Scenario Based Ideation
Grapevines grown in the harshest of conditions produce the most vibrant terroir. Ideas like grapes, need constraints in order to flourish. I have found using a combination of Scenario Planning and Brainstorming produce both the breadth and depth of ideas needed to drive innovation.
Scenario planning leverages qualitative data as well as emerging trends, along with quantitative data and historical models, to explore the potential impact changes in technology, the environment, and society, could have on the organization, its product, its people, and it business model. This method was emerge from game theory in 1960’s and had been used by organizations to help them prepare by giving them space to consider how they might respond in a rapidly evolving landscape. There are two schools of thought on the practice, one focuses on the weight probability of the outcomes, the other focuses on what should happen with a focus on enabling that course of action.
In both case the end goal for crafting these scenario is to ensure they feel plausible but stop short of reading like a prediction. One common method to help lend plausibility is to draft them as new articles from the future, or a retrospective keynote looking back over the organization’s accomplishments. Including emerging trends from today (i.e. technological, environmental, societal, economic, political, etc.) and connecting them to a cascade of future events resulting in the outcome depicted in the scenario is one common way to make the narrative seem real.
Generating the scenarios starts with identifying which emerging trends you want to focus on and framing them as polarities. For example, Generative AI is the hottest topic to hit technology and non-technology companies in over three decades. Let’s use GenAI as an example. One polarity could be that at one end GenAI augments knowledge workers and accelerates innovation, at the other end GenAI displaces much of the workforce leading to economic depression and dissolution of the middle class. These two polls would items #1 and #2 in the diagram below. Building on current events, another set of polarities could be Nationalism gains a stronger foothold in the US and abroad, decreasing global immigration as well as the US’s position in geo-politics. The other half of this set could be Democracy prevails, and NATO, led by the US, helps the Ukraine defeat Russia, and the global economy stablizes. These would be placed in #3 and #4 below.
Then by combining the two polarities bounding each quadrant, you can begin to draft your narratives. It is important to note, there are an infinite set of potential scenarios you can create for each of these quadrants… GenAI powered innovations in a world faced with a growing trend toward Nationalism? The potential of repurposing the knowledge workers to focus societal and environmental challenges…
The key with identifying your polarities to base them on probable futures that are relevant and while not near term are still in the back of people’s minds.
Once you have the 2x2 defined, its time to start writing out the scenario, anything is fair game that can be refuted with logical reasoning. These should be written with an eye toward telling story that feels real. They require some skill, for example don’t reference things that are unpopular by their nature, but rather come masked as the familiar. Focus on functional over fashion. Pragmatic and logical small steps, over time, rather than sweeping changes that ignore people’s tendency to abhor change unless its backed by the form of a threat or puts their status quo into jeopardy.
Referencing multiple narratives within each scenario will make them more plausible and well rounded. For example if you choose to draft a keynote scenario, you frame different narratives as interviews with customer, testimonials from partners, or even analyst briefing. Demonstrating a strong interplay of related but separate events in a scenario will create both a more fertile ground for ideation but also a more diversity in how you distribute the future—all of which combine to make your scenario more plausible.
In the examples above, imagine the narratives you could construct if GenAI where to be used with the intend of identifying illegal immigrants? And the racial bias in the data sets caused it misidentify subsections of the population regardless of their citizenship. But at the same time it was successful in identifying perpetrators of domestic violence? How would you balance your narrative? How would such applications of their technology impact companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple?
When writing The Handmaids Tale, Margaret Attwood made rule for herself that she would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or at some other time. While it might be an odd reference for these purposes, its a good rule to keep in mind when crafting scenarios.
Once you have the scenarios completed, then you can use them to developing ideas for how to respond to these potential changes.
Starting with the core scenarios you four target areas to brainstorm solutions. Then moving out to make them more extreme, or inward to make them less extreme you eight additional areas to focus the ideation. Then by shifting the influence of one polarity over the other, you create additional opportunities to help you focus ideation.
Taking a more structured approach to brainstorming allows you to ensure both the plausibility of your ideas and their coverage allowing you to prioritize and adapt as the anticipated scenarios unfold. Based on the response to your scenarios, and the results of your ideation, you can determine how deep you want to go in developing ideas into prototypes to address—and ideally manifest, these potential futures.
