Who needs to create scenarios?
I have spent the last few months considering long term planning. Not what I’m going to have for breakfast next week rather than just tomorrow but what could the world be like in 2020 and am I ready for it (the answer to which is probably not).
The reason for this is because the Research into Action part of the Beyond Current Horizons project is trying to support all those in education involved in such thinking, be it around designing curricula, building schools for the future, becoming an extended school and perhaps even planning careers. So far my main conclusion is that this type of planning is not easy given, as Peter Schwartz puts it, the “impossibly complex array of factors that affect any decision”.
So what could be done to make it easier? How can all those involved in education be inspired enough not only to create a vision but to make it a viable one? One solution that I’ve been investigating is to use scenarios – as the Carnegie UK Trust report says they can:
- Help define future vision and strategic priorities
- Rehearse different policy or strategy options to and weaknesses, or unintended consequences
- Future-proof a decision that is on the table.
Moreover, scenarios should be engaging, memorable and thought provoking – which ought to be ideal given the various backgrounds of those involved either working alone or in groups when doing the required educational long term planning.
However, the tricky thing is creating them. To VERY briefly summarise the process you decide your area of concern, you list all the possible factors that may impact, by some black art you select the most important and divergent factors around which to develop your scenarios, you create these plausible, coherent and possible futures, and then you plan with them. And this leaves out the consulting of experts to ensure the factors are accurate, commissioning of research as necessary, agreeing and sharing definitions, the critiquing of the proposed scenarios, the refinement, workshops possibly at every stage of the process, and how to create an action plan once you’ve got the final scenarios…
Would this creation process be useful to the education leaders, Local Authorities, consultants, architects, IT suppliers out there that may be involved in long term planning in schools? It would after all require investigating possible changes in the role of childhood, employment, technology, assessment and all the other research challenges which will influence plans. In my opinion, though I’m willing to change my mind on the basis of reasoned argument, is no. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of time in the world of planning in schools and surely what time is there should be spent doing the visioning and planning and not creating a set of plausible coherent possible futures in which these visions can be tested. The more interesting question is how can scenarios be used by education leaders? Which I may blog about in the future – but until then am looking forward to others thoughts on whether scenario creation would be useful in long term planning.
