FUTURES & FORESIGHT SCIENCE最新文献

This article is a rejoinder in response to commentaries written about a 25-year retrospective on Kees van der Heijden's seminal text Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation. As a means to explore the commentaries and—without irony—bring them into conversation with one another, this piece engages in a thought experiment about the impact of Scenarios as well as the book's author through the sociologically informed notion of robust action from traditional thinking about social embeddedness.

Kees van der Heijden's Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation has assuredly earned a place as a true classic in the reflective-practitioner literature pertaining to futures and foresight science. Rowland and Spaniol's (2021) extensive review of it, a quarter of a century after its initial publication, demonstrates in abundance why it has risen so deservedly to this stature. Their review documents the many powerful features of the book, skillfully interweaving scholarly and practitioner insights. Rowland and Spaniol draw on their detailed knowledge of the relevant scientific and professional literatures, combining them with the results of a series of interviews undertaken with a number of van der Heijden's “colleagues, coworkers, collaborators, students, and friends” (Rowland & Spaniol, 2021, p. 1), who they invited to offer their reflections on the first (van der Heijden, 1996) and second (van der Heijden, 2005) editions of the book. The list of colleagues they interviewed includes some of the field's most prominent scientist-practitioners. The result is an article that sets out the many achievements of a book that has contributed to the betterment of academia and practice alike, locating them in the evolutionary context of both the literature and some of the major world events that have preoccupied many of its users.

I first became aware of this book shortly before its formal publication in 1996. My colleague George Wright and I were engaged in a consulting project with the leadership team of an organization that was struggling in its efforts to break free from its (then) current strategy. It was immediately apparent that the strategic conversation in the organization concerned had become rather stale, and the process tools and insights of Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation were exactly the sorts of tools and insights that would enable us to help rejuvenate it. George and I were fortunate to have in our possession a preprint of the entire manuscript, and, with Kees van der Heijden's permission, we were able to make full use of its contents. In so doing, as so neatly encapsulated in the narrative crafted by Rowland and Spaniol (2021, p. 2), drawing in turn on the preface of van der Heijden (1996), our overriding aim was to enable the leadership team:

‘…to articulate, fully and unambiguously, their organization's unique “business idea” from their perspective and based entirely on their internal, working vocabulary. By “reperceiving” their organization through painstaking interviews, analysis, reflection, presentations, and more,” [we sought to enable] members of the client organization… [to be] better able to see their situation and themselves “in a new light” (x). And, from this “unique insight,”… [have] “the opportunity to create… distinctiveness” in their “unique offering,” and, thus, gain “competitive advantage.”’

Large-scale Delphi surveys on technology foresight started in the 1960s and involve an average of about 2000 participants answering, potentially, up to about 450 items. This contrasts sharply with the participation and content of the more common, smaller-scale Delphi surveys. Previously, Belton et al. developed “six steps” to underpin a well-founded and defensible Delphi process and we apply these steps in a novel evaluation of the quality of 42 large-scale technology foresight surveys. Using a detailed analysis of two exemplar studies and a content analysis of all 42 surveys, we explore whether such surveys differ systematically from “traditional” smaller-scale Delphi surveys and, if so, why this may be and what it may mean for the quality of data produced. We conclude that there are some problematic issues within these surveys—to do with (i) data quality in both the numerical summarizing of participant's between-round feedback and in the reporting of final round numerical responses, (ii) the infrequent elicitation of rationales to justify participants' proffered numerical responses, and, when such rationales are elicited, (iii) the between-round summary and presentation of the rationales. We speculate on the reasons for these design differences in the extant large-scale surveys and conclude that extra-survey political influences, such as differing objectives and the need to demonstrate wide-ranging expert participation, may be the underlying cause. We conclude with considerations and recommendations for the design of future large-scale Delphi surveys to enable the underlying process to become better-founded and more defensible to procedural evaluation.

This commentary revisits an early book review by the author of Kees van der Heijden's influential book, Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation, highlighting the continuing neglect of the role of forecasting in scenario construction. In addition, there still remains considerable ambiguity as to whether scenarios offer more than plausible stories. The review highlights the need to resolve these ambiguities in the scenario research literature through a better understanding of the links between forecasting and scenario construction. The benefit of success would be a greater understanding of long-term uncertainty.

This paper builds on four qualitative backcasting scenarios that illustrate sustainable futures in a Swedish setting. The paper complements the originally qualitative scenarios by developing an eight-step modified and expanded IPAT model—originally describing environmental impact as a product of population, affluence, and technology—that also enables quantitative descriptions of the scenarios. The modified and expanded IPAT model is used to show how the scenarios can stay within the climate aspect of sustainability. The result is quantified descriptions of the development paths of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions, working hours, man-made capital stocks, recycled and nonrecycled materials used, and different types of energy used in the four scenarios. The four main findings are (a) the back-bone instrument in making the energy system fossil-free will, in all scenarios, substitute fossil energy with renewable energy; (b) however, to succeed with that it is necessary to use different mixes of many complementary climate policy instruments; (c) IPAT models can be modified and expanded in many different ways to act as quantitative descriptions of different technological developments and social changes in scenario exercises; (d) by disregarding gross domestic product as a proxy for affluence, and replacing it with labor and capital, behavioral concepts like sharing and prolonged product lifetimes can more easily be introduced as climate policy options in a modified and expanded IPAT model.