) engaged in a thorough literature review resulting in a concise output. First and foremost, this is phenomenal research, and Spaniol and Rowland deserve immense credit for doing this important work. Two things, however, caught my attention. As the Hawai’i 2060 anecdote suggests, plausibility is a moving, if not fuzzy, target, and one can never know with complete certainty if participants will go along with, and/or truly digest, if you will, scenarios. Consequently, the notion that scenarios must be “plausibly possible” raises some concerns. Plausible for whom? Plausible in what context? Are plurality and diversity integral to this formulation of plausibility? Indeed, Plausibility is not just about connecting the dots (casually or logically) but also about believability and perceptual acuity; in other words, what is plausible for one based on culture and experience might seem entirely implausible to another. Has our present crisis shown the futility of plausibility as a metric? Let’s take a look at Shell’s experience with plausible scenarios.
There are few organizations more closely associated with scenario planning than Royal Dutch Shell. As a product, scenarios are often targeted at leaders, and Shell is notorious for generating “plausible” scenarios for its leadership team. Pierre Wack, who led the scenarios team from 1971 to 1981, is credited with creating this emphasis, as well as being the catalyst that drove further adoption of scenarios across the private sector. Emphasizing the actual/perceptual divide inherent to Shell’s approach, he argues, “Scenarios deal with two worlds. The world of facts and the world of perceptions. They explore for facts but they aim at perceptions inside the heads of decision makers” (Wack 1985). Echoing Wack, Wilkinson and Kupers contend that scenarios have much more to do with the present, specifically “drawing attention to the role of the future in shaping current priorities and facing immediate challenges” (Wilkinson and Kupers 2014). This learning is critical and highlights how scenarios must play with what is seen as plausible and, perhaps most importantly, reorient what can and might be seen as possible.
As part of an in-depth review of how scenarios worked at the multinational oil giant, Wilkinson and Kupers, who both spent substantial time inside the organization, provide a critical point of entry for thinking through the functionality of this essential practice. While their book winds its way through the decades-long history behind Shell’s scenarios, there is a rather telling passage toward the end of the text. They reflect, “There are no solid examples of Shell anticipating future developments better than other companies, notwithstanding the mythology around the anticipation of the oil crisis in the 1970s—but there are plenty of anecdotes of Shell catching on quickly to changes in market or in culture” (Wilkinson and Kupers 2014). This intimation captures how scenarios can support a broader organizational learning paradigm and, perhaps most importantly, create a means to contest dominant imaginaries, which always and only occurs within a particular context.
As a process, some believe that scenarios must focus on “relevance, coherence, likelihood and transparency” (Godet and Roubelat 1996, 169), but others envisage scenarios as “a kind of collectively practiced existentialism” (Ogilvy 1996, 32). Clearly, the latter suggests that deeply held beliefs and assumptions are being questioned. It is perhaps best to think of this spectrum in terms of the amount of “future shock” that an individual or organization can and might be willing to absorb. There is perhaps no greater affront to the need for plausibility in creating alternative futures scenarios than our all-too-postnormal present. If the primary aim of a futurist is to make an “initially ridiculous idea plausible,” then scenarios must link present and futures in a digestible, yet imaginative, and enthralling, yet concrete, way—and this is often, but not always, a contest of perceptions versus potentialities, which is to say that scenarios are as much an art as science in moving beyond the plausible (Dator et al. 2015, 135). In keeping scenarios within the space of pure (rather than plausible) possibility, the process can identify blind spots, challenge assumptions, identify biases, and presence radical potentialities. But, there is always the danger of adverse reactions.
Another point of interest for scenarios practitioners that is only briefly mentioned in the Spaniol and Rowland article is the distinction between “scenarios” and “alternative futures,” which is an approach pioneered by Jim Dator. Recounting an exchange with Dator on this exact distinction, Sohail Inayatullah relays that the latter connotes a “far broader concept, being based on historical archetypes, deep patterns that re-occur through time” (Inayatullah 2009, 78). Speaking to cultural and narrative constructs, “alternative futures’’ intentionally play on the “images of the future” that swirl within and all around us. Reflecting on the difference between the two, perhaps one must look not so much at usage but rather at process and outcome. In his overview of the “Mānoa School” scenario modeling approach, which uses “generic” futures enhanced via a research-driven horizon scanning process, Dator stresses the importance of visioning a preferred future as the culmination of an alternative futures exercise, which is to say that the intended aim of using this method is to confront fully and completely what one does and does not want. And, most importantly, plurality and diversity are key elements, which is to say that such processes should be truly participatory futures in both scope and scale (Ramos et al. 2019).
Spaniol and Rowland do not engage thoroughly with “alternative futures” (although noted not differentiated from scenarios), which leads me to wonder how their definition of a “scenario” might be different were it to account for or distinguish itself from this related concept. From my perspective, both scenarios and alternative futures are fundamentally stories about the future designed to challenge our assumptions and help us learn, but what one might choose to do with this learning is essential to anticipate and, as one might expect, can have a profound effect on the process and its subsequent outcomes.
Concerning the Hawai’i 2060 anecdote, there is a bit more to the story. Fast forward to 2014. A follow-up exercise was organized, and the prominent participant who was previously flustered by the scenarios dramatically altered his tune. Indeed, the expert in question made a point of apologizing for his earlier response as updated forecast models made it clear that what was previously seen as an outlier (i.e., an extreme scenario) was now an expected or projected future. Indeed, a 2018 report, which was actually co-authored by researchers at SOEST, forecasted that by 2050 the islands could see a dramatic increase in coastal flooding and extreme weather events. The report states that Hawai’i’s land area vulnerable to sea-level rise could be double previous estimates (Anderson et al. 2018). What was plausibly possible had shifted substantially in a relatively short period of time.
I have yet to experience a more stark reminder that the unthinkable can become the unavoidable, and this anecdote encapsulates the spirit of Dator’s 2nd Law of the future: “any useful idea about the future should appear to be ridiculous” (Dator 2015). Wendy Schultz, a well-known and highly regarded “Mānoa School” alumnus whose work has led to a range of plausibility-be-damned approaches, puts it thusly: “plausibility is maladaptive” (Schultz 2014). So, what’s next? Hopefully, 2020 ushers in a death knell for not only systemic inequality, inaction on climate change, structural racism, and other social issues but also plausibility as a metric for scenario products and processes.