Book by Betty Sue Flowers: “Leaders need well-developed foresight because all big decisions are influenced by their story of the future, whether they are aware of it or not. The “official story of the future” is a more or less coherent, more or less conscious, more or less shared narrative about what will happen in 3 months, 6 months, a year, or five years. But as Betty Sue Flowers points out, here’s the weird part: The future is a fiction. It doesn’t exist. Yet you can’t make rational strategic decisions without one.
To manage this, organizations analyze ever-growing volumes of information with increasingly sophisticated analytical techniques and produce forecasts that attempt to predict the future. However, data alone is not enough, and projections are always based on assumptions, a common one being that things will keep trending as they are now.
When an important decision needs to be made, especially when the people involved in making that decision have opposing ideas about what should happen, it can be challenging to hold a generative dialogue rather than staging a fight. In this context, almost any discussion can immediately devolve into an argument. Scenarios can be very useful in creating a space for dialogue in which people can listen to each other and even help tell the story of a possible future that is not the one they most wish to create.
Flowers emphasizes that scenarios are not intended to be predictions. Instead, they act as a stage setting for generative dialogues and much better decisions to be made. By creating a set of different, plausible stories of the future, they are best used to:
- Create a container for frank, thoughtful, safe, imaginative conversations about how the organization might adapt if trends change.
- Disrupt assumptions sometimes unconsciously held in current stories.
- Stimulate more complex and informed stories of the future.
- Increase foresight and the organization’s ability to adapt, and
- Set the ground for generative dialogues that improve the organization in the present…(More)”.
