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Over the past two decades, my colleagues and I have worked with hundreds of teams of people striving together to change the future. These teams have tackled some of the most important and difficult challenges of our time: health care, economic development, and climate change across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Australia. The teams have included politicians, peasants, activists, artists, academics, businesspeople, trade unionists, civil servants and community leaders. Some of these teams have been local and others global; some have worked together for days and others for years; some have succeeded in changing their situation and others have failed.
Through these experiences I have learned that it is possible for people with conflicting agendas who are in a situation that they want to change to work together cooperatively and creatively to effect that change. The result is this guide to the "What," "Why" and "How" of this approach.
My colleagues and I call this new way of working "transformative scenario planning." Its purpose is to enable people trying to change the future collaboratively to transform, rather than adapt to, a situation. It centers on constructing scenarios of possible futures for a situation, but takes the well-established adaptive scenario planning methodology and turns it on its head - to construct scenarios not only to understand the future but also to influence it. And it involves planning, not in the sense of writing down and following a plan, but of engaging in a disciplined process of thinking ahead together and then altering actions accordingly.
When to use transformative scenario planning
Transformative scenario planning can be useful to people who find themselves in a situation that has three characteristics.
First, these people see the situation they are in as unacceptable, unstable or unsustainable.
Second, these people cannot transform their situation on their own, or by working only with their friends and colleagues. These people therefore need to find some way to work together with actors from across the whole system.
Third, these people cannot transform their situation directly. The actors who need to work together to make the transformation are too polarized to be able to approach this work head-on. They agree neither on what the solution is nor even on what the...