One of the most interesting aspects of Oxford Scenario Planning Approach (OSPA) – as outlined in the book Strategic Reframing by Rafael Ramirez and Angela Wilkinson (core Faculty at the Oxford Scenarios Programme at Oxford University’s Said Business School) – is the emphasis placed on attending to peoples’ “sense of the future”. As they put … [Read more…]
UPDATE: My principal PhD supervisor and I have just published a new paper which reviews and contributes to the distinction between reactive and proactive/’transformative’ forms of scenario planning, which is part of a special issue of the International Journal of Foresight and Innovation Policy – see: http://www.inderscience.com/info/inarticletoc.php?jcode=ijfip&year=2015&vol=10&issue=2/3/4. The paper focusses on proactive (or ‘transformative’) approaches … [Read more…]
Some researchers from the University of Melbourne have recently published an interesting paper entitled “The problem of fit: scenario planning and climate change adaptation in the public sector” in Environment and Planning C. The paper reports some of the findings of the ‘Scenarios for Climate Adaptation’ project which explored the use of scenario planning to … [Read more…]
Scholars examining the increasing use of scenario-based techniques have recently argued that most existing writing on the use of these techniques fails to substantively address the potential pitfalls of such techniques. In this post I want to raise a specific issue: it has been argued that effectively conducting scenario planning “requires unbiased consideration of multiple … [Read more…]
I’m currently doing some interviews for a case study that I’m developing as part of my PhD. This ‘case’ will focus on the Future Fuels Forum run by the CSIRO Energy Transformed Flagship (external link), which was run from November 2007-June 2008. During this period oil prices shot up (see Figure below) and surged to … [Read more…]
Adam Kahane’s latest book Transformative Scenario Planning: Working Together to Change the Future is a concise and useful methodological summary of his innovative scenario work (e.g. in South Africa). But it left me with many unanswered questions. On the one hand, I’m attracted to this collaborative approach to scenario work which explicitly aims to influence … [Read more…]
Recently I’ve been reading Art Kleiner’s influential book The Age of Heretics, and Kees van der Heijden’s Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversations, which both consider Shell’s early experiments in the 1970s with scenarios and scenario-based planning techniques. These books both highlight that there is much more to this case than the simple “success story” … [Read more…]