Scenario planning has become an increasingly important strategic planning tool as more corporations, organizations, and government agencies begin to use scenarios. This publication presents a set of three interdisciplinary, global scenarios to 2025 that provide different pictures of possible futures.

What are scenarios?

Scenarios are plausible alternative views about how the future may develop. They differ from forecasting in that they do not attempt to predict the future based on linear extrapolations of the past. Scenarios do not seek to project the future. Instead, they focus on the identification of discontinuities and how these could potentially develop as a set over time. Scenario analysis allows us to anticipate future developments, and to evaluate strategies for responding to these events or conditions through an exploration of alternative futures.

Several alternative schools of scenario development have evolved over time and for the purpose of the NIC global scenarios to 2025 project, the Intuitive Logics School was chosen to develop the scenarios. This school of scenario planning places more emphasis on the qualitative logic of the scenarios and the resulting plots can easily stimulate debate among a diverse group of stakeholders. Encouraging users to challenge their mental models, these scenarios help us to prepare for the different futures that may unfold.

We also decided to use the deductive scenario development process which is a very structured step-by-step approach. The deductive approach starts in the present and ends with a range of plausible futures.

How are scenarios developed?

Over the course of almost one year, the scenarios were developed in a number of workshops around the world. A total of more than 200 people from about 40 countries have participated in the various workshops to help shape this work.

The process followed the following steps:

1. The first step in the scenario development process, which began in January 2008, involved the identification of the most important potential issues using the STEEP¹ analytical framework. A total of about 60 issues were identified using desk research and interviewing some of the world's foremost experts in the various interdisciplinary areas.
2. Issue prioritization and the development of the scenario logics were the focus of the second step. This step happened in three interactive workshops around the world: 1) at the Evian Group at IMD in Switzerland, 2) in Singapore, and 3) at the GBN/Monitor Group in San Francisco. The results of the outcomes of these three workshops were then synthesized into a single coherent set of storylines.
3. The third step involved scenario affirmation and refinement. At the Global Futures Forum Annual Meeting in Vancouver, the scenarios were presented and discussed with members of the global intelligence community. In addition, in June 2008 a formal scenario affirmation workshop was held in Washington, DC during which the scenario logics were further scrutinized and refined.
4. The final step involved the scenario writing and scenario quantification. To ensure the plausibility and the internally consistency of the scenario plots, the team worked with a group of leading scenario planners and thought leaders—the “scenario champions.” The scenario quantification was carried out by the International Futures team at the University of Denver, while the energy demand and mix modeling was conducted by the Markets & Country Strategies Group of PFC Energy.

What are the focal questions of the scenarios?
The National Intelligence Council, in collaboration with workshop participants, identified the following focal questions as the point of departure for the scenario development process:

• How can the world attain a high level of sustainable economic growth given the rapidly changing geopolitical landscape of the early 21st century?
• What will the balance of power look like in 2025 and to what degree might collaborative policies and frameworks shape the global context?

These questions formed the basis for the in-depth explorations of the dynamics of the different futures during the scenario workshops. They also inform the creation of the twodimensional matrix used as the framework around which to structure the scenarios. In this case, the two most influential factors for the future were identified as economic growth (from constrained to unconstrained growth) and multilateral solidarity (from common cause to cross purposes).

See below to download and print the full report and accompanying slides.

Footnotes

¹ The STEEP framework is used to identify macro-environmental factors from the following dimensions: Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, and Political/Regulatory.

The National Intelligence Council routinely sponsors unclassified conferences with outside experts to sharpen the level of debate on critical issues. The views expressed in the following papers/slides are those of individual participants. They are presented not as final reports of the NIC 2025 project but to stimulate discussion and debate.

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