Creating a scenariologic - design and application of a repeatable methodology

Context scenarios are widely used for assessing the robustness of strategies and policies in both the private and the public sector. Royal Dutch Shell, for instance, has become renowned for its strategic use of context scenarios in the seventies and developed a methodological stepwise approach for scenario construction. Nowadays, context scenarios have become one of the standard tools of policy analysts and strategic planners. A context scenario is a creative narrative description of a future situation sprouting from causal processes and constructed through logical reasoning. Designing a good scenariologic, the skeleton of the scenarios, is the main step for designing creative, plausible and internally consistent scenarios. A sound scenariologic is the basic requirement for good scenarios and group support systems can be of great help for designing such a scenariologic. Many practitioners and facilitators stress that except for the product scenarios itself, raising awareness about uncertainty and the experience of going through the process of scenario construction itself are important too. Traditional scenario construction workshops therefore can be quite time-consuming, but short intensive workshops using GSS do support these goals too. It is shown that due to the intensive interaction, GSS supported workshops are well-suited for creating a sound scenariologic, for raising awareness about uncertainty in policy making and do create a social base for policy-in-the-making. In this paper, the methodology and the successive application of basic GSS thinkLets in this creative scenario construction process is described. Illustrations are taken from a number of scenario-workshops in which a stepwise approach for the construction of context scenarios was used.