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In this case, key uncertainties were identified by the participants of the workshops and the
respondents of the strategic interviews and futures questionnaires. Brainstorming sessions
during the workshops aimed not only to identify the key uncertainties and the degree of their
impact but also to discern possible impacts of these uncertainties.
5. Establish Scenario Logics
This stage lies at the heart of the prospective process. Here is established a logical rationale
and structure for the scenarios, and it is when intuition, insight and creativity play the greatest
role. The logics provide the themes for a scenario’s plot or story. They connect the present to
a specific scenario end-state or outcome, for any ‘future history’ must make sense ‘today’. Put
another way, they are the organising principles around which the scenarios are structured. They
focus on the critical or pivotal uncertainties for the organisation concerned and present
alternative theories of the way the world might work. These alternative future states are
logical in the sense that a persuasive and rational case can be made for each of the outcomes.
These logics can be articulated and elaborated in a number of different ways. Most usually, by
either laying-out in simple narrative form, or by using the 2 x 2 matrix approach, or by depicting
the logics and their interactions or relationships diagrammatically showing causal connections.
These are represented in Figure 2.
In this project, the gateway scenarios were nested within three alternative global and national
scenarios developed in the beginning of the process using the material from the national
workshop, a number of strategic conversations at the national level as well as the work of The
Futures Academy conducted over the recent years. Participants of the gateway workshops were
asked to imagine the futures for their gateway within three different national sets of
circumstances.
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Figure 2: Scenario logics. Source: Outsights.
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