First steps: towards purposeful activities in scenario thinking and future studies

Participatory scenario development for integrated assessment of nutrient flows in a Catalan river catchment

“…urban development and sustainability and biological invasions, have revealed that, even if results provided during the process are important, there is value in the process itself (Özkaynak, 2005;Rodríguez-Labajos, 2006). The special attention dedicated to the identification of stakeholders and the selection of workshop participants is essential to guarantee the quality of the process (Burt and van der Heijden, 2003). Although the four scenarios produced by the participants are common sense, results would probably differ, yielding a different set of scenarios, if the workshop were to be repeated with a different set of players or through a close, common senseapproach.…”

“…In these conditions, it seemed difficult to consider surprises, limiting the scenarios to variations of current trends. Indeed, in the multi-scale scenario work within the MedAction project, which emphasised scenario development at different scales and also the relations between scales, Kok et al (2006) came to the conclusion that stakeholders had difficulties to work on large-scale surprising developments; also, Burt and van der Heijden (2003), working on scenario development with small and medium sized enterprise managers for strategic management and learning process, agreed with Kok et al (2006) that stakeholders tended to prefer thinking in terms of a forecast or "single future", feeling more comfortable with either small changes or large-scale developments that are close to daily life.…”

“…In the definition of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is commonly adopted in environmental applications, scenarios are described as alternative futures that are neither predictions nor forecasts, but contrasting images of how the future might unfold (Parry and Carter, 1998;Rotmans et al, 2000). Scenarios are widely used to explore uncertain futures, to assess possible pathways for socio-economic development, to identify management strategies and to present alternative views or images of the future with the aim to provide insights into the present (Berkhout et al, 2002;Burt and van der Heijden, 2003;Ledoux et al, 2005). Thus, by synthesising and communicating complex and extensive information to decision makers and the public, scenarios make decision-making more robust and help identify strategies for pre-empting undesirable future developments (Carter et al, 2001;Van der Heijden, 1996).…”

Axiomatic foundation and a structured process for developing firm-specific Intuitive Logics scenarios

“…However, the literature does not provide a systematic method for performing this crucial task; rather, choice of the scenario logic seems to be a highly subjective (8) decision. While very little has been published about actual methods used for developing scenarios, one ethnographic study of scenario creation by professional futurists revealed that even these experienced futurists struggled to choose a scenario logic in the studied project.…”

“…On the other hand, most of the driving forces are separated from the organization and affect the organization only through the local factors. Managers are known to spend more time on the issues in the transactional environment, which consists primarily of local factors, and less on the contextual environment, which is primarily comprised of driving forces [8]. Thus, it is easier for an individual from the organization to envision the impact of a local factor, compared to that of a driving force, on the focal decision.…”