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.

As an audience we can believe an alien present. It’s like today, only more so. Maybe an alternative version of today. We can also easily be persuaded to believe in a far future. We feel sure that someday, somehow they’ll have massive floating cities, or highways in the sky, instant food, and all the rest. We feel certain about this despite the fact that we can’t fund fast trains between our cities today, or permit genetically modified insect-resistant corn, or take any unified step toward large-scale 21-century developments. Even returning to the moon next decade seems far-fetched.

The near future – let’s peg it 2020 and beyond — is a blank because there is almost no vision of a near-future that seems both desirable and plausible.

There are, in fact, many visions of the period Kelly describes that are both desirable and plausible to some people, but what really intrigued me was this idea of an “alien present”. One of the things I’ve been saying to audiences over the last year or so has been “the difficult present is not the likely future”, meaning that it’s often easier to pick something confusing or challenging about the present to think about than it is to consider things that are genuinely sited in the future.

If the “future” is far enough away in time, it becomes an alternative or parallel world, chronologically separate from our own. “2186″ becomes, not a date, but as much of a location as “Fairyland” or “Toontown”. What Kelly calls the “near future” is somewhere that’s far enough distant from the present to appear different, without being so far away in time that it becomes easy for us to treat it as an alternative world rather than this world. The challenge is to articulate a future in a way that makes the causal and temporal connections to our own clear, and forces us to imagine reality, not fantasy.

Despite many invites the attendees comprised a CABE enabler and some teachers who had been involved in the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) process – the three local authorities invited could not attend that day – although they are seen as key users. Local authorities are not only involved in BSF (an obvious case of long term education planning) but extended schools, general ICT procurement which could influence curriculum design, and overseeing curriculum implementation.

The day had two main conclusions. The first was that scenarios were not seen as a useful tool when it came to planning, and the second was the need for case studies.

To my mind the first is counter intuitive; although I have spent a lot of time investigating scenarios recently so may be biased. I would have thought that seeing possible futures would have broadened thinking, and certainly testing ones plans in a variety of situations would ensure robustness.  Yet the concerns expressed are far more immediate, they need something practical for next year, possibly even five years into the future, but they are not looking 20 years ahead. Is this because all the measurement factors are immediate? Is this because they feel they’re recipients rather than leading the process so they don’t need to think about the “big picture”? My conclusion is I need to talk to more people but I do hope that with the CABE now supporting school involvement those in, or about to start, the BSF process feel more empowered.

Case studies, the second conclusion, would illustrate how stakeholders could broaden their thinking, use the tools that are to be provided, and inspire them. Which is evidently lacking when faced with a toolkit to help without examples of how and why it works. I can understand the need for explanation, but am now faced with the challenge of creating them. So if you know of any examples where the testing of robustness of long term plans has been essential, or where there was real involvement from all the stakeholders, let me know. Thanks.

Kevin Sander, director of corporate partnerships of the Arbor Day Foundation. “The ability to see the online impact of their tree planting, and knowing it will translate into an offline one, provides children with a sense of empowerment and a purposeful experience.”

Planting 15,000 trees to reflect the committment and enthusiasm of the Dizzywood players is a wonderful thing. What interested me in particular was the implication that planting a tree in a virtual world is an action that results in a tree growing in the real world, that there was some kind of continuity between the virtual and the real. For that magical thing to take place, for action to cross between different species of world, lots needs to happen. In fact, whenever a mouseclick implies a real-world outcome, a complex system of interrelated logistical events is summoned.

Anyone who’s shopped with Amazon knows this, of course. What I’m wondering about is more a terminological or perceptual shift in the way we describe work that might happen as this sort of transition becomes more usual. Currently, the jobs and activities essential to my books arriving from the internet are categorised variously and separately: ‘postman’, ‘order picker’, ‘database administator’, or perhaps ‘distribution’, ‘cataloguing’. But if we become more and more used to thinking that virtual actions have real outcomes, and if the chain that links the action and the result becomes less and less the focus of our attention, perhaps these different categories will end up making more sense as one single category: ‘people who make invisible things real’, perhaps, or ‘ontological transformers’, or perhaps just ‘the elves’.

As an analysis of economic develpment I’m sure this is naive and ill-informed. But I think it’s important to try and work out the ways that calling old things by new names might fool us into thinking there are genuinely new things in the world, when in fact it’s just our priorities that have changed.