Creating Better Futures: Scenario Planning As a Tool for A Better Tomorrow

Rating:
Summary: Determinism dies another little death
Review: Compiled in part as a rebuttal to those who see the future through a dystopian lens (i.e. Orwell and company), Ogilvy offers this book as a refusal to accept either the notion that we are a doomed people, or that we must settle for "good enough" in contemplating progress and the future. He offers scenario building as the premiere tool for creating multiple, multicultural futures, based upon a "relational worldview". In doing so, Ogilvy tackles positivism and relativism, values and ethics, and the importance of true pluralism to creating better futures.

Ogilvy is well equipped for the task. With a doctorate in philosophy from Yale University, he has taught at that venerable institution, as well as at the University of Texas, and Williams College. He has been interested in the relationships between human values and consumer societies, and headed the "Values and Lifestyles" research project at the think tank, SRI International (formerly known as Stanford Research Institute). He worked in scenario building with Peter Schwartz for Royal Dutch/Shell, and later co-founded Global Business Network (GBN) with Schwartz and others. At GBN, he specializes in corporate scenario planning and research on futures in business environments. He has also authored, Living Without a Goal (1994), China's Futures (with Peter Schwartz - 2000), and Many Dimensional Man (1977), as well as numerous other publications through SRI.

Ogilvy fleshes out his relational worldview in the first part of the book, where he traces the move from mysticism to rationalism, and the evolving recognition of the inter-relatedness of the world today. Emphasizing the growth of elaborate networks of information and obviously competing visions of the future, Ogilvy constructs an extremely useful framework for beginning to consider potential futures in the world at large. He considers changing relations in religion, politics, and economics, in the struggle between individual and collectivist posturing and power, and weaves together multiple, shifting disciplinary views in the human sciences, and interprets these into a new view of the world that avoids the excesses of zealots and nihilists alike.

Ogilvy takes a chapter to discuss the application of particular features of this new world to normative scenario building. Recognizing the philosophical shift from things to symbols, the growing emphasis on relationships, the shift to narration from explanation, and the questionability of "timeless norms", Ogilvy cautions against wholesale subjective relativism, and instead holds out the possibility of what he calls the democratization of meaning, and paths towards ethical pluralism, that strives to unite the normal, or what exists, with the normative, what ought to be. In this model, ambiguity is always present, and the potential for multiple interpretations is rife - and a source of welcome creativity. Likewise, the idea of heterarchy, a sort of hyperlinkish anti-hierarchy, creates opportunities for multiplicity as well. Rather than trying to devise the One True Path based on immutable "laws" of nature, multiple paths are carved out that represent the shared hopes and dreams of community and communities.

By Part Four, entitled New Rules, New Tools, it is quite obvious how scenario building works hand in hand with the relational worldview and ethical pluralism Ogilvy has discussed. The rest of the book is devoted to the use of the scenario building tool, with examples of scenario building in action in first an educational context, and then a healthcare context. He closes by reiterating why even thinking about one best future is no more possible that thinking about one best way of being human, and encourages the visualization of a "rich ecology of species in the gardens of the sublime."

The strengths of this book are many; it is an extremely enjoyable read, with just enough additional sources to round it up to a "scholarly" tome. In the best scenario building tradition, the thesis of the book is cohesive and plausible, and is an especially refreshing departure from much of the scenario building literature, that too frequently focuses on business applications and barely questioned assumptions defined by buzzwords. Ogilvy stresses the need for passion and pluralism to co-exist, reminds us of the true potential of communal/social creativity, and suggests the possibility of exhilaration in imaginations unfettered. Creating Better Futures is aptly named, and offers an "Etch-a-Sketch" blueprint to be used over and over to do just that.

Rating:
Summary: A new paradigm for shaping our future
Review: How do we achieve our futures? Is our future predetermined? How much of our future can we extrapolate from our past and our present? These are questions which James Ogilvy addresses in this book.

Ogilvy has an impressive background in both academia and the business world. Before co-founding the Global Business Network, he was a Professor of Philosophy at Yale and Williams, and a social researcher with the Stanford Research Institute (Values and Lifestyles Program). In Creating Better Futures he draws on all his experiences in these fields to outline what he sees as an emerging paradigm of how we view and shape society. This paradigm he calls the 'relational worldview': a view of the world which highlights relationships and interdependencies across and in spite of differences.
Ogilvy devotes a large part of the book to outlining his worldview - he identifies social structures which were dominant in the past & explains why they are no longer sufficient to provide us with the futures we want. Then he relates his argument for a new world view to shifts he sees in other social sciences, namely anthropology and literary criticism: the shift from objectivity to subjectivity, from things to symbols and relationships, from determinism to ambiguity and the existence of many different but equal possibilities which arise from meanings created and shared by and within groups.

Ogilvy points out that we already have at hand the essentials for creating a better tomorrow; the three key elements of players, values and tools we need are easily identified once we look at the world through the new paradigm of the relational worldview. He rejects the Religious Institutions of past eras, and the Governments and Marketplace of the modern era, as major players in future society. Placing individualist and collective societies at two opposite ends of the same spectrum of social organization, he identifies individuals within communities as the new actors in making decisions.

Similarly, the social values of this new paradigm are not found in the absolutism or determinism of religion, or the scientific objectivity of modernism. Nor are they found in the subjective relativism of postmodernism. Rather, values are found in the ethical pluralism of interrelated communities - an ongoing process whereby communities share their hopes and negotiate meanings as they try to get along with each other.

Recognizing that in an increasingly interdependent world there are a multiplicity of religions, races, standards, norms and values, Ogilvy's worldview identifies scenario-building as the tool best suited for creating better futures. Scenario-building is a process which provides a venue for a individuals and groups within a community to assess, articulate and negotiate its hopes and values for a better future. In the final chapters of the book Ogilvy gives a brief outline and some illustrations of the practice of scenario planning.

This is stimulating, though not easy, book to read. Adopting a new perspective is always challenging, and Ogilvy has included a lot of abstract philosophical, sociological and literary theories as he builds his case for a new worldview. However I chose this book because I wanted to read more than another "How to .." book - I wanted a book that would situate the technique of scenario-building in a wider social and global context. Ogilvy's well-considered paradigm provides a very good starting-point for us to contemplate as we try to negotiate our shrinking and increasingly interdependent world.