Through the Noise: The Imperfect Practice of Scenarios and Foresight

May 2025 

Last week, I slipped back into student mode at the Oxford Scenarios Programme, trading pitchbooks and board decks for research papers, flipcharts, mind-stretching readings, and dinner debates in centuries-old college halls. Against a macro landscape crackling with uncertainty—tariff wars, reshoring, generative AI disruptions, tech nationalism, debt overhangs—it felt like the perfect moment to pause, step out of the relentless operating cadence, and interrogate the deeper forces reshaping our global reality.

The Oxford Scenarios Programme (OSP) excels at blending intellectual rigor with disarming informality. By day, we immersed ourselves in frameworks and methodologies, dissecting drivers of change—from geopolitical fractures to technological tipping points. By night, we retreated to century old dining halls, debating the nuances of plausibility versus probability over plates of herb-crusted lamb and glasses of Côtes-du-Rhône. The cases mirrored the complexity of the topics: a global standards body grappling with its role in a fragmenting world; a European pharmaceutical giant reimagining drug discovery in the age of generative AI; a venerable museum navigating digital reinvention and anarchic activism; and policymakers from Brussels to D.C. sparring over the unraveling of global institutions, the ethics of slashed foreign aid, and the scramble for talent in a climate-stressed era.

The format—small cohorts, PowerPoint-free discussions, and long reflective walks through Oxford’s green meadows—was engineered to dismantle the rehearsed “expert voice” we default to in boardrooms. Instead, it pried open space for raw inquiry: half-formed hunches about AI’s ethical frontiers, uneasy admissions about institutional inertia, and vulnerable questions like, “What if deglobalization isn’t a phase but the new baseline?” The alchemy worked. By design, the programme forced us to confront not just what we thought, but how we thought—and why.

The week’s defining challenge loomed large: How do we nurture imagination when the news cycle screams “crisis” every ten minutes? By 2025, the world’s complexity has grown ornate, even labyrinthine—a baroque tapestry of interlocking risks. Tariff skirmishes, once confined to trade ledgers, have metastasized into a global contest over technological sovereignty. The battle cry—“Whose chips? Whose Chips Act?”—encapsulates the scramble to control semiconductor supply chains, as nations weaponize standards to secure dominance in AI, quantum computing, and green tech. Deglobalization, long dismissed as a wonk’s hypothetical, now pulses through rewired trade corridors: regional blocs forge self-reliant supply chains, ports pivot from globalization’s arteries to nationalist checkpoints, and “friend-shoring” becomes the new diplomatic vernacular. And AI, once a back‑office productivity lever, is leaning hard into front‑of‑house decision rights. The question isn’t “are we de‑risking China?” but “how many supply‑chain redundancies can shareholders stomach before they rebel?”

In the corridors between sessions, the U.S. election loomed large. Some pinned the trade re‑balancing squarely on Trump‑era politics; others argued the vectors were secular, a late‑stage response to two decades of hyper‑integration. Either way, the collective takeaway was: treat politics as a variable, but do not reduce every driver to political noise. The ageing of the West, the rise of middle‑class Asia, and the mathematics of the carbon budget will keep compounding no matter who is tweeting from the Resolute Desk. In this landscape, imagination isn’t a luxury—it’s the antidote to strategic atrophy. The crises will keep coming; the work lies in widening the aperture, seeing beyond the firefight to the deeper rhythms reshaping power, profit, and progress.

The future isn’t fixed—it’s open, and it’s ours to shape. That uncertainty, far from being a problem, is what makes action, innovation, and progress possible. Scenario planning and strategic foresight aren’t about predicting what will happen. They’re about helping us make better decisions today by exploring what could happen. In a world moving faster and becoming more complex, anticipation is not optional. It’s a leadership skill. Spot early signals. Act before you’re forced to.

When crises blindside us, instinct drives us to react—extinguishing fires, patching leaks. Yet the most tectonic shifts rarely arrive unannounced. Aging populations, energy transitions, the erosion of multilateral trade norms: these are not black swans. Academics and practitioners have tracked their trajectories for decades, publishing warnings in journals and boardroom briefings. The critical unknowns lie not in what will happen, but when thresholds will be breached—and whether institutions will respond with foresight or folly.

Consider demographics: Japan’s median age now exceeds 49, Italy’s workforce shrinks by 1% annually, and China faces a “demographic time bomb” as its population peaks and plunges. Pension systems designed for 20th-century lifespans buckle under the strain. Yet nations like Sweden and Singapore, acting early on actuarial forecasts, recalibrated retirement ages and privatized pension tiers—turning a slow-motion crisis into managed adaptation. With foresight, we can act early: reform pension systems, scale clean energy, secure supply chains. Take the U.S. push to rebalance trade and reshore industry. It’s easy to dismiss as politics, which is rooted in signals ignored for years. The 2021 Suez blockage and 2022 semiconductor shortage laid bare the fragility of hyper-globalized supply chains. Geopolitical flashpoints, from Taiwan to the Red Sea, turned “just-in-time” into “just-in-case.” Corporations like TSMC and Ford now pour billions into dual factories in Ohio and Arizona, not because politicians demand it, but because shareholders recognize redundancy as insurance against systemic risk. The lesson is clear: Foresight isn’t about predicting the future—it’s about building the reflexes to shape it.

OSP offered no shortage of frameworks and methodologies—tools that, in theory, arm strategists to deploy scenarios with boardroom polish. But beyond the models and the marketing (the “sell” required to make foresight stick in skeptical organizations), what lingers are raw, personal insights about the human dimensions of scenario work. Over five days, I observed patterns—in myself and others—that transcend technique. These are not steps in a playbook, but quiet truths about how we think, resist, and grow. If scenario planning is a craft, these reflections are its unwritten code: the self-awareness required to wield it well.

This begins not with frameworks, but with friction. To “get out of your frame,” you must first name it: the industry axioms, cultural narratives, and personal experiences that shape what you see (and ignore)

Get Out of Your Frame

Conversations with European colleagues at the OSP revealed a lingering disquiet—a collective shudder at Trump's re-election, which many framed not as a political anomaly but as a harbinger of civilizational decay. Their unease echoed the existential melancholy of Prince Fabrizio in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, a novel chronicling the collapse of Sicily’s aristocratic order during Italy’s 19th-century unification. Like Fabrizio, who watches the Risorgimento dismantle his world with a mix of resignation and disdain, Europe today clings to the vestiges of an international order it once helped to architect, even as that order steadily erodes under the weight of shifting global power dynamics and emerging multipolar realities —multilateralism, diplomatic decorum, and incremental reform—as if these were heirlooms in a museum. Fabrizio’s nephew Tancredi, who pragmatically allies with the revolutionaries to retain influence, delivers the novel’s iconic line: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Here lies the transatlantic rift. Europe, like Fabrizio, equates change with loss: the erosion of social democracy, the fraying of NATO unity, the rise of right-wing populism. Meanwhile, the U.S., in its Tancredi guise, embraces disruption as a tool of reinvention—slashing trade deals, raising tariffs, dismantling decaying institutions, and turning uncertainty into a lever for strategic recalibration and advantage in a multipolar world.

But the analogy cuts deeper. Fabrizio’s tragedy lies not in his resistance to change, but in his failure to see that preservation requires adaptation. Europe’s conundrum mirrors this: Can Europe reform without fracturing under the weight of competing national interests and historical legacies? Can it transcend the outdated mindset that the world still orbits around its institutions and values? As global influence tilts eastward and southward, can Europe temper its moral grandstanding and focus on pragmatic, actionable solutions that actually work on the ground? Can it reconcile its penchant for normative declarations from the proverbial mountaintop with the complex realities of a multipolar, crisis-prone world? Most critically, can it advance its ambitious goals of green transition, social protection, and digital sovereignty without further alienating an aging, economically anxious population already disillusioned by rising inequality and a sense of institutional stagnation? 

It's striking to observe the surprising homogeneity of thought among a diverse group of highly successful and educated Europeans: “Trump is crazy,” “The U.S. has gone rogue under the new administration.” The consensus is so uniform that it begs a deeper question — what assumptions underpin this shared worldview ? why so many people tend to see things form a certain particular frame ? what such homogeneous thought process means for building scenarios ? Neuroscience offers a clue. To avoid sensory overload, the brain automates as much as possible, storing experience in quick‑access packets that help us predict the next moment without conscious effort. The upside is efficiency; the downside is inertia. Once we adopt a narrative—“Trump signals Western decline,” “tech nationalism will bury Europe,” “the Global South’s rise is Europe’s fall”—it calcifies into our outlook. We see confirming evidence everywhere and overlook signals that do not fit the script.

The stimulus-response paradigm dominates much of human reasoning, reducing complexity to linear equations: X happens, so Y must follow. Yet human behavior—and by extension, societal and geopolitical dynamics—defies such simplicity. Our goals are rarely linear; context, values, and unseen priorities shape them. Consider commuters facing a train delay: one switches to driving, prioritizing punctuality; another works remotely, valuing flexibility; a third relocates entirely, seeking long-term stability. Without understanding their goals—the why behind the what—we misread their actions as mere reactions, not strategic choices.

The peril lies in projecting our own biases onto these ambiguities. Policymakers clinging to linear models often misdiagnose motives, leading to flawed strategies. For instance, dismissing China’s Belt and Road Initiative as mere infrastructure expansion ignores its deeper goals: currency internationalization, geopolitical alliances, and soft power. Likewise, framing Europe’s carbon tariffs solely as climate action overlooks its industrial strategy to shield industrial ecosystem from foreign competition.

To navigate this complexity, we must adopt goal-aware analysis: mapping not just actions, but the aspirations and fears that animate them. Behavioral economics teaches us that decisions are rarely about utility alone; they are stories we tell ourselves about progress, identity, and survival. Geopolitics, then, becomes a theater of competing narratives—not a chessboard of predictable moves.

Scenario work begins by escaping these entrenched frames. We have to acknowledge that our internal stories—the ones that keep us feeling safe, or aggrieved, or resigned—are just that: stories. Fabrizio’s lament for a fading order was as much about his own identity as about Italy’s future. Europe’s current pessimism may say more about its mental model than about its actual prospects. As The Leopard whispers through its dusty ballrooms: between pride and decay, ritual and ruin, stars and dust, we endure. To shape what endures, we must first step outside our inherited frames, notice the wider field of possibility, and let new narratives take root.

Frames aren’t enemies. They’re lenses—until they become cages. The work lies in holding them lightly, testing their edges, and letting others’ frames refract your own. It’s uncomfortable, iterative, and deeply human. And in the end, it’s what separates sterile exercises from scenarios that spark change.

Perception, Perspective, and the Epistemology of Foresight

In scenario planning, where the goal is to anticipate, imagine, and navigate multiple plausible futures, the distinction between perception and perspective becomes critical. Perception is our immediate, sensory-based, and deeply personal view of reality. It is shaped by experience, bias, culture, and emotion. Perspective, by contrast, requires us to intentionally shift out of our own frame of reference and attempt to see the world through someone else’s eyes. While perception is reactive and instinctive, perspective is deliberate, trained, and strategic.

This distinction matters because most of us operate habitually within the bounds of our own perception. We assume that what we see is all there is. Scenario planners, however, cannot afford that luxury. If we fail to recognize the difference between what is and what seems to be, we risk designing futures that reinforce blind spots, biases, and systemic distortions. Perspective is what allows a strategist to anticipate surprises, identify leverage points, and understand how different stakeholders might respond to change. In this way, scenario planning becomes an epistemological exercise—one concerned not just with what might happen, but with how we know what we think we know.

Philosopher Susanna Siegel’s work on the rationality of perception offers a profound lens through which to examine this. She argues that perceptual experiences—what we consciously see, hear, or feel—carry epistemic weight. Just like beliefs, our perceptions can be evaluated as rational or irrational depending on how they are formed. If a belief is shaped by wishful thinking, it may be epistemically unsound. So too can a perceptual experience be compromised—what Siegel calls “wishful seeing”—when it is unduly influenced by fear, desire, or bias. In the context of scenario work, this insight reminds us that even our most intuitive judgments may be distorted by prior beliefs or entrenched assumptions.

Consider how language shapes perception. Sidney Dekker, an expert in accident analysis, points out that the metaphors we use—“accident chain,” “human error,” “mechanical failure”—don’t just describe events, they frame them. The questions we ask, the explanations we pursue, and the conclusions we reach are all mediated by the structure of our language. In scenario planning, where narratives are crafted to evoke meaning, this becomes a cautionary tale: the language we choose to describe the future can narrow our vision or liberate it. Overly simplistic metaphors can lead us to overlook complexity or prematurely settle on causal explanations that fit our worldview.

This brings us to a deeper point: perception itself is shaped by culture. Siegel draws on J.J. Gibson’s concept of “affordances”—the idea that perception is not just about recognizing objects but also about perceiving their possibilities for action. In social contexts, these affordances are not neutral. They are culturally coded. A person may seem threatening or out of place not because of anything they do, but because of how their presence is perceived through a culturally conditioned lens. In the West, both among hosts and immigrants for example, racialized narratives have embedded themselves so deeply in public consciousness that they influence perceptual experience at a foundational level—determining who seems trustworthy, dangerous, competent, or invisible.

For scenario planning, this recognition introduces political and ethical stakes. If our perceptions—of threats, opportunities, or stakeholders—are subtly shaped by cultural forces, then so too are the scenarios we create. Left unexamined, these perceptual biases can become structural biases within the stories we tell about the future. The challenge is not simply to include diverse voices, but to critically reflect on how deeply rooted assumptions influence the very architecture of our foresight.

How, then, can scenario planning respond? One practical approach is to begin every project with a bias mapping canvas—an explicit inventory of known organizational or cultural assumptions, such as “tech solutionism” or “short-termism.” These should be revisited at key divergence points in the scenario process. Second, teams can apply an epistemic quality review to each key driver or uncertainty, assessing both the evidentiary strength of the data and how compelling it feels. This helps identify areas where strong intuitions are unsupported or where counterintuitive signals deserve a closer look.

To go further, multi-sensory immersion can deepen engagement and surface perceptual reactions. When scenarios are presented with artifacts—mock news headlines, simulated social media posts, or fictional customer reviews—they engage perception in richer ways than text alone. Debriefing which artifacts felt “real” and why can reveal hidden assumptions and emotional responses.

Ethical and political implications also warrant direct attention. An equity audit can be built into the scenario process to test whether narratives inadvertently reinforce stereotypes, power imbalances, or blind spots. Finally, the practice of learning loops ensures that when real-world data surprises us, we don’t just update the forecast—we interrogate the perceptual filters that made the surprise invisible in the first place.

In the end, scenario planning is not just about imagining the future—it is about refining the way we perceive the present. It is about understanding that perception is not fixed or neutral, but shaped by deep cognitive and cultural forces. By cultivating perspective alongside perception, scenario planners can build futures that are not only plausible and insightful, but also more just, inclusive, and epistemically sound.

Lived Experience, Memory, and the Craft of Scenario Planning

Scenario planners like to picture themselves as explorers of the unknown, yet they set out with maps drawn from the past. The brain, ever the conserving organ, insists on using those maps. There were six groups that worked on real life case studies but funily enough most scarios planned twenty years from now boild down to either debloalization or AI. We put huge weight to the present and recent past. Evolution has wired it for efficiency: it reduces metabolic load by turning yesterday’s successful interpretations into today’s unconscious filters. What felt causal—if X, then Y—is stored as an assumption and silently pasted over the next situation that looks vaguely familiar. In stable environments this speeds survival; in shifting ones it breeds strategic myopia.

Inside a corporate war‑room the dynamic is easy to spot. Senior executives survey the competitive landscape through lenses polished during earlier triumphs. Without noticing, they let last decade’s logic pass as “objective reality,” and confidently extrapolate linear paths forward. The annual‑report archive is littered with their misplaced certainty. Firms that slid from dominance to bankruptcy seldom lacked intelligence; they lacked the reflex to question the brain’s cheap copy‑and‑paste function.

Scenario planning exists to supply that reflex. Its first move is to surface the lived and past experiences already shaping perception. A bias‑mapping canvas, completed in silence and discussed aloud, makes the hidden explicit: Which victories, crises, slogans or personal turning‑points still govern how we read weak signals? Which linear stories—big customer lost ⇒ restructure ⇒ rebound—have become mental templates for entirely new situations? Naming these patterns does not erase them, but it robs them of sovereignty.

History then becomes both ally and adversary. Used uncritically, historical analogies seduce us into “the future = the past, plus AI” Used rigorously, as John Snow used London’s cholera data, history becomes an experimental field. Snow distrusted the fashionable miasma theory because his lived observation—sewer workers did not die more often—clashed with the doctrine. He bracketed assumption, isolated a variable (water source) and let empirics decide. Scenario teams can mimic that discipline: treat each analogue as a hypothesis, test it against counter‑evidence, and stay open to entirely different causal architectures.

Three complementary methods keep this scientific mindset alive:

Yet cognition is not the whole story; embodiment matters. Phenomenologists from Merleau‑Ponty onward remind us that experience is not disembodied data processing but being‑in‑the‑world. Strategy workshops happen in rooms arranged for hierarchy: who sits at the center, who near the exit, who on screen. These spatial cues inflect which futures feel plausible. The body’s “I can”—its sense of reach, voicing, status—colours the futures it can imagine. Invite junior analysts to storyboard a radical scenario and the room suddenly re‑orients: spaces of possibility expand because different lived bodies, with different sensorimotor histories, are now doing the perceiving.

Merleau‑Ponty’s distinction between Körper (the body as object) and Leib (the lived body) translates directly into stakeholder mapping. A carbon‑intensive utility and a coastal fishing community inhabit the same coastline but not the same oriented space. What the utility reads as a manageable regulatory cost, fishermen feel as existential threat. Effective scenarios fold both orientations into one narrative frame, forcing decision‑makers to inhabit unfamiliar bodies long enough to grasp non‑linear reactions—protest, litigation, migration—that a purely objective map would miss.

Holding all this together is a disciplined skepticism—an “open mind, not an open sink.” Powerful new ideas and technologies parade through the boardroom weekly; most are noise. Scenario teams therefore adopt a Popperian ethic: propositions must survive attempts at falsification before they upgrade the mental model. Edmund Phelps’s vision of economic dynamism reminds us why the hassle is worthwhile: societies (and firms) flourish when many people experiment locally, test assumptions quickly, and share what works. Scenario planning emulates that grassroots innovation in the cognitive realm, offering a structured playground where multiple logics of the future can be tested without betting the balance‑sheet.

Finally, again to reiterate, every scenario cycle should build learning loops. When an unexpected signal appears—an abrupt policy reversal, a technology scaling faster than the boldest storyline—it is more than a forecast error. It is feedback on the perceptual filters we left in place. The team reconvenes, identifies which lived experiences or linear assumptions blunted their sensitivity, and amends both the narrative set and the mental habits behind it.

Why Feedback Loops Make—or Break—Your Scenarios

Scenario planning consistently warns against projecting the future in straight lines, yet too often, planning workshops fall back into just that—assuming that tomorrow will look like yesterday, plus or minus ten percent. The failure here is not in intention, but in attention. The blind spot is feedback: every social, organizational, or technical system reacts to interventions with its own dynamic responses. These responses can amplify our efforts, neutralize them, or delay the result so long that we misread the signal altogether. Without recognizing feedback loops—and the time lags that often hide them—scenario work risks becoming an exercise in narrative comfort rather than strategic foresight.

Feedback loops are foundational to how real systems behave, and yet most strategy work treats systems as if they are linear and independent. Consider a familiar example from aviation. Traditional airline management focused obsessively on aircraft load factors and route efficiency, treating each plane as a node in a logistics network. Southwest Airlines challenged that approach by redrawing the boundaries of the system. Instead of maximizing plane efficiency, it optimized for passenger convenience—direct city pairs, rapid turnaround times, and simplicity. This shift activated a reinforcing loop: faster gate times led to more daily flights, which lowered unit costs, which enabled cheaper fares, which in turn attracted more passengers. The more the system succeeded, the more it reinforced its own success. Scenario planning that failed to recognize these feedback dynamics—treating load factor as an isolated performance lever—completely missed the nature of Southwest’s competitive advantage.

At a macro level, feedback loops also explain the collapse of once-thriving systems. Joseph Tainter’s work on the fall of complex societies illustrates the consequences of ignoring diminishing marginal returns. Civilizations solve early problems by adding layers—more administration, more infrastructure, more surveillance, more data collection. Each layer initially yields benefit, but over time, the cost of maintaining the complexity outweighs its utility. The Roman Empire, for instance, sustained expansion by funding its legions through plunder. But when the cost of frontier defense began to exceed the revenue it generated, the entire system became unsustainable. A balancing feedback loop—rising maintenance costs reducing surplus and weakening military capacity—eventually overcame the reinforcing loop of conquest.

Modern organizations risk echoing this same trajectory. Compliance teams double every five years. Enterprise systems grow in sophistication and opacity. Data platforms become so layered and intricate that no one knows how to extract value from them. AI dashboards promise insight but generate new rounds of data-cleaning committees. Without visibility into feedback, a scenario set will wrongly forecast a steady growth in capability. One that understands feedback will ask a far more difficult—and realistic—question: when does increasing complexity stop protecting the system and start choking it?

This is why modeling feedback loops is essential to meaningful scenario design. Even a rough causal loop diagram—sketched on a whiteboard—forces a team to interrogate their assumptions. Which variables reinforce each other? Which push in opposite directions? Where are the delays? When we chart the behavior of key variables over time, rather than looking at point-in-time snapshots, we begin to see the slope of the future, not just its destination.

Recognizing hidden stocks is just as crucial. These are the slow-moving accumulations—public trust, institutional legitimacy, infrastructure maintenance, technical debt—that can store both resilience and fragility. Their effects often show up only after a critical threshold has been crossed, and by then, strategic reversals may no longer be possible.

Interventions should also be tested for policy resistance. When you push on a system, the system pushes back. A new policy that looks clean on paper might be undermined by unseen loops—user backlash, shifting incentives, regulatory drag. If the feedback loop is stronger than the intended lever, the intervention will fail. Better to spot that on a diagram than in the market.

Scenario teams must also watch for the point at which returns on complexity decline. When a new KPI, tech platform, or governance process adds less value than the one before it—or worse, erodes agility—that inflection must be captured in the logic of the future you’re building.

Ultimately, moving from loop literacy to foresight fluency means changing how we think. Linear cause-and-effect is instinctive. It mirrors the structure of a story: one event leads to another in a clean, satisfying arc. But systems don’t tell stories—they operate in loops. They respond, delay, amplify, and resist. They often surprise us because we didn’t model how they might respond, only what we hoped they would do.

But once teams learn to see feedback, two important shifts occur. First, they stop extrapolating blindly and start building richer, more adaptive scenarios. Second, the fundamental question changes—from “What will happen to us?” to “Which loop can we tune or tame?” That shift marks the true value of scenario planning: not just predicting the future, but learning how to shape it.

What Makes a Good Scenario? A Narrative Grounded in Jouvenel’s Conjecture

If you have read Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, it reads like a haunting retrospective scenario—an elegant, intellectually vibrant, and seemingly invincible Europe that drifted, almost sleepwalking, into catastrophe. It is a deeply personal account of a society enamored with progress, civility, and cultural refinement, yet fatally blind to the gathering storms of nationalism, militarism, and extremism. For the scenario planner, Zweig’s memoir is more than a nostalgic lament; it is a powerful case study in the failure to perceive discontinuity. It reminds us that what feels permanent—economic prosperity, political order, cultural sophistication—can dissolve rapidly when weak signals are dismissed or when dominant narratives silence alternative possibilities. Reframing Zweig’s Vienna not as the pinnacle of history but as one path among many, foresight becomes a practice of humility and vigilance: surfacing buried assumptions, exploring divergent futures, and preparing institutions and societies to remain flexible in the face of shocks. The goal is not to predict collapse, but to safeguard the civic imagination and collective resilience that Zweig’s generation, for all its brilliance, tragically lacked.

In a world increasingly obsessed with prediction, the best scenarios are not those that claim to foresee the future—they are those that help us think and act differently today. Bertrand de Jouvenel’s concept of conjecture reminds us that good futures work is not about prophecy. The role of the futurist is not to play oracle, projecting singular outcomes with mathematical precision. Instead, the futurist is a guide—one who invites others into a reasoned and imaginative exploration of what might happen. Conjecture, in this sense, is not idle speculation but a disciplined reflection on the many possible paths the future could take, grounded in current conditions, emerging signals, and human choices.

From this foundation emerges the idea of futuribles—plural, possible futures. The future is not a single, predetermined track but a wide and branching landscape of options. Each path contains not only trends but turning points, not only risks but aspirations. Scenario planning that reflects this pluralism moves beyond mechanistic forecasts. It creates exploratory scenarios to help understand what might unfold, and normative scenarios to articulate what we hope to shape. The purpose is not to predict, but to prepare—to enable choice, agency, and direction amid uncertainty.

Still, scenarios are not an end in themselves. It is easy to fall into the trap of producing elegant futures narratives that have little impact on actual decisions. A good scenario links clearly to action. It sharpens decisions, clarifies priorities, and identifies the shifts in investment, policy, or mindset that different futures might demand. It is a means to an end—a strategic tool rather than a creative exercise.

To serve this purpose, scenarios must balance imagination with clarity. The most effective are not necessarily the most sophisticated, but those built through transparent, structured methods that can be understood and used by the people who must act on them. They are coherent, plausible, and open-ended enough to spark new thinking. Their power lies not in complexity but in accessibility—methods that illuminate, rather than obscure, the forces at play.

A strong scenario process also resists the "hammer-nail fallacy"—the habit of using a familiar tool for every problem or asking the same questions in every context. Not all challenges are alike, and not all futures work begins with the same assumptions. Jouvenel emphasized the importance of asking the right questions. Foresight is as much about reframing problems as it is about answering them. Poorly posed questions lead even the most carefully constructed scenarios toward irrelevance.

Jouvenel also critiqued the overly predictive rationalism of his era—the belief that the future could be controlled through data, extrapolation, and expert authority. He warned against the illusion of managerial certainty. The future, he argued, is not a machine to be calibrated but a space shaped by human values, desires, and decisions. What we believe, hope for, and act upon are not incidental to foresight—they are at its core. Foresight, therefore, is never neutral. It must make explicit the ethical stakes and strategic choices that lie within every imagined future.

Good scenarios also require memory. They must be rooted in historical understanding and long-term thinking. Thinkers like Fernand Braudel, knew that the rhythms of human behavior, institutional inertia, and technological change often repeat or echo over time. The future may not repeat the past, but it often rhymes. Scenarios that ignore this are brittle. Those that engage with history are more likely to build resilient strategies—not just imaginative ones.

Ultimately, what makes a scenario truly effective is not its elegance or novelty, but its usefulness. Does it challenge assumptions? Does it sharpen decision-making? Does it equip people to navigate uncertainty with greater clarity and confidence? A good scenario does not tell us what will happen. It gives us the insight and agency to shape what could happen. And that, more than foresight, is the beginning of meaningful strategy.

Scenarios are possibilities, but the future is yet to be built….

This is the gift of scenario thinking—rigor to guard against illusion, and narrative to spark action. London’s skyline looms ahead, its glass towers throbbing with spreadsheets and shareholder demands, its boardrooms where “long-term” means next quarter. But here, under constellations older than borders, the night stretches vast and patient. The spires stand as sentinels of time, reminding me that urgency is a modern myth. and I carry with me the quiet power of knowing: we are not passengers—we hold the remote, and the story, stubbornly, remains ours to tell….