Previous scenarios

Previous scenarios

The scenarios which were generated in 1996/7 are show on the left, those in 1997/8 in the middle and the 2000/01 pair are shown on the right.

This section reviews the family tree from which the two 2000 scenarios, Renewed Foundations and Pushing the Edge, grew. We have not included links to other pedigrees, although self-evidently we have both been influenced by and influenced other groups.

Scenarios generated in and before 1995 reviewed the three major uncertainties in prospect: the relations between the US and Europe - and the possibility of a Japanese revival - the nature of the post-Cold War security vacuum, and the reality of the "E"-economy.

We got a number of important things right. We were sceptical about both Asia and the about the short term commercial implications of the internet. Our position on defence has been reinforced by events. The continued weakness of political leadership is evident, and the compensatory, growing role of the politicised NGO has been supported by events.

We got some things wrong. We were overly sensitive to US-EU differences. We had not counted on the Euro's weakness, or seen the US as the essentially unique long term haven for capital which it has become. We thought that the US stock market realignment would happen sooner and more aggressively, based on historical GNP:stockmarket valuations.

One of the most interesting scenarios that we developed is Market Quickstep. This considered the declining role of the nation state as a unit of economic activity, and the growing role of local clusters and networks. Most US sectors have shown considerable geographical concentration in the past decade, whilst simultaneously spinning out much of their activity to a web of subcontractors. Clusters have evident economies of scale and appear to be both important policy variables and significant considerations for commerce. Location, location, location indeed.

The key consideration in this scenario was what happened if these geographical clusters applied the basic tools of corporate strategy. That is to say, accelerated competition drove them to concentrate on their strengths. Pleasing rustic areas would focus on holiday and retirement home provision, industrial areas on the supply of trained labour, excellent regulation, low cost transport, specialised infrastructure and the like. Plainly, if taken to its logical conclusion, this could lead to a major clash with central government; yet this is, in effect, theessence of European 'subsidiarity' and US state policy. Our assessment of the processes and consultation structures which would be necessary in order to make this work in a co-ordinated manner pointed directly to the key features of Renewed Foundations. Rightly or no, we felt that whilst extreme market conditions drove the need for this positioning, it was unlikely that market forces alone would generate the institutional structures that were needed to make this work. The overhead to the state of doing this was huge, but so too were the potential rewards for getting it right. Government coiuld largely stop 'doing' and focus on causing the right thing to be done, in the right place at the right time. Cohesion of processes and balances would replace a standardised national template to which all had to conform.

This concern about balances within and between desirable things is the essence of much of the art of management. It seems that there is no one single right answer to many policy balances and, even if there were, we would not be sure of this for decades. W have to persevere with what works, and what seems right to us. That is, Sweden, the US and Canada can achieve roughly comparable returns on assets and economic growth, whilst using substantially different mixtures of policy. What matters is that policy makers:

(a) know and understand the balances that they have been striking
(b) have de facto agreement from their stakeholders about this,
(c) stick to their course when things become difficult,
(d) are open to evidenc eand new views, and
(e) recognise that no one element in a portfolio of measures is dominant.

An additional stylistic approach which we have adopted owes much to political science, to biology and to complexity theory. Essentially, it is the theory of agency, whereby a large number of similar but not identical agents both create a system by their actions and whilst also probing it for its weaknesses and potential. That is, a group of many suppliers of goods and many customers for those goods make prices, but also brand relationships, fashions and so forth. None of these things - prices, brand values - have any existence outside of the system that creates them. The system is continually trying to beter or reinvent itself through the striving of its individual agents and the information which they create.

Such structures tend to be highly resilient and 'inventive', and rapidly find an equilibrium when external events change. Unlike the idealised firm or nation state, there is no single governing intelligence. Balances are struck as a result of each each agent gathering information and seeking to get closer to their notion of the best. When such agents operate in a complicated, many dimensional space - as already discussed - then this implies that no unique optimum is being sought, but a general trend to betterment. The system never gets stuck in local optima, or in structures implicit in a too-narrow selection of information. There is almost always an agent going counter-trend. There are sceptics and commentators. Instead of a governing intelligence, there is a collective - what should we call it? entity? intelligence? system? - which forms concepts and passes these around, acts on them and makes new things.

Such structures seem to be the core of knowledge based activities, of marketplaces and of functioning tacit systems such as neighbourhoods and clubs. They have a great deal to do with the processes which sociologists call 'discourse', by which new things are brought into the web of society. Mobile telephones, for example, play a role which is far removed from - and far more complex than - the initial thoughts of their inventors. Where such inventors fail to note these changes and extrapolate from their original analysis, then they lose their shirts.

Strategy and policy is now best formed through discourse within a stakeholder group. This is the only way in which resident knowledge can be extracted, for tacit knowledge and opinion is seldom tuned to address the issue at hand, particularly in the pat, 'logical' way that early knowledge managers and market researchers had assumed. However, a failure to take into account latent opinion, potential possibilities or new ways of talking about the problem dooms one to repeat the model that worked in the past, to do exactly what everyone else who shares that model is doing and and to miss the possibilities of the future. It is through engagement with these formless yet self-guiding assemblies of people and organisations that truly useful insight is often derived, and always derived where the issues are complex, 'social' and concerned with the fusion of very different ways of seeing the world. We believe that this distributed intelligence is the only way in which large organisations - whether in the private or the public sector - can react quickly to the complexity of today's operating environment. Organisations (and nations) which learn to harness these skills will be better fitted to cope in the truly tumultuous world that we face.