Scenario
Welcome to the APEC Center for Technology Foresight
The APEC Center for Technology Foresight aims to develop and diffuse foresight capability across APEC. Foresight helps governments, businesses and organisations to establish directions, choose priorities and manage change. Since its launch in February 1998, the CTF has completed six international foresight studies, designed and supported many more studies at national and organisational level, co-hosted an international foresight conference and provided training and consultancy to many APEC member economies. The CTF also runs an APEC Technology Foresight Network, a global database of foresight practitioners, projects and publications (see: http://www.apectf.net) and yearly foresight trainining workshop.
The CTF is a project of the Industrial Science and Technology Working Group of APEC. It is hosted by the National Science and Technology Development Agency of Thailand.
For further information, see: http://www.apecforesight.org
SCENARIO PROCEDURE
Scenario is not about predicting the future; rather they about perceive the future in the present.
That foresight is not an exercise in forecasting cannot be over-emphasized. Rather, it is a mechanism for visioning possible futures, and for managing in the face of the unavoidable uncertainly.
On the basis of a range of foresight studies, the following generalizations have emerged:
What are Scenarios?
- Scenarios are coherent pictures of alternative futures;
- Scenarios are not predictions or forecasts of the future, nor are they science fiction stories;
- Scenarios are stories about the future which comprise a number of plots which bind together the elements of the scenario;
- plots within a Scenario are based on the key variables and critical uncertainties in the participant’s external environment; and
- in good Scenarios, plot lines intercept.
Scenarios address:
- issues trends and events in the current environment that are of concern to experts and decision-makers in society;
- elements in the environment that are determinable and somewhat predictable – pre-determined events or variables; and
- elements in the environment that are more uncertain, trend breakers that affect a system in unpredictable ways, but with understandable dynamics – turning points in the business, political or social environment, identifiable in the present, though often as early, weak signals of change.
Tests of a good Scenario:
Strategic Planning and Long-Range Planning
- Scenario is plausible to a critical mass of exerts and / or decision makers
- Scenario is internally consistent;
- Scenario is relevant to the topic or issue of interest;
- Scenario is recognizable from signals of the present – weak signals of change;
- Scenario is challenging, containing some elements of surprise or novelty in directions where the organization’ s vision needs to be stretched;
- Scenario is linked to participants mental maps; and
- Scenario should not be novel in very respect.
Source : Ron Johnston, Director of Australia Center for Innovation
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