Thinking differently without waiting for disaster
Well. That was pretty exhilarating. We’ve just had the privilege of spending three days in the Cotswolds with our Expert Advisory Group, laying out the structure of the three worlds that form the basis of our BCH scenarios. We’ll share more detail about these scenarios in a later post: this is just a short note to recognise the committment and effort everyone brought to a difficult and challenging task. I’m sure I wouldn’t be the only person to imagine that the Cotswold fog surrounding the hotel sometimes crept in to our rooms, though it didn’t linger for long in the face of such insight and illumination. Thank you!
One of the topics that arose from time to time was the question of what these scenarios would be used for: what, in effect, was the value of trying to provide multiple alternative visions of the future, rather than just aiming for a single most likely future? I think one of the best answers to this is that having alternatives allow you to counter dominant visions and orthodox futures. And this morning I read one of the best examples of why you might want to do that, in Mervyn King’s explanation of the regulators’ failure to censure the practices of the financial sector: “They would have been seen to be arguing against success”.
When there’s a single, dominant vision of how things are and how they will be, it has a distorting effect, exerting a strange kind of gravity that – while things are going well – seems to attract only support. Of course, once this dominant vision falters there’s greater appetite for different approaches, but by then things have already turned sour. This is why futures work is important: articulating alternative futures in a systematic way gives us the chance to step outside the influence of recieved opinon, even while it’s at its most influential. And if we can do that, we might not have to wait for disaster before we can change things for the better.
