In Futures Thinking: The Basics, I offered up an overview of how to engage in a foresight exercise. In Futures Thinking: Asking the Question, I explored in more detail the process of setting up a futures exercise, and how to figure out what you’re trying to figure out. In Futures Thinking: Scanning the World, I took a look at gathering useful data. In Futures Thinking: Mapping the Possibilities (Part 1), I gave a broad overview of creating alternative scenarios. Now we move to the nuts & bolts.
Let’s build some worlds.
World-building is, in many ways, the mirror-opposite of a good science fiction story. With the latter, the reader only needs to see enough of the world to make the choices and challenges facing the characters comprehensible. The world is a scaffolding upon which the writer tells a story. Clumsy science fiction authors may over-explain the new technologies or behaviors–where they came from, why they’re named as they are, etc.–but a good one will give you just enough to understand what’s going on, and sometimes a little less than that (trusting that the astute reader can figure it out from the context).
Scenarios, conversely, are all about the context. Here, it’s the story that’s a scaffolding for the scenario–a canvas upon which to show the critical elements of the world you’ve built. A good scenario doesn’t make a good science fiction story–but it’s a setting within which a good science fiction story might be told.
Turning your drivers and data points into a sufficiently diverse set of multiple believable, internally-consistent worlds can be difficult, and most scenario developers rely on a set of heuristics to make sure that the worlds being built will both differ from each other in important ways and show clear and logical evolution from the present. As you read more about scenario planning and futures thinking, you’ll find a variety of methods in current use. For our purposes, however, we can start with something straightforward.
In my first piece, I suggested that you use something called “futures archetypes”–essentially, pre-built points of divergence that can be applied to just about any kind of futures exercise. The archetypes I listed were:
