Scenario planning slides for Unit 2a: PGDP514

1. Scenario Planning for DRR

2. Background to the Scenario
Planning process
 Origin in post WWII military planning – creating
alternative cold war scenarios.
 Pierre Wack a planner with Shell used scenarios to alert
Shell to the dangers of oil industry instability in the
early 1970’s.
 Used in South Africa in a process known as the Mont
Fleur scenarios to ensure a peaceful transfer of power
in 1994.
 Used in natural resource management in the Millennium
Assessment and at different scales in South Africa,
Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

3. What is Scenario Planning?
 Scenario planning is a tool, methodology or process for
analysing the future in a creative and innovative way
that challenges the mind to use past experience with
current indicators and drivers to create plausible
alternative futures. It is about Past, Present and Future!
 It is a tool for testing unpredictable “what if”
situations.
 It is a tool for testing conventional plans and underlying
assumptions.
 It is a tool for getting people to examine their own
positions from a different perspective. Thinking the
unthinkable.

4. Some underlying concepts:
“There are always pockets of the future in
the present. Some countries do things
today that will take five or ten years to
reach other countries. Some sectors of
society are right now living in a way that
is our future. Some people have ideas that
will take twenty years to incubate and
become generally accepted. Technologies
exist that people have not yet heard of
that will one day be commonplace”.
(Anthony Hodgson, 2004)

6. “There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns.
That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But
there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we
don't know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this
information together, and we then say well that's basically what we see
as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known
unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown
unknowns.
It sounds like a riddle. It isn't a riddle. It is a very serious, important
matter.
There's another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of
evidence is not evidence of absence. It is basically saying the same thing
in a different way. Simply because you do not have evidence that
something exists does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't
exist. And yet almost always, when we make our threat assessments,
when we look at the world, we end up basing it on the first two pieces
of that puzzle, rather than all three”. – Former US Secretary of Defence,
Donald Rumsfeld, From a Press Conference at NATO Headquarters,
Brussels, Belgium, June 6, 2002

7. Scenarios work like we think!

8. Key
Question
Default Scenario
Rich
Picture
Purpose
Develop
Awareness
Of System
Complexity /
Drivers
Drivers
Policy Advice
System
Drivers
Causal
Relationships
Result – Trans
Scale
Communication /
Understanding /
Foresight
Driver
Matrix
Future Scenarios
Purpose
Scenario
Matrix
Scenario
Narratives
Conflict
Resolution /
Test
Assumptions /
Possible
Futures

10. What Scenario Planning is not!
 It is not about trying to predict the future (it is more
about preparing for the future)!
 It is not a panacea for all our planning problems (it is
more about putting plans into perspective).
 It does not replace the need for conventional planning.

11. Some scenario planning examples
:

15. Why might Scenarios be useful for
the “X” situation?
 Ultimately a question you will answer !
 However, the “X” situation is a complex system with a
wide range of emerging issues
 Change is always happening how will the future look?
 The future always has shocks and surprises. Is your
planning prepared for this? Perhaps more importantly
are you prepared for this?

17. How participants feel…
 Confused
 Tired
 Frustrated
 Exited
 Amazed
 Informed
 Empowered
Don’t worry all of this is normal …..

18. Determining the Key Question
-
What are you trying to address?
The key question is important though to provide focus
for the process it contains three important components
-
Subject
Physical scale
Time scale

19. The Rich Picture
Understanding the “default scenario”.
 What is a default scenario? The default scenario is our
existing reality – the comfort zone of the world around us,
our assumptions and expectations of how the future will
evolve
 In any circumstance we need to understand the world
around us and the forces that are shaping it
 Rich Pictures
world and issues
help us explain and understand our

20. The Players
 The stakeholder analysis is a central part of the scenario
planning process. It identifies the various “actors” and should
be used to develop an understanding of the institutional
geography and interests. It goes further than simply
identifying who should, or should not, be involved in the
process and, amongst many things, it provides us with an
insight into how people perceive the system to be operating.
 Some stakeholder groups are easily identifiable particularly if
they are formal institutions. However, there are often
informal groupings or individuals within communities and
sometimes within institutions that may have considerable
unseen impact on institutional dynamics.

22. Driver Identification
 Working with and understanding system drivers is the
central part of the scenario planning process.
 The initial objective is to capture as many system
drivers as possible, no matter how insignificant the
driver may seem.
 System drivers may have different forms and be
conceptual or physical in nature.
 Don’t worry about duplication – this will be resolved by
“clustering” later.

23. Driver Clusters
 In order to manage a large range of drivers they need to
be clustered
 This can be done in various ways one of which is PESTEL

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Political
Economic
Social
Technical
Ecological
Legal

24. Cause Effect Relationships
 The driver causal relationship diagram is a systems diagram that
shows the relationship between drivers.
 The causal relationship diagram indicates through lines and
arrows whether the relationship is a positive or negative
relationship in respect of the key question developed at the
outset of the exercise. In some cases, the relationship can be
both positive and negative.
 The causal relationship diagram is a schematic representation of
the system and is very useful in showing interdependencies and
levels of complexity within systems.
 Ogilvy and Shwartz (2004) “systems thinking is good for
deepening the scenario plots”, the participants are often
astounded by visualising the linkages between driving forces they
have identified.

26. Developing the Driver Matrix
 The driver matrix is a simple tool for analysing the impact and
predictability/ responsiveness of a driver.
 The impact of the driver is the level of influence the driver has
on the system to either maintain or change the system.
 The predictability is how much is known about the driver and
how it will influence the system in the future.
 In scenario development, understanding driver impact and
predictability is especially important for drivers that have a
higher impact and are less predictable in respect of their future
influence on the system.
 If the driver matrix has too many drivers, it can become
cluttered and may need to be re-clustered.
 It is important to realise that, when looking at the driver matrix,
the values higher, lower, more and less are not absolute, but
relative to the other driver clusters.

27. Less Predictable
Water
LNP Driver Matrix 2007
Health and Disease
Infrastructure
Lower Impact
Formal Economy
Higher Impact
Wildlife
Livestock
Governance
More Predictable
Demographics

28. Framing The Scenarios – The
Scenario Matrix
 The approach outlined here is what Ogilvy and Schwartz refer
to as “the deductive approach”.
 This approach involves drafting a scenario matrix out of the
driver matrix in a process where “arriving at the axes is an
interactive group process, driven as much by challenge as
consensus” (Ogilvy and Schwartz, 2004).
 In this four possible futures are developed based on two key
(preferably high impact low predictability) drivers.
 Each driver forms one of the axes and the extreme values
identified earlier provide the basis for each “scenario plot”.
 Using a four scenario matrix, one scenario will be
predominantly positive, one will be predominantly negative
and two will be mixed.

29. CONSISTENT
POSITIVE SCENARIO
CONSISTENT CLIMATE AND
SOUND INSTITUTIONAL
ARRANGEMENTS RESULT IN
SUSTAINABLE MAP
COLLECTION
SCENARIO PLOT 2
CLIMATE
SCENARIO PLOT 1
MIXED SCENARIO
CONSISTENT CLIMATE BUT
FAILED INSTITUTIONAL
ARRANGEMENTS RESULT IN
OVER COLLECTION OF MAPs
OVER
MAPs COLLECTION
MAPs COLLECTION
SUSTAINABLE
SCENARIO PLOT 3
MIXED SCENARIO
VARIABLE CLIMATE BUT
ROBUST INSTITUTIONAL
ARRANGEMENTS RESULT IN
SUSTAINABLE COLLECTION
OF MAPs
CLIMATE
SCENARIO PLOT 4
NEGATIVE SCENARIO
VARIABLE CLIMATE AND
FAILED INSTITUTIONAL
ARRANGEMENTS RESULT IN
OVER COLLECTION OF MAPs
VARIABLE

30. Scenario Narratives
 The scenario narratives ultimately are the key to the scenario planning process.
They are the stories that take the complexity of drivers and their complex
interactions and make them readily understandable. To assist in remembering and
describing each scenario plot it is often useful to give each plot a catchy name.
 Narratives can be in various forms such as:

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Written stories
Rich pictures
Theatre
Film
 The scenario narratives should be set in the time of the scenario horizon.
However, it is important that the narrative brings out the “evolution” of events to
the end point, in a manner that describes interactions over time rather than
suddenly arriving at an end point.
 It is the creation of the narratives that should provide the participants of any
scenario planning exercise the most enjoyment as pointed out by Ogilvy and
Shwartz; “If you are not having fun you are not doing it right.”

32. Scenario Planning and DRR

34.  To achieve meaningful DRR there is a need to understand the
wider context in which disasters occur and will occur in the
future.
 Scenario planning is a tool that can assist in this by:
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Integration with other planning approaches and simulation
Informing management and policy reform
Facilitating cross-scale and trans-disciplinary communication
Assisting capacity building, awareness, education and knowledge
building