Scenario integration

What is the scenario integration workshop?

The scenario integration tool uses qualitative and quantitative elements of scenario planning to collectively draft possible developments of a societal challenge. It is typically applied in a structured one-day workshop.

In future or transition-oriented research projects, questions about possible developments abound. To accommodate qualitative and quantitative thought-styles for generating such future outlooks, a platform and language for exchange and interaction are necessary.

We suggest to organize the tool as group workshop of one day along the following steps:

1) The facilitator introduces the objective of the workshop as well as the rationale and core terms of scenario planning

2) The participants discuss and define specific system boundaries

3) The participants collect and roughly structure a first set of impact variables. These variables are used to characterise the societal challenge and its future development. (Participants have to be asked to collect these individually when preparing the workshop)

4) The participants split into two groups (try to balance members of different subprojects, if applicable)

• Group 1 further sorts und structures impact variables and defines for each impact variable the range of values that characterise a future development (projections – make sure that all variables are “owned”, i.e. determinable by at least one of the participants).
• Group 2 intuitively develops various visions of future developments and describes these visions in a crisply and well understandable text or picture.
  

5) In the plenary: the two groups mutually present their results and answer questions of clarification.

6) Continuation in the two groups:

• Group 1 tries to represent the visions of Group 2 as scenarios with impact variables and respective values; in doing so they try to detect incongruences between visions and gaps in their variables-based descriptions.
• Group 2 compares its visions with the impact variables and values provided by Group 1; in doing so they check whether the visions are diverse, i.e. cover impact variables with different values. In addition, they identify impact variables or values that are important for describing their visions but are missing.
  

7) In the plenary: the two groups mutually present their results, answer questions of clarification and discuss the following points:

• What adaptations in the visions are necessary to get comparable but distinct scenarios?
• What adaptations in the impact variables and their possible values are necessary to adequately describe all scenarios?
• Is the set of visions or scenarios complete, or should additional ones be constructed?

Follow-up:

It is recommended to clarify how the scenarios are going to be used by the different researchers or subprojects.

At the end of the workshop a reasonably complete draft of a set of different scenarios should be available. All scenarios should be on the same level of abstraction and describe various possible future developments of a societal challenge using the same set of variables to which different values are assigned.

Further, it should be clear who finalises these scenarios after the workshop. An agreement that all researchers (or subprojects) are using the developed scenarios in their subsequent research steps may be helpful.

All researchers involved or at least one researcher representing each subproject, respectively, plus relevant societal actors should participate.

Care should be taken when inviting societal actors: they should be familiar or willing to work with the abstract language of “impact variables” and “values of impact variables”. Alternatively, the views of societal actors can be collected separately in form of narratives, storylines or visions.