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we find difficult to allocate to anything that doesn’t appear urgent or immediate. Another critical point for the futures field is the point Oglivy makes about the attempt of futurists to gain academic credibility: To the extent that we mimic scientists in claiming value-free objectivity in our view of the future, we deny the very thing that makes us good human beings and good futurists. We deny that we care. But we must care. If we do not, we are doomed to a dreadful future…we futurists (including all human beings trying to shape their own futures’ don’t have to learn how to play their game of objective, value-free science; they are learning to play ours. (page 78) And, further into the book, Oglivy comments: Scenario planning is a practice in search of a theory. Developed outside the university by thoughtful people with no disciplinary and departmental axes to grind, scenario planning solves the dilemmas of critical theory without ever having set out to do so. (page 160) The more we assess scenario planning using traditional academic criteria, the less we have the ability to understand and exploit its unique advantages – that of allowing us to escape the often crippling constraints of our ways of operating and doing business today, to consider what is possible and even preferable for us into the future, to explore risks and threats and possible responses ahead of time, and to collectively build images of futures that we can begin to work towards today. More importantly, it moves us out of the dominant economic paradigm of making profits, or faceto-face teaching, and into a world where anything is possible.
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A Foresight Saga?, Review by Maree Conway
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There is more in this book than I can do justice to in a single review. So, I won’t try but highly recommend that you read this book if you are serious about doing scenario planning to transform thinking about the future – as opposed to entrenching the status quo even more. If there is one thing that I would want added to a future edition, it’s more about how we need to integrate the individual, interior into scenario planning. Oglivy is clear about the role that values play in scenario planning, but if we are to ‘make change’ then we have to change the way people think about the future. That isn’t going to happen just by ‘aha’ moments or by exploring options for normative futures, it happens by methodically working through a series of steps to rewire the brain to move us out of our present and our comfort zones. We are creatures of habit, in thinking and action, and the biggest value of scenario planning, done well, is that it will shake us out of those habits by making us confront the simple truth that the future will not be business as usual. This book demonstrates how to go about creating the future we want. Because, no matter how good the outcomes of a scenario project are, if we haven’t changed the way people think about and respond to change, they will go back to work and do what they have always done. And then we will get the future we deserve. Maree Conway is CEO of Thinking Futures, a Melbournebased strategic foresight practice that helps people build their environmental scanning, strategic thinking and strategic planning capabilities to develop stronger futures ready strategy today. www.thinkingfutures.net
vol. 53, no. 2, 2011