The W iz ar dof USSustainable Scenarios ProjectWorld Business Council for
Sustainable Development

Copyright © World Business Council for Sustainable Development
March 2000, ISBN 2-940240-06-X
Printed on 100% chlorine-free bleached paper.

Acknowledgment

Imagine that the Wizard of Oz, or perhaps just your boss, has given you $1
million dollars to integrate sustainability into your organization. What would
you do first and why? What problems would you encounter? How would
you resolve them?

These are just a few of the questions considered by the United States
Sustainable Scenarios Project, an effort conceived and underwritten by morethan 20 North American-based businesses, some of which are members of
the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). Eachcompany invited one representative from government and one from acommunity group to participate.

Possibly the most important outcome of the project, however, was the clearly
expressed yearning by all to participate more often in partnerships thatbreak down the boundaries between business, government and NGOs. Most
recognized that the next steps in the journey toward sustainable development
will require people to share leadership and power, working together withcourage, wisdom, and heart to achieve the solutions.

Acknowledgment

We, the participants of the Sustainable Scenarios Project, realize our work
is a small contribution to the goal of sustainable development. We hope thekit will help others to engage in vigorous and imaginative discussions about
their futures and then to create action plans that take them forward.

We would like to thank the following individuals, without whose contributions
this project would not have been possible:

Betty Sue Flowers, University of Texas, Austin, for capturing the ideas
expressed during the workshops and writing the Wizard of US
Adam Kahane, Centre for Generative Leadership, for permission to use hisarticle Changing the Winds
Roger L. Mayer, Time Warner, for permission to use the original movie, The
Wizard of Oz
Lee Pilz, GSD&M, for creative guidance with the video
Lawrence Wilkinson, Oxygen Media, for permission to use his article How to
Build Scenarios

We would also like to acknowledge:
All the participants (see list at the end of the report), for their commitment
to making this project happen,
The WBCSD member companies and other businesses for providing theirsupport,General Motors Corporation, for sharing power and leadership,
The WBCSD Scenario Unit and Core Team – Cary Baird, Betty Sue Flowers,
Ulrich Golüke, Pallavi Hiremath, Karen Jochelson, Karen Lange, Tim Mealey,
Judie Mullins and David Tulauskas, for the tenacity and dedication to bring
the project to a successful conclusion.

Content

1. Introduction ............................................................................... p. 7
2. Personal Case For Scenarios: Changing The Winds ................. p. 11
3. The Business Case For Sustainability ....................................... p. 25
4. Why Stories Are Important ....................................................... p. 31
5. How To Build Scenarios ............................................................. p. 37
6. The Wizard Of US – Models For Using The Video ........................... p. 49
7. Bibliography .............................................................................. p. 57
8. People ......................................................................................... p. 59

1. Introduction

Much has been written in the last half of the 1990s about the use of
scenarios in business planning. Prominent and respected leaders andscholars such as Allen Hammond of the World Resources Institute andPeter Schwartz, formerly of Shell Oil have both contributed to our collective
vision for the future and eloquently promoted scenarios as a planning tool.

The process of scenario development, however, is not widely understood.
Many people never get past the dilemma of how to pronounce the words.

Scenarios are essentially stories about the future, and in that sense, scenarios
involve the skill of story creation and telling. For thousands of years andacross diverse cultures, humans have told stories to imbed values, wisdom,
social expectations and moral teachings. Mothers and fathers tell bedtime
stories to their children to make them think about their behavior, parental
expectations, personal safety and other issues of growing up. We tell ghoststories around the campfire that reinforce beliefs (or lack of) in the spiritual
world, the triumph of right over wrong, and the fear of the unknown.

7

Introduction

Scenarios are valuable tools on two levels. The first and most obvious relates
to the nearly universal human yearning to look ahead and know what will
happen. In building scenarios, we marry the storytelling skills from theright side of the brain with the quantitative, analytical skills from the left
side. When done properly, scenarios bring to life vivid, thrilling views of the
future, but they are not intended to be predictive. Rather, they are intended
to open the minds of those involved, to help them identify key driving forces
or variables, and understand how those variables could play out underchanging conditions. Scenarios are the consummate tool for anticipation.

A second potential outcome of scenarios is one that we discovered orobserved through many scenario projects. When diverse people convene toconstruct scenarios, they come with their own perspectives on reality.
Inevitably, the process of working with others on scenarios — discovering
new data, analyzing the drivers and other variables, and creating the stories— brings people to a common understanding of the issue at hand. In short,scenario creation can be a powerful tool for building consensus andcollaborative decision-making.

Scenario creation can be done in many ways. On page 37 of this booklet,
Lawrence Wilkinson describes in his article, “How to Build Scenarios,” oneprocess that can be used. A complex scenario project that is well supportedwith research, contributions from various subject experts, and input fromprofessional technicians and analysts can cost hundreds of thousands ofdollars. But good scenarios are not dependent on financial resources, nor
are they relevant only for multinational corporations or institutions.
Challenging and relevant scenarios can be created by departments, small
companies, non-profit organizations, churches, in short, any one that isinterested in its future.

8

Introduction

Since the first Earth Summit on the Environment in Rio de Janeiro in 1992,
business and industry have been struggling to clarify, even justify, theirinterest in such a broad concept as sustainability — with little apparent
connection to the bottom line. We believe that scenarios can help people
look at their organizations, the future and key drivers in ways they normally
do not and understand them in a new context. Participation in a scenario
project enables people to begin seeing the future through a lens theycollectively have created, rather than their own narrow scopes. It is throughthis change in perspective that collaboration and trust are born.

This booklet is designed to provide you with basic tools and methodology
for creating scenarios and, if possible, to build bridges between groups orindividuals so we can make progress in the journey to sustainability.

910

2. Personal CaseFor Scenarios:
Changing The Winds

1

Each of us has a choice to make about how we look at the future. Will we bemost effective by trying to adapt to what is happening in the world aroundus? Or by choosing to participate in shaping the future?

Looking back on my career, I can see that I have been working on thesequestions for the past fifteen years, in large companies around the world
and in public projects in Canada, South Africa, Colombia, and elsewhere.
This work reminds me of Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey,” the stages
that all of us — not just great mythic characters — meet on the way tofinding our life’s work: the call to adventure, crossing the threshold, theroad of trials, the supreme ordeal, and the return and gift.

So far, four lessons about strategy have stayed with me from out of myexperiences in the cauldron of public conflict.

The Man With The Answers
I grew up in Montreal in a family which believed in working to make theworld a better place. Our emphasis was more on thinking and doing morethan on feeling and being. I studied physics at McGill University and in
1 Reproduced with the permission of Adam Kahane, Centre for Generative Leadership L.L.C, Hamilton, Massachusetts, USA.
E-mail: kahane@cgl-leadership.com

11Personal Case For Scenarios: Changing The Winds

1981 went to a conference in Calgary organized by Pugwash, an organizationof scientists striving to prevent nuclear war. I found it very inspiring,particularly a woman from Sri Lanka who spoke of energy as a more pressing
challenge to developing countries than nuclear weapons. I met John Holdren,
who invited me to pursue a graduate degree in energy economics. I arrived
at the University of California at Berkeley in 1982, eager to learn how to
use policy to help the world. One of the courses I took was called “Tricks of
the Trade,” about how to influence the world, where I learned that the mainthing was to produce the right answer quickly. That way, when testifying
before a Senate committee (which we all aspired to do), we could say, “Well,
Senator, that’s a good question, and I think that the right answer would be
exactly 3.2 terajoules, and that’s why you should support this legislation.”

After graduating, I joined Pacific Gas and Electric. I learned more of thesame. You became a star by having quick answers to your boss’s questions:“Well, boss, I think the rate of return on this project would be 15.2 percent
and that we should go for it.” Then I was recruited to work at Royal Dutch/
Shell in Group Planning Coordination in London, eventually to head up thesocial-political-economic-technological scenario team. For somebody
interested in strategy work, this was the pinnacle. By this time, I was very
analytical in my approach, with a lot of knowledge about the energy industry;that’s why I was hired. But I had lost most of my interest in changing theworld. I was dispassionate, even cynical. At the same time, I loved the Shell
environment. I found the people incredibly smart and knowledgeable. Ifthey were arrogant, it was because they were the best. I admired them andwas proud to be one of them.

I learned the scenario method there. What I understood was that the purposeof scenario planning was to observe the world and help the organization

12Personal Case For Scenarios: Changing The Winds

adapt to it. Talking from idealism, about outcomes we wanted, was not
only improper, but dangerous. It led people into trouble; thinking about
their desired futures, they might act outside their proper domain or missimportant signals that didn’t fit with their desires. It was critical todifferentiate clearly what you could and could not influence. “If you’re in ahang glider,” we said, “then you have options as to how you lean anddistribute your weight. But you only have scenarios for the direction of thewind. If you start talking about options for wind direction, as if your wishes
about wind direction could influence it, you will get terribly hurt.”

This realistic, adaptive paradigm dominates thinking about corporations
and corporate strategy. Philosophically, it corresponds to objectivism andrepresentationalism, where we assume that there is a pre-given world out
there that we can study. The danger I saw was that it could end up being
reactive and irresponsible. But I also saw problems with its opposite, theidealistic pole, where we assume that we can create the world we want.
Philosophically this is subjectivism and solipsism — everything is possible,
only my interior life exists — and the dangers are myopia and hubris. So I
found myself stuck on the horns of a true dilemma.

I wouldn’t have said it then, but in retrospect this period corresponds toJoseph Campbell’s “the wasteland,” a time of living inauthentically. I learned
a lot; looking back, though, I see that I did not fit.

About that time an outsider came in to head up the Shell scenario team, avisionary lawyer and businessman named Joseph Jaworski, who had founded
the American Leadership Forum and is now my partner in the Centre forGenerative Leadership. Joe caused a ruckus at Group Planning; he wanted
the scenario work to be activist, to contribute to shaping a better world. He

13

Personal Case For Scenarios: Changing The Winds

also believed in the importance and power of a leader’s and a company’s
higher purpose, beyond simply observing, adapting, making money, andsurviving. This stance sparked deep disagreements in Group Planning, but
it struck a profound chord within me. I found my energy, which had been
sapped, coming back. Campbell calls this “the call to adventure.” You heara call, you don’t know what it is, and you don’t even recognize it as a call.

In 1991, Shell was invited to send a staff member to South Africa to facilitatea series of workshops being organized by Professor Pieter Le Roux at aconference center near Cape Town called Mont Fleur. The project was an
attempt to use the Shell scenario method to improve strategic thinking andconversation among South African leaders about the future of their country.

South Africa had just begun the transition from apartheid to a democratic
government. It was only a year since Nelson Mandela had been released
from prison and the left-wing opposition legalized; the first all-race elections
would not be held for two more years. It was a period of many activities
where people who had been in deep conflict were getting together to search
for a collaborative way forward.

Scenarios were already well known in South Africa because during the 1980sa scenario exercise led by Clem Sunter, a senior executive at the Anglo
American mining corporation, had played an influential, public role in building
discussion, particularly among the white population, about possibilities andoptions. But the Anglo American scenarios, for all their insights, fell short oftheir potential because they were developed by a fairly homogenous teamand in effect handed to the country as a set of answers.

14Personal Case For Scenarios: Changing The Winds

The Mont Fleur scenarios were different. The multi-racial scenario teamincluded twenty-two members from across the spectrum of South Africa’s
diverse constituencies: community activists, conservative politicians, African
National Congress officials, trade unionists, mainstream economists, andtop corporate executives. Our objective was to develop a set of alternative
stories about South Africa’s future, to provoke debate and forward movement.

One Mont Fleur scenario (“Lame Duck”) envisioned a prolonged transition
with a constitutionally weakened transitional government. Because thegovernment “purports to respond to all, but satisfies none,” investors holdback, and growth and development languish amidst a mood of long, slow
uncertainty. This was an important scenario because a coalition government
was being negotiated, and the scenario allowed people to see potential
dangers and how to mitigate them. Another scenario (“Icarus”) suggested
that a black government could come to power on a wave of public support,
embark on a huge, unsustainable public spending program, andconsequently crash the economy. For the first time, a team including
prominent left-wing economists discussed the possibility of a new
government trying to do too much.

The Mont Fleur project contributed to the building of a common language
for talking across groups about the opportunities and challenges facing thecountry. This shared understanding — together with the fruits of countlessother workshops, meetings, and negotiations — eventually helped lead tothe unprecedented “miraculous” transition from minority to majority rulein 1994. One specific Mont Fleur contribution was creating a more realistic
assessment of the crucial economic dimension of the transition; previously,
most people had focused only on political, military and constitutional
aspects.

15

Personal Case For Scenarios: Changing The Winds

Personally, I was overwhelmed by this experience. I liked the South Africans.
I found them warm and I admired their extraordinary capacity to listen toeach other. I respected the sacrifices that the people I was meeting had
made to bring their country to this juncture. At the same time, I was struckby my own effectiveness as a facilitator. In fact, I was more effective in theMont Fleur project than I had ever been before-and than I would be again
for many years. I had done something right, but I didn’t know what it was.

Eventually I figured it out. At Mont Fleur, I had had almost no time to prepare.
With more time, I would have done my normal PG&E or Shell thing. I would
have read, formed opinions, and brought a recommendation. I was effective
because I arrived in ignorance and respect. One of the participants, HowardGabriels, said afterwards, “Adam, we couldn’t believe anyone could be as
ignorant as you. We were sure that you were trying to manipulate us. But
when we realized you really didn’t know anything and were really there justto support us, we decided to trust you.”This was my first lesson: I was much more effective when I gave up the
stance of knowing and arrogance and replaced it with one of wonder andreverence. This allowed me to enter into what Martin Buber calls an “IThou” relationship with the rest of the group. Such relationships are thesource of generativity.

The Messy Gray Zone
Mont Fleur was the start of a series of love affairs for me. I fell in love withthe country, with this new “servant consulting” work, and with Dorothy, theproject coordinator, whom I ended up marrying. I resigned from Shell, moved
to South Africa, and started to work internationally as a strategy consultant

16Personal Case For Scenarios: Changing The Winds

to both private companies and public institutions. In Campbell’s terms,
this was “crossing the threshold” into another world.

I wondered for a long time whether the Mont Fleur scenarios were actually
scenarios in the way I had been taught to use the term. Were they stories
responding to outside events, like the Shell scenarios, or were they, in fact,
options that people might choose? Technically speaking, the Mont Fleur
scenarios were Shell-style adaptive scenarios in that none of the participants
had the option of choosing South Africa’s future. They could only choose
options for themselves based on an understanding of events around them.
On the other hand, in the years that followed I could see influential South
Africans using the scenarios, not only as a guide for their own choices, but
as a way to talk through and influence their country’s destiny.

I also wondered about a comment made by Rob Davies, a member of theteam. “The exercise was very good,” he said. “But I felt that I had to compromise.” Why, I wondered, did he feel dissatisfied?

Campbell talks about the hero’s “road of trials,” in which valuable knowledge
may be forgotten. In fact, I forgot the first lesson almost immediately. My
old arrogance came back, my learning slowed down, and I began to consider
myself the North’s gift to South Africa. In 1994, I organized a meeting inBerkeley with Steve Rosell, Don Michael, and Ed Schein-all highly respected
theorists on collaborative learning. I wanted them to tell me how to makethese projects work. It was a terrible meeting. Eventually, Ed said, “Youknow, Adam, your approach is foolish. You are living in the world’s greatest
laboratory of collaborative futures and you’re asking us what to do.” I had
reached the nadir of my “knowing,” not able to see what was in front of my
nose.

17

Personal Case For Scenarios: Changing The Winds

I was working at the time with Steve Rosell on a scenario project for the
Canadian government. Like most state organizations, the Canadiangovernment had never done scenario work. Why do scenarios when you
control the fate of the country and can simply choose the future you want?
But when we got there, this assumption of control was being questioned.
“We have these levers that as civil servants we’ve been trained to use,” oneof them told us, “but the levers don’t seem to be connected to anything any
more.”

Meanwhile, I was working in South Africa with various collaborative “forums”
composed of businesses, government, opposition parties, trade unions,and community organizations, trying to find a way to reshape the country’s
institutions. People in the forums joked that there were both “a practicaland a miraculous solution. The practical solution is that we all get out of
our chairs, get down on our knees, and pray for a band of angels to comeand solve this problem. The miraculous solution is, we stay here, work
together, and find the solution ourselves.”

I learned my second lesson from contrasting these two experiences. People
seemed much more effective when they gave up the illusion of being incontrol, and tried instead to work through things with others. When, as with
the Canadians, they held onto the need to deal only with things under theircontrol, they weren’t effective. They operated in an all-or-nothing, black-orwhite, win-or-lose world that didn’t reflect the way things really work. The
South Africans, by contrast, were daring to play in a gray zone between
complete control on the one hand and no influence on the other, a generative
domain where they had less control than they wished but more influencethan they expected.

18Personal Case For Scenarios: Changing The Winds

The Dimension Of The HeartI later became involved in a larger scenario project on the future of Canada,in the context of fierce debates over economic and social policy, Quebec
secession, and other issues. Modeled on Mont Fleur and convened bybusinessman Michael Adams, these sessions brought together Canadiansfrom across the spectrum: Quebeçois and Western leaders, business people
and trade unionists, community leaders, and aboriginal peoples. The group
took a particularly long time to come to consensus; we had to add an extra
session. I felt fogged in, unable to see clearly the picture we were trying tocreate.

The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood has said, “Just because English
Canadians don’t move their faces much, doesn’t mean we don’t havefeelings.” As a Canadian I certainly had strong feelings about the subjects
we were discussing, but I didn’t pay much attention to my feelings andcertainly didn’t articulate them. Most members of the group behaved in
the same way. Although the rational arguments often had an emotionaledge, peoples’ feelings were rarely put on the table. Somehow this slowed
things down.

Around the same time, in South Africa, Dorothy Kahane and I facilitated an
uplifting strategy session for the Synod of Bishops. Archbishop Desmond
Tutu had retired and Winston Ndungane, his successor, wanted to get histhirty-two bishops together to plan for the future of the Anglican Church inSouth Africa. We knew this would be a very special workshop within thefirst fifteen minutes, when we were establishing ground rules. Someone
suggested, “We must listen to each other.” So far, nothing out of the ordinary;that rule is usually suggested. But then a second bishop said, “No, I think
we must listen empathetically.” A third bishop said, “No, we must listen to
the sacred within each of us.”19Personal Case For Scenarios: Changing The Winds

In corporate strategy sessions, we often downplay the spiritual dimensionof our work. That wasn’t necessary with the bishops. We started and finishedeach day in church. Although there were many clashes during the workshop,
people dealt effectively with difficult and important issues, including somethat had been undiscussible for decades.

I learned my third lesson from these experiences. Strategy work is not only
work of the mind — the only training I had ever had for it — but work of theheart and spirit as well. Without open acceptance of that heart and spirit,
you can have neither true connection nor true passion, the source ofcommitment and will, and the root of all great strategy.

Now I also had a clue to Rob Davies’ concern about compromise. To
compromise meant to give in; he had been hoping for a consensus, a true
accord. The great social scientist Solomon Asch said that “Consensus isvalid only to the extent that each adheres to the testimony of his experienceand steadfastly maintains his hold on reality.” The bishops had the capacity
for true consensus because they were able to speak openly about theirexperiences, evoking more than only their minds.

Changing The WorldTo Joseph Campbell, the “supreme ordeal” refers to the peak experience on
life’s journey, after which the hero is never the same. If I have experienced
such an event, it was the scenario project I facilitated in Colombia in 1997
at the invitation of businessman Manuel Jose Carvajal.

Colombia had been our metaphor at Shell for everything going wrong. We
used to refer to “Colombianization” as the drifting of an economy into adownward spiral of criminality and impoverishment. Now I was going to20Personal Case For Scenarios: Changing The Winds

facilitate a scenario exercise in the middle of a guerrilla war with tens of
thousands of people under arms, with one of the world’s largest drugtrafficking operations, under a corrupt political and economic system. Oneof the jokes at the workshop summarized the country’s mindset. “In
Colombia, the optimists say, ‘The way things are going here, we’re all goingto end up eating shit.’ And the pessimists say, ‘Yes, and there won’t even be
enough to go around.’“

At the same time, the forty-four members of the scenario team were
wonderfully intelligent, sensitive, and humane. We divided our evenings
between earnest debate and loud singing. The team members were far
more diverse than the Mont Fleur participants had been. There were
academics, business people, and trade unionists; rebels and members ofthe militia who were fighting them; retired army generals and members ofenvironmental groups; peasant community leaders and newspaper owners;
representatives of black people, indigenous people, and youth. I think thatabout a third of the participants had lost an immediate member of theirfamily to the conflict that they were discussing: somebody’s father had
been assassinated, somebody’s sister had been kidnapped, somebody’s
son had been killed. They weren’t just observing, they were as intensely
engaged as you can imagine.

Technically, it was an almost surrealistically challenging project. One rightwing paramilitary leader had just been released from prison, but all the top
leaders of the left-wing guerrillas were either in hiding, prison, or exile. For
the ten days of the workshops, four guerrilla leaders participated via
speakerphone. One of them, in exile in Costa Rica, called in from a different
phone every workshop. Another one called from a prison pay phone, saying,“I only have a few coins, but I really need to give my input on Scenario ‘B.’”

21

Personal Case For Scenarios: Changing The WindsThose people who had suffered most in the war were, in many cases, themost humble, open, and respectful of the others. They were able to listen
and suspend judgment, even of their enemies. This reminded me of myfirst lesson, the importance of wonder and reverence. I had seen the same
phenomenon in South Africa. In these terrible, terrible situations, people
who are not destroyed by the conflict are purified by it-touched by grace.
These Colombians realized that they were in a war that nobody could win,that they had to struggle together to resolve. Every day they lived with thesecond lesson, the need to move from the illusion of control to the grayzone of influence.

The third lesson was also often with us. These participants had the capacity
to speak from the heart, to express their fear, anger, hope, and faith. Whenthey did, the fog in the room lifted and the stark dynamics we were trying tostudy became clear. One of the most powerful sessions was an evening
where everyone told a story from their own lives. I said that I was concerned
about some of the participants being mortally afraid of each other. One of
the guerrillas responded over the speakerphone: “Why are you surprised at
this fear, Mr. Kahane? Of course the fear that pervades Colombia is also in
the workshop room.”

At the end of 1997, the team meetings ended. Since then the stories havebeen told and debated throughout the country. One story, “When the Sun
Rises We’ll See,” paints a downward spiral that could ensue if status quo
attitudes and strategies continue; the moral of the story, drawing on a wellknown Colombian saying, is “the worst thing people can do is do nothing.”
Another story, “A Bird in the Hand is Worth Two in the Bush,” explores how
a compromise could be negotiated between the government and theguerrillas; the moral for this one is “any settlement is better than continuinga bad lawsuit.” As of this writing in early 1999, the work has been published22Personal Case For Scenarios: Changing The Winds

as an insert in every Colombian newspaper (one million copies), televised
in a one-hour special carried on every Colombian TV station and watchedby eight million people, and presented in speeches to over 17,000 people.
After many years of paralysis, things are starting to move in the country,with hopeful negotiations beginning between the government and guerrillas.
Somehow the scenario process has exemplified — and perhaps contributed
to bringing forward — a shift toward a better future.

I came back in my mind to my questions about what I had learned at Shell.
Were these scenarios, we had defined the term there, or were they options?
If they were just efforts to develop better ways to cope with outside events,
why had there been such a special energy in the workshops? Why had theparticipants been so passionately engaged? Why had they come at all?

Then the light went on for me. I realized that this project was not reallyabout understanding and adapting. People participated because they wanted
to influence and improve the world. They dared to reject cynicism in favorof hope. My colleague Otto Scharmer points out that the team’s capacity tosense and influence turns on their being able to tap into their collective
passion and will, including by really listening to each other’s stories. The
fourth lesson from my journey, then, is this: We must give up the assumptionthat we are powerless, that we can only react to the world, and that wemust be passive in its face. If we have the courage to step forward, we canhelp the future be born.

This fourth lesson also provides the clue to getting off the horns of therealism-idealism dilemma I found at Shell. It is neither true that we must
simply react to a world that pre-exists nor that we can create it from within
ourselves. The cognitive scientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela
argue that “Every act of knowing brings forth the world.” More than simply

23Personal Case For Scenarios: Changing The Winds

describing the world, scenario stories actually help shape it. The key to
evoking this generativity is the deep collaboration, even communion, thatarises from being with others in the ways I discovered in the first threelessons. As Maturana and Varela say, “We have only the world that we bring
forth with others, and only love helps bring it forth.”Completing Campbell’s circular journey, I see these four lessons as a giftfrom the activists, bishops, guerrillas, and scientists to corporate leadersand other strategists. To be more effective we must first let go of thearrogance of knowing and move towards wonder and reverence. Second,
we must move away from the black-and-white, secretive approach of trying
to try to keep things “under control,” towards the gray zone of greater
openness and influence. Third, we must move away from treating strategy
and learning as purely affairs of the mind, towards engaging other parts ofourselves, including our hearts and spirits. Finally, we must move awayfrom pure adaptation and reactivity, towards intentionality and generativity.
Of course, all of these lessons are easier to articulate than to practice. But
I think they offer a prize worth struggling for: the opportunity and the capacity
to make the world a better place.

24

3. The Business CaseFor Sustainability

2

Sustainable Development As An Organizing Frame
For Value Creation
How many people is this earth able to sustain? Isaac Asimov once answeredby saying :“This question is incomplete as it stands. One must ask
further: At what level of technology? And ask further still:
At what level of human dignity?”

Sustainable Development is the language we need to address thequestion of how will six billion people who know everything about eachother live in dignity; and what is their relation to technology?

There are three profound changes in the world we need to deal with, as
citizens, as organizations, as regions, as nations.

1 We are moving away from a world which revolved
around removing material constraints to a worldin which that is no longer true.

2 Written by Ulrich Golüke, Manager Scenario Unit of the WBCSD, Switzerland. E-mail: goluke@compuserve.com

25

The Business Case For Sustainability

2 Human activities have reached the power of geophysics. We are moving from being part of thesystem to becoming the system.

3 Globalization has commoditized the traditional
attributes of value creation: availability, price,
quality and mass customization.

From Material Constraints To “Meaning” Constraints
Our world is changing rapidly — from one in which the removal of material
constraints dominated everything we did, to a world in which we will spend
less than half of our time on meeting those material needs3 . While seemingly
trivial, this shift is profound and unsettling. The questions this shift begs
are: How will we live? What will we value? What will we, as individuals, ascompanies, as regions, as societies, do with our time? And, hence, what will
I need to do to survive and prosper in this world?

This thought is illustrated in the following gragh:Material constrained„Meaning“ constrained

Time spent

100%
80%
60%
40%
20%

???
Service
Manufacturing
Agriculture

0%
1700

1850

now

2050

2100

3 See Arnulf Grübler, Technology and Global Change, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 305-312

26

The Business Case For Sustainability

There are six dimensions along which this transition will play itself out:
DIMENSIONSStructures of e veryday life:
Power is based on:
Fundamental question of humans:

DOMINANT CONSTRAINT
Material“Meaning”

LinearClosed feedback loops

Physical assets

Networks

Is more always better?

What do I really need?
I must learn who I am

How do I see myself:

I am my function

What do I do to survive:

I adapt

I learn

Organizing principle

Scarcity

Sustainability

Sustainable Development is an organizing principle that allows thisshift to be turned from confusion to advantage.

From Being Part Of The System To Becoming The System:
Connected Risks
Traditionally, the impact of human beings, our activities, were:• independent of each other’s,• self limiting in space,• self limiting in time,
because we were able to rely on the buffering function of the world aroundus. Now that our impacts have reached geophysical proportions (complex
engineering – Chernobyl –, global climate, germline therapy), we can nolonger take for granted the ability of ‘nature’s’ buffer to allow us to “learn
from mistakes”. We need to think through and anticipate consequences of
our actions. Something we never before needed to do, and hence are notgood at.

27

The Business Case For Sustainability

Entire industries have been built on the assumptions of the biosphere being“a free buffer,” largely because the Earth’s buffering capacity was vast whenindustrialization began. The same capitalistic system that began innovation,
new technology and industrialization had no mechanism to value thebiosphere’s contributions to wealth creation, nor its ability to cleanse or
simply receive waste. Our understanding of this system’s complexity requiresthat we rethink how we value it in the context of the total living systemcalled Earth.
Human Impact

NatureNatureHuman Impact?

BufferToday
BufferNature?

Human
ImpactThe “old” days
BufferSustainable Development is an organizing principle that allows us tore-think the place of humans as part of the biosphere.

Where Will Viable Top Line Growth Come From?
Traditionally, every product and every service competes on a mixture offour attributes:• availability• price• quality• mass customization

28

The Business Case For Sustainability

In a globalized world, where it is cheaper when you live in Geneva,
Switzerland, to buy a book from Amazon.com than to go to the local
bookseller, all these attributes have become commoditized. In a
commoditized world, your only strategy is to become a cost leader; yet, bydefinition, there is room only for one global cost leader.

Just like the Japanese “invented” quality as a differentiating attribute when
the rest of the world was competing on availability and price, so we need to“invent” a new, fifth, attribute to again be able to differentiate ourselves tosurvive and prosper in the future.

Top-line growth?

Availability

Sustainability
Price

Value Star:
Product, Service, Portfolio

Mass
Customization

Quality

Sustainable Development is this fifth attribute which will generate competitive advantage for companies and regions.

As we enter the 21st century – with all the promise and challenge it willbring – it is difficult to predict when sustainability will become the fifth
attribute. But many companies, organizations and individuals are working
toward this goal, and their commitment, ideas and research to make adifference, will provide guidance and new milestones to mark our collective

29

The Business Case For Sustainability

journey toward sustainability. The next century will be critical, because somany variables are converging. We remain optimistic about our collective
future.

30

4. Why Stories
Are Important4

All human cultures — from nations to corporations and even to families —have a story of how they began. Sometimes cultures live uneasily withseveral contradictory stories. For example, the current culture of the west
embraces a biblical Genesis story that explains, metaphorically, whyhumans behave the way they do, and a “Big Bang” story that is the scientificalternative to the way the universe began.

In these stories of a culture’s “genesis,” we find the fundamental valuesof the people who live in the culture. In a corporation or community
organization, for example, the story of the founder often embodies “hardwork,” or “entrepreneurial foresight,” or a vision of a better world. Thesefounding myths also embody the goal of the culture, whether, as suggested
by Genesis, to return to a paradise or, as in the case of a corporation, toprovide more customers with the goods and services envisioned in theoriginal founding.

The present is created by the stories we tell about the past and the future.
The facts of the past we cannot change, and the future is not under ourcontrol. But the plot line — the story we tell about these facts — is within
our power to observe and change.
4 Written by Betty Sue Flowers, Professor of English, University of Austin, Texas. E-mail: bflowers@utx.cc.utexas.edu

31Why Stories Are Important

The power of the story can easily be demonstrated in a group of people
through the use of a little interactive exercise. Divide the group into sets ofpartners, A and B. Give A about five minutes to tell his life story to B — asa hero story; then B tells her story to A as a hero story. Repeat the exercise— but this time, A and B tell their stories as victim stories. The third timearound, the plot is that of a learner — as if there were a purpose to life, andthat purpose was to learn, with every event in life as a learning experience.

Participants in this exercise quickly feel the difference in their own energy
level and what facts come to the surface as they move from story to story.
Most find it far easier to use one plot rather than another. One story feels“truer” than another. That feeling is an illusion, in that all stories are in thedomain of “as if.” But it’s certainly true that some “as if’s” give rise to more
powerful action than others.

Every community of people working together for a common good has animplicit story of reality — of what is going on. It is the job of leaders toanalyze existing stories in the community, and if they are not useful any
longer, propose new ones. But new stories for a group cannot simply be
manufactured out of whole cloth. They must emerge from the life of thegroup.

The Power Of Scenario-Building
The power of scenario-building is that it offers a disciplined path for creating
stories together. The stories must be coherent and must offer a persuasivechronology of how A leads to B, which then leads to C. But because creating
stories is a form of fiction-building, the teams that work together find thatcertain old arguments can be bypassed altogether, while particular32

Why Stories Are Importantconversations can occur that otherwise would never come up in the everyday
life of an institution. The emergence of “unmentionables” allows difficult
issues to be discussed in non-threatening contexts. After all, scenarios are
fictions, not plans for actions or visions for the future that any particularfaction is promoting. Even though scenarios are fictions, they often havenon-fictional outcomes. This occurs not because people decide to follow a
scenario, but rather, because new possibilities arise during the course of
the conversations. This is one of the most exciting aspects of scenarios.

By their very nature, scenarios are “cartoons” — that is, they are roughsketches, broad-based pictures of different worlds. This roughness offers
something of an advantage in that it avoids what often happens when people
gather to plan a future that challenges the present, but end up getting
sidetracked by incidental details that prevent them from focusing on the
big picture. Disagreements over such details can be disheartening to groupmembers and can make the process painful and protracted. Scenarios offer
the advantage of minimizing these quarrels over details. After all, any
particular scenario is a fiction — the details are only representative examplesof what we might find in a given world. Consensus is neither possible nor
impossible — just unnecessary.

Analyzing The Stories That Shape Us
One of the wise clichés we often tell our children is that those who don’tknow history are doomed to repeat it. But those who do know history repeat
it also. Because our stories embed our values, we can be stuck in them —we can even kill for them, as numerous wars even in this century makeclear.

33

Why Stories Are Important

As we move toward a world which is more globally interconnected, we need
to become aware of our differing stories and to work together to encourage
new ones to emerge. The “Jazz” scenario5 was created by a diverse groupof business people and is such a story that is not only about the environment
but also society and business. It is embedded in what is currently the mostpowerful story operating in the world — the “economic myth.” The economic
myth is a myth in the sense that it is a context for values organized arounda supreme value, or “reality” — in this case, self-interest, whether “self” isdefined as a solitary individual or a specific group. But unlike the hero
myth, for example, with its stories of representative individuals, or the
religious myth with its many stories of fall and redemption, or the myth ofenlightenment, with its story of progress, the economic myth has no
authoritative story. That means that instead of holding the story of who weare as a belief, we can hold it self-consciously as a fiction, as a myth, as an
ideal. We don’t have to defend it against change. We can let it evolve as wetell it and live in the present that is created by the future we tell.

The economic story has been seen as the enemy of the environment because
self-interest seldom takes into account the interest of the group as a whole.
But now the interconnections of the global economy mean that in the longterm, our self-interest coincides with the health of the whole. In an economic
myth, nations decrease in importance as mediating institutions just as
multinational corporations and other financial institutions increase inimportance. The long-term self-interest of economically oriented institutions
does not necessarily coincide with the self-interest of individual nations, as
Ruzaburo Kaku, CEO of Canon, points out: “Today there is only one entity
whose effort to create stability in the world matches its self-interest. That
entity is a corporation acting globally.”

5 The summary booklet “Exploring Sustainable Development” can be downloaded from the internet (pdf format) www.wbcsd.ch/publications/scenariosum.htm

34

Why Stories Are Important

Our global health, economically, environmentally and socially, depends on
our learning to tell a new story about the interconnectedness of complex,
living systems. In this century we have been given a new image — the blue
pearl of the earth as seen from space. And now we need to work together tocreate a new story that will match this image.

35

36

5. How To Build
Scenarios
Planning For “long fuse, big bang” Problems In
An Era Of Uncertainty
It happens to us all. We look out into the future, trying our best to makewise decisions, only to find ourselves staring into the teeth of ferocious andwidespread uncertainties. If only everything didn’t depend on, well,everything else. How do we decide what kind of career path to pursue whenit’s not clear what industries will exist in 10 or 15 years? How do we plan
our children’s education when we can’t know what sort of society they’ll
live in? As we face each of these problems, we confront a deeper dilemma:
how do we strike a balance between prediction — believing that we can see
past these uncertainties when in fact we can’t — and paralysis — letting
the uncertainties freeze us into inactivity.

The senior managers of large corporations face a similar dilemma, butthey often carry the additional weight that on their decisions rest the
livelihoods of thousands. The cliché is that it’s lonely at the top. But formost managers these days, the bigger problem is that it’s confusing up
there. It’s no longer enough simply to execute, to “do things right.” Like us,
senior executives have to choose the right thing to do: set a course, steer

6 Reproduced with the permission of Lawrence Wilkinson, Oxygen Media, San Francisco, California, USA. He was also
President of Global Business Network until 1998. E-mail: lwilkinson@oxygen.com

37

6How To Build Scenarios

through the strategic issues that cloud their companies’ horizons. Do we or
don’t we buy that competitor? Build that semiconductor fab plant? Replace
the copper in our network with fiber? Or wait and save billions?

Questions like these are known as “long fuse, big bang” problems. Whatever
you decide to do will play out with a big bang — often a life or death difference
to an organization — but it can take years to learn whether your decision
was wise or not. Worse yet, “long fuse, big bang” questions don’t lendthemselves to traditional analysis; it’s simply impossible to research away
the uncertainties on which the success of a key decision will hang.

Still, like us, the manager must make a decision - and make it now. The restof the stampeding world will not wait until certainty appears. Anything that
can help make a decision in the midst of uncertainty will be valuable. One
such tool is scenario planning. A growing number of corporate executives
are using scenario planning to make big, hard decisions more effectively.
And it’s not just for bigwigs: scenario planning can help us at a personallevel as well.

Scenario 1: I Will
The world fragments into a working pandemonium of individuals,organized by jobs rather than geography. Communication ispervasive and focuses on personal empowerment. The Net
becomes the chief exchange medium for decentralized work,
personal gratification, and global commerce. Physical infrastructure in North America stagnates, while personal spaces
thrive. Art and attention are turned inward, as personal expression
flourishes in new media and old public spaces crumble.
Technology is the global culture. The have-nots become the have-38How To Build Scenarios

lates. Ethnic or group differences give way to a homogenizedpatchwork of unbridled individual variety. Europe is wracked withcivil strife as its socialistic civilization unravels. Russia rebounds.
Japan lags. China and the developing countries become huge
flea markets where just about anything goes.

Scenario planning derives from the observation that, given the impossibilityof knowing precisely how the future will play out, a good decision or strategy
to adopt is one that plays out well across several possible futures. To findthat “robust” strategy, scenarios are created in plural, such that eachscenario diverges markedly from the others. These sets of scenarios are,essentially, specially constructed stories about the future, each one modelinga distinct, plausible world in which we might someday have to live andwork.

Yet, the purpose of scenario planning is not to pinpoint future events but tohighlight large-scale forces that push the future in different directions. It’s
about making these forces visible, so that if they do happen, the planner
will at least recognize them. It’s about helping make better decisions today.

This all sounds rather esoteric, but as my partner Peter Schwartz7 is fondof saying, “scenario making isn’t rocket science.” He should know. Not only
did he help develop the technique back in the 1970s, but he’s also a rocket
scientist.

Scenario planning begins by identifying the focal issue or decision. There
are an infinite number of stories that we could tell about the future; ourpurpose is to tell those that matter, that lead to better decisions. So we
begin the process by agreeing on the issue that we want to address.

7 Co-founder and Chairman of Global Business Network, Emeryville, California, USA.

39

How To Build Scenarios

Sometimes the question is rather broad (What’s the future of the former
Soviet Union?); sometimes, it’s pretty specific (Should we introduce a new
operating system?). Either way, the point is to agree on the issue(s) that will
be used as a test of relevance as we go through the rest of the scenariomaking process.

As managers of our own lives, we can do the same exercise. Let’s say that
our key concern is the quality of life that we’ll have in 15 or 20 years andthe personal investments that we’ll need to make in preparation for the
future.

Scenario 2: Consumerland
The world is populated by consumers rather than citizens.
Technology breeds unlimited customized choices. The consumer
is served by highly evolved companies, aggressively nimble andconscientious of the market’s whims. Computers do increasing
amounts of white-collar work. Manufactured products are heavily
personalized, but do-it-yourself dies. Real leisure increases; dissent
withers. Politics means electronic voting. Governments are virtual
corporations, with their heavy lifting privatized to commercial
ventures. The have-nots are given spending vouchers. Southeast
Asia and the coast of China manufacture most of Consumerland’s
goods, and consume almost half themselves. Latin America is theirbranch office. Japan gets richer and unhappier. Russia exports
trouble in the form of neoreligious cultists and mafioso. The US
and Europe become large theme parks.

40How To Build Scenarios

We Breathe In: Driving Forces
Since scenarios are a way of understanding the dynamics shaping the future,
we next attempt to identify the primary “driving forces” at work in the present.
These fall roughly into four categories:

Social dynamics — quantitative, demographic issues (How influential will youth be in 10 years?); softer issues of values, lifestyle, demand, or political energy (Will people get bored with
online chatting?).

Economic issues — macroeconomic trends and forces shaping
the economy as a whole (How will international trade flow andexchange rates affect the price of chips?); microeconomic
dynamics (What might my competitors do? How might the very
structure of the industry change?); and forces at work, on orwithin the company itself (Will we be able to find the skilledemployees we need?).

Political issues — electoral (Who’ll be the next president or
premier?); legislative (Will tax policies be changed?); regulatory(Will the Microsoft juggernaut run afoul of legal/regulatory
problems?).

Technological issues — direct (How will high-bandwidth wirelessaffect land-line telephony?); enabling (Will X-ray lithography bringin the next chip revolution?); and indirect (Will biotech allow easy
“body hacking” and thus compete with more traditional formsof entertainment?)41

How To Build Scenarios

Of course, categories are only handles. Real issues entail a bit of all four
forces. The point of listing the driving forces is to look past the everyday
crises that typically occupy our minds and to examine the long-term forcesthat ordinarily work well outside our concerns. It is these powerful forcesthat will usually catch us unaware.

Once these forces are enumerated, we can see that from our own viewpoint,some forces can be called “predetermined” — not in a philosophical sense,
but in that they are completely outside our control and will play out in any
story we tell about the future. For instance, the number of high school
students in California 10 years from now is more or less predetermined by
the number of elementary school children now. Not all forces are so evident,
or so easy to calculate, but when we build our stories, predeterminedelements figure in each one.

Scenario Logics
After we identify the predetermined elements from the list of driving forces,
we should be left with a number of uncertainties. We then sort these to
make sure they are critical uncertainties. A critical uncertainty is anuncertainty that is key to our focal issue. For instance, will the percentageof women in the work force continue to increase? Our goals are twofold —we want to better understand all the uncertain forces and their relationships
with each other. But at the same time, we want the few that we believe areboth most important to the focal issue and most impossible to predict tofloat up to the surface.

42

How To Build Scenarios

Scenario 3: Ecotopia
The world slows the growth of development. In reaction to earlier
decades of high crime and chaos, communitarian values triumphover strictly individualistic ones. Slimmed-down and digitized
governments win the trust of people. Directed taxation funds public
works, some of them large-scale. Corporations adopt civicresponsibility programs out of long-term economic self-interest.
Technology, such as online shopping, makes urban living very
resource-friendly. Net access is a subsidized right. Dirty
technologies are outlawed, forcing less-developed countries toleapfrog to clean and light technologies, if they can. Initially, thiswidens the gap between rich and poor nations. Europe erupts into
a second renaissance, becoming a moral beacon. Japan mobilizes
not much later. The Islamic world awakens. Asia and Latin America
become lifeboats for the young and restless of the developed world
who find the environmentalism and communitarianism too
dogmatic; they settle in “free economic zones,” where theirmigration and energy help to vitalize growth. North America
stumbles as its cowboy individualism is tamed.

At first, all uncertainties seem unique. But by stepping back, we can reducebundles of uncertainties that have some commonality to a single spectrum,an axis of uncertainty. If we can simplify our entire list of related
uncertainties into two orthogonal axes, then we can define a matrix (twoaxes crossing) that allows us to define four very different, but plausible,
quadrants of uncertainty. Each of these far corners is, in essence, a logicalfuture that we can explore.

43

How To Build Scenarios(We could, of course, spin hundreds of scenarios from combinations of
our forces, but experience teaches that fewer are better. The right one, two,or three axes give us a very effective framework in which to explore all theother forces.)

Wired8 staff developed, as an illustration, the following matrix as one setof scenarios for the future. The question: What will be the general tenor ofcommercial life on a global scale in the year 2020?
FRAGMENTATION

I WillEcotopia

INDIVIDUALCOMMUNITY

Consumerland

New Civics

COHERENCE

The first axis of uncertainty is the character of our desire, an “I” or “We,”individual or community.

This uncertainty about the quality of our individual hopes and intentions
cuts at the most fundamental level: Will the energy of democratization andthe ascendance of the ultimate individualized “I” continue to prevail? Or
will our social organization and self-definition be rooted in a group — anation, a tribe, a collection of users of a particular brand, a morecommunitarian “We”? The I or the We will never disappear, but which will
come to be the prevailing influence in our culture? It could go either way,
and with a bang; that is the uncertainty.

8 Wired is a monthly magazine. Internet: www.wired.com

44How To Build Scenarios

The second (vertical) axis shows the uncertain character of social structure:
Will society be a center that holds and provides stability, or will it fragment?

Here, we stake out the extreme possibilities of social organization: Will
social and political structures (either new or traditional) provide a society
wide coherence and order? Or will society shatter into shards, the jagged
edges of which do not mesh into a coherent whole? Will there be a state toimpose order, level the playing field, and unify a commonwealth? Or, will
permanent fragmentation, increasing plurality, and unfettered freemarketism bring us to “bottom-up” functioning anarchy?

Our second uncertainty might seem at first blush an outcome of the first.
But in fact, while they’re related, they’re separately uncertain. Indeed, it’s
precisely the way they’re intertwined that makes them interesting by giving
us four scenarios, four very different “future spaces” to explore.

Fleshing Out The Scenarios
We return to the list of driving forces that we generated earlier; these
dynamics become “characters” in the stories that we develop. Our goal is
not to try to tell four stories, one of which — we hope, as futurists — will betrue. Instead, we recognize that the “real” future will not be any of the four
scenarios, but that it will contain elements of all of our scenarios. Our goal
is to pin down the corners of the plausible futures. These corners are
exaggerated — the outer limits of what is plausible. Thus, our scenarios
will have a near-caricature quality.

45

How To Build Scenarios

Here’s how the Wired scenarios play out in each of the four corners:

I Will is the quadrant where individualism (I-ness) meets fragmentary or
marginal control by large organizations. It is a future in which you want andget the ability to make your life uniquely yours. The Net is the ubiquitous
medium through which you realize your desires and discharge your few andrelatively unimportant social duties. Government has withered in the faceof privatization, replaced by a largely electronic marketplace that connects
and clears transactions of every type. Most large, centralized institutions
have crumbled into a much more finely grained pattern, a many-to-manylandscape on which each individual is alternately producer and user. In thisfuture, you coproduce the products and experiences that you consume.
Your loyalty is to your tools, knowledge, and skills.

Scenario 4: New Civics
The world settles into small, powerful city-states. Rural areas of
the world are second-class, but have widespread virtual hookups.
Europe fractionalizes into 57 countries; China, Russia, Brazil, andIndia also devolve into black market ethnic states. Gangs indeveloping countries and old inner cities transform into politicallaw-and-order machines. Citizens use networks and databases
to watch over and protect each other. Average life spans increase
dramatically; general health improves. Civic pride blossoms.
Governments use advance technologies to create the largest
public works yet, both citywide and global. Corporations arereigned in by civic regulations, although they increase in size —there’s the Fortune Global 5,000. Conglomerates fund most of
the UN-type activities.

46

How To Build Scenarios

Consumerland is the quadrant where individual desires meet a social andcorporate center. It is a future in which everyone is the ultimate consumer,
possessed of almost infinite choices. The Net is again a ubiquitous medium— but a medium through which corporations deliver marketing messages
tailored directly to your unique preferences, via personal catalogs,
personalized ads and coupons, and the like. The products, of course, are“mass customized” to your desires. Government plays an active role, laying
down the rules (standards, regulations) by which corporations play. Socialorganizations proliferate but it is clear that they serve individual yearnings.
The citizen becomes a consumer — served by society.

Ecotopia is the quadrant where a communal sense of “We” meets a strongsocial center. It is the future where the center holds. Government plays alarge role in supporting the commonwealth, but more important thangovernment is the emergence of widely shared ecological values. These are
not coercive values but a voluntary embrace of cohesion, cooperation, andreduced consumption, backed by legislation and even corporate policies.
The Net acts as replacement technology; it’s maximized to eliminate theneed to travel on business, to cut down on the amount of paper used, etc.

New Civics is a future in which values are shared but in many small,competing groups. It is a decentralized world of tribes, clans, “families,”
networks, and gangs. It is a future in which we want to build and enjoy thebenefits of community but without the help of a benevolent Big Brothergovernment. The Net encourages each group to move most of its members’
economic activity and their social services inside a closed group. Thus,
government’s role and influence are eclipsed by the sway of these emergent
groups; small — often deadly — conflicts among groups pop up continuallyaround the globe. Our primary concern is to be good members of our group.

47

How To Build Scenarios

Our loyalty is to its membership, its mores, and its brands. While this future
conjures visions of organized crime and sectarian strife, it is also a futureof pride, heroism, and the satisfactions of belonging.

Note that the scenarios don’t fall neatly into “good” and “bad” worlds,
desirable and undesirable futures. Like the real life from which they’re built,
the scenarios are mixed bags, at once wonderfully dreadful and dreadfully
wonderful.

The Implications Of Our Scenarios
Given that we don’t know which scenario will unfold, what do we do toprepare?

Some of the decisions we make today will make sense across all of the
futures. Others will make sense only in one or two. Once we’ve identified
those implications that work in all of the scenarios, we get on with them inthe confidence that we’re making better, more robust plans. The decisions
that make sense in only one or some of the scenarios are tricky. For these
we want to know the “early warning signs” that tell us those scenarios are
beginning to unfold. Sometimes, the leading indicators for a given scenario
are obvious, but often they are subtle. It may be some legislation, or technicalbreakthrough, or gradual social trend. Then, of course, it is important tomonitor these critical signs closely.

Ultimately, that’s the power of scenario planning. It can prepare us in thesame way that it prepares corporate executives: It helps us understand theuncertainties that lie before us, and what they might mean. It helps us“rehearse” our responses to those possible futures. And it helps us spot
them as they begin to unfold.

48

6. “The Wizard Of US”
Models For Using The Video

In this learning tool, you’ll find a short videotape called “The Wizard ofUS,” which uses the journey to Oz as a metaphor to represent the journey
to sustainable development. This conversation starter can serve as the firstten minutes of a 30-minute presentation to a service organization about
the status of sustainable development in the community. Or, with theworkshop and discussion activities suggested below, it can introduce anhour or more of interactive programming. For even more ambitious groups,
the drama can be produced as a simple play in which community leaderstake key roles. The play is designed with simple and easily available props
and costumes and with very little stage action so that the non-actors playing
the characters can read their scripts on stage with very little prior rehearsal
time required.

Focus For Discussion
Each of the scenes in the video provides a focus for discussion. The
discussion activities around the video are most powerful with a group thatwants to work on a project — or has been working on a project for sometime — and seems to be stuck. The “project” in the video is sustainable
development — but any organization (business, community, governmental)
project, from improving the schools to cutting down on crime — can beused as the basis for discussion in response to the video.
9 Written by Betty Sue Flowers, Professor of English, University of Austin, Texas. E-mail: bflowers@utx.cc.utexas.edu

49

9The “Wizard Of US”: Models For Using The VideoThe Opening Narration — Scenario Descriptions
If your group is discussing sustainable development and is familiar with
the WBCSD global sustainability scenarios,10 this opening narration provides
a quick reminder of the main points of the stories: FROG!, in which weessentially ignore increasing environmental difficulties in the interest of“first raising our growth” (F-R-O-G); GEOPolity, in which we react with tighter
government regulations to our environmental problems; and Jazz, in which
diverse groups work together in innovative ways to solve problems. It wasout of such a diverse group (representatives from government, business,and NGOs) that the idea for “The Wizard of US” arose — as well as the idea
for providing this entire learning tool. The global scenarios themselves aregood conversation starters, and if you have used them in this way for an
earlier session of an all-day workshop, the opening narration will provide
transition to the next activity — “The Wizard of US.”The Characters
The key discussion points raised by the video center on the characters, who
represent different players on the sustainable development journey:• Lion — NGOs (non-governmental organizations),
looking for the courage to go beyond roaring andto work constructively with “others” (however
defined).

• Scarecrow — Government, looking for brains tocome up with the best framework to encouragesustainable development.

• Tin Woodsman — Business, looking for a heart
to go beyond the financial bottom line.

10 The summary booklet “Exploring Sustainable Development” can be downloaded from the internet (pdf format) www.wbcsd.ch/publications/scenariosum.htm

50

The “Wizard Of US”: Models For Using The Video

The Scenes — Focus For Discussion
The video embodies seven main “acts.” Each provides a focus point for
discussion.

1. The Munchkin Argument — Their initial conversation consists ofstereotypical finger-pointing from a “we-versus-they” perspective.

Focus question for discussion: What similar conversations
or finger-pointing occur in your community in relation toissues you are working on? Participants will probably have a
few examples — and they don’t have to follow the charactersas represented here. For example: “Our local newspaper
doesn’t adequately support our environmental efforts. It neverreports good news.”

2. “Over the Rainbow” — This is the point of aspiration in the video. It is aslightly shortened version of the original with one stanza changed:

Someday I’ll wish upon a star
and wake up where the smog
is far behind me.
Where acid rain no longer drops
away upon the forest topsThat’s where you’ll find me.

Focus questions for discussion: What do we aspire to? Do
we have a common dream?

51

The “Wizard Of US”: Models For Using The Video

3. Journey to Oz — At this point, the characters decide they have to dosomething in a different way. They have to “go” somewhere.

Focus questions for discussion: What would it mean to dosomething in a different way? How do we get to “Oz”?

4. Self-analysis — In this scene, the munchkins have turned into their corresponding characters and are trying to understand what they need.
There is still a lot of finger pointing. Analysis, in itself, doesn’t get themout of the situation.

Focus question for discussion: What do we know and understand about our organization’s or community’s strengths andweaknesses?

5. Disappointment — In this scene, the characters are returning from theirvisit to the Wizard, who has not solved their problems, but has sent
them on a witch hunt. The overt question is: Who’s the witch?

Focus questions for discussion: Who’s the witch? Who is usually
blamed for the way things are? All the “witches” should be out inthe open by now.

6. Transformation — Dorothy sees that the witch is not a “who” but a “what”— What is the witch? The answer: witch-hunting itself — trying to findthe bad guy rather than working together, with all our imperfections, tosolve common problems. The transformation comes from the realizationthat the Wizard is “US.” The solution to the problem is right here. The
disempowering phrase, “If only they would . . .” is rendered meaningless.

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The “Wizard Of US”: Models For Using The Video

Focus questions for discussion: What’s the witch that isconnected to us? What is the major block to our progress
together? Lack of trust? Disagreement about what the need
is? What are our strengths together? What roads to solution
are right here in the room? Depending on the nature of thegroup and its lighthearted openness to ritual, you can collect all
the “witches” that people have written down and put them in awitch’s hat or some other container and throw water over them,which did the trick in the original “Wizard of Oz.” The point is thatat the end of this exercise, the usual negative “witches” will be“dead” — and recognized as such if they are raised again in futurecommunity discussions.

7. The Yellow Brick Questions — The video ends with four questions:

•
•
•
•

What knowledge do we lack — and where can we find it?
What courage do we lack — and where can we find it?
What heart do we lack — and where can we find it?
How can we find our way home?

Focus for discussion: Answering these four questions,especially the last one.

Workshop Journey - Four Models For Using The Video
1. Discussion Journey
Divide the audience into small groups of 7-10 people. Choose a leader foreach group who will help steer the group through each act and corresponding
questions, one at a time. (It helps if everyone has a copy of the focus
questions for discussion.) If all the groups are meeting in the same room,

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The “Wizard Of US”: Models For Using The Videoan overall leader can operate in place of the facilitators. The leader should
signal a movement to the next question so that no group falls behind, andthe timing comes out right. At the end of the discussion period, the groupleader calls the group as a whole back together and goes through thequestions, collecting a few representative answers to each of them. The
last four “Yellow Brick” questions can be handled by all the groups.

2. Display Option
You can elaborate on the discussion material by appointing a core teammade up of a note-taking representative from each group, who together
create a document that integrates the thinking of all the groups inpreparation for a second, more strategic workshop. Or, if you wish toelaborate on the spot, you can have an artist drawing what the groups
report back as they report. Or, you can have the groups list their answers toeach act’s questions on posters that they then put up on the walls. At theend, participants walk around and read all the input. If you choose to use
the exhibit approach, it helps to label sections of the walls in advance sothat participants put their posters together under each act or section of
the video: “Disappointment,” “Transformation,” etc. The last act, “The Yellow
Brick Questions,” should be displayed so that each of the last four questions
has its own small area, enabling short answers to be displayed under eachof the last four questions.

3. A Shorter Journey Workshop
Assign one of the acts and its question(s) to each group. Ask each group to
answer its assigned question plus the four questions at the end of thevideo. (You’ll need to have copies of the questions to hand out or display.)
Each group provides a reporter, so that, at the end of the meeting, thequestions are answered, in order.

54

The “Wizard Of US”: Models For Using The VideoThe major difference between the longer journey and the shorter one (aside
from time, of course) is that in the longer journey, each participant actively
goes on the journey, while in the shorter journey, each participant provides
part of the piece for the joint “journey report.”

4. Non-Workshop Discussions
a. Lead a structured discussion of the questions in the group as a whole,orb. Discuss only the last 4 questions. This is particularly effective and evenquicker if you divide the group into characters — a table of “lions”
talking about courage, a table of “scarecrows” talking about what brains
are needed, and a table of “tin woodsmen” talking about what heart isneeded. Casting participants as characters increases the sense oflightness and the spirit of play, orc. Facilitate an open-ended discussion on anything the audience responds
to.

Note: If you choose option #c, you are likely to get a reaction that “Thingsaren’t so bad here” or “We’re making lots of improvements, and thisvideo makes it sound so negative.” Try to avoid getting into a theoretical
discussion about the difference between entertainment, designed tomake you feel good so that you’ll buy the product, and a video designed
to provoke thought leading to action. Simply point out that the trustnecessary to work together for the common good is most often undercut
by two common tendencies:

55

The “Wizard Of US”: Models For Using The Video• Hiding the “witch” — unspoken issues that are shoved under thetable.

• Witch-hunting — finger pointing (which almost always involves
stereotyping); and the milder, more passive form of witch-hunting,playing the “If only they would” game (“If only those other people
would do something”).

Melting The Witch
One point the video makes is that you can’t access the power of the Wizardof US — the power that comes when communities act together for thecommon good — unless you can first identify the witch and then give up thewhole witch-hunting habit. With enough practice, a community can learn toinstantly recognize a witch-hunting remark. From being the habitual modeof discourse, a witch-hunting comment begins to stick out like an alien
intruder, leaving a brief silence in the room during which no one reacts,
either to agree or to defend against the attack. This silence is like the waterthat melts the witch — after which, the journey continues.

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7. Bibliography

Of all the books about scenarios, we recommend the following:

The Art of Strategic Conversation by Kees Van Der Heijden, October
1996, John Wiley & Son

The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain
World by Peter Schwartz, May 1996, Doubleday
Which World?: Scenarios for the 21st Century by Allen Hammond,June 1998, Island Press

Exploring Sustainable Development: WBCSD Global Scenarios
2000-2050 by Betty Sue Flowers, November 1997, WBCSD
The Dance of Change by Peter Senge, March 1999, Currency Doubleday

57

58

8. People

Business
David A. Sonstegard

3M*

St Paul, MN

Claire Krizov

AT&T*

Atlanta, GA

Bruce Vigon

Battelle

Columbus, OH

David Tomlinson

Bethlehem Steel

Bethlehem, PA

Barbara A. Kuryk

BP Amoco plc*

Chicago, IL

Joseph Botos

Cargill Incorporated*

Wayzata, MN

William A. Wallace

CH2M HILL*

Greenwood Village, CO

Dobbin Callahan

Collins & Aikman

Dalton, GA

Lee Schilling

Collins & Aikman

Dalton, GA

Skiles W. Boyd

Detroit Edison

Detroit, MI

Arthur Heidrich Jr.

Detroit Edison

Detroit, MI

Dawn Rittenhouse

DuPont*Willmington, DE

Richard Dauksys

Frisby Technologies

Winston Salem, NC

James E. Hartzfeld

Interface Research Corporation*

Kennesaw, GA

Robert L. Graham

Jenner & Block

Chicago, IL

Lynn Grayson

Jenner & Block

Chicago, IL

Becky Raftery

Jenner & Block

Chicago, IL

Raymond T. Reott

Jenner & Block

Chicago, IL

Randolph Haviland

Johnson & Johnson*

New Brunswick, NJ* WBCSD member59PeopleJim Merkhofer

Mexican Industries

Detroit, MI

Jim Thomas

Novartis Corporation*

Summit, NJ

Scott Springer

Roy F. Weston Inc.

Vernon Hills, IL

Greg Anderegg

S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc.*

Racine, WI

Dennis M. Heydanek

The Dow Chemical Company*

Midland, MI

George D. Carpenter

The Procter & Gamble Company*

Cincinnati, OH

Patty Calkins

Xerox Corporation*

Webster, NY

Non Governmental Organizations
Robert G. Struble Jr

Brandywine Valley Association

West Chester, PA

Jack Byrne

Center for a Sustainable Future

Shelburne, VT

Keith Wheeler

Center for a Sustainable Future

Shelburne, VT

Claudia Thompson

CERES

Boston, MA

Thomas Benjamin

EASI

Catlett, VA

Susan Hermann

Global Env. & Technology Foundation

Annandale, VAMark Reshkin

Indiana Dunes Env. Learning Center

Valparaiso, IN

Nevin Cohen

Inform Inc.

New York, NY

Jennifer Hosking

Infrastructure Revitalization Institute

McLean, VA

Kevin Curtis

Keystone Center

Washington, DC

Janice Joseph

Metropolitan Org. Strategy for Enabling Strength

Detroit, MI

Vincent Shay

Nature Conservancy of Nebraska

Omaha, NE

Randy Solomon

New Jersey Future

Trenton, NJ

David Maurer

Racine Area United Way

Racine, WI

Catherine Gray

The Natural Step

San Francisco, CA* WBCSD member

60

PeopleGovernmental Organizations
David J. Reynolds

City of Chicago

Chicago, IL

Sarah Lile

City of Detroit

Detroit, MI

Gary Lawrence

City of Seattle/Washington

Seattle, WA

Derwick Paige

City of Winston-Salem

Winston Salem, NC

Christophe Tulou

ECOS (Env. Council of the States)

Washington, DC

Paul D. Zugger

Michigan Department of Environmental Quality

Lansing, MI

Matt Polsky

New Jersey Dept of Env. Protection

Trenton, NJ

Scott Butner

Pacific Northwest National Labs

Seattle, WA

Robert J Barkanic

Pennsylvania 21st Century Env. Commission

Harrisburg, PA

Andrea Bumpurs

Racine County

Racine, WI

Jean M. Jacobson

Racine County

Racine, WI

Dennis Baca

United States Postal Services

Washington, DC

David J. Kling

US EPA

Washington, DC

Robert Springer

US EPA

Chicago, IL

Josephine Powell

Wayne County

Detroit, MI

Academic Institutions
Carol Carmichael

Georgia Institute for Technology

Atlanta, GA

Ryan Waddington

University of Michigan

Ann Harbor, MIMark Milstein

University of North Carolina

Chapel Hill, NC

61

PeopleCore Team
Karen Jochelson

Consultant

London, UK

Cary Baird

Foundation for Sustainable Development

Golden, CO

Judie Mullins

General Motors Corporation*

Detroit, MI

David Tulauskas

General Motors Corporation*

Detroit, MI

Timothy Mealey

Meridian InstituteWashington, DC

Betty Sue Flowers

University of Texas

Austin, TX

Ulrich Golüke

WBCSD

Geneva, CH

Pallavi Hiremath

WBCSD

Geneva, CH

Karen Lange

WBCSD

Geneva, CH* WBCSD member

62