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What increasingly affects all of us, whether professional planners or individuals preparing for a better future, is not the tangibles of life--bottom-line numbers, for instance--but the intangibles: our hopes and fears, our beliefs and dreams. Only stories--scenarios--and our ability to visualize different kinds of futures adequately capture these intangibles. In The Art of the Long View, now for the first time in paperback and with the addition of an all-new User's Guide, Peter Schwartz outlines the "scenaric" approach, giving you the tools for developing a strategic vision within your business. Schwartz describes the new techniques, originally developed within Royal/Dutch Shell, based on many of his firsthand scenario exercises with the world's leading institutions and companies, including the White House, EPA, BellSouth, PG&E, and the International Stock Exchange.… (more)
Read this because of Stewart Brand's "The Clock of the Long Now", and because I thought it might be helpful if I changed my career at my company to something more related to scenario planning and systems dynamics. Not a hard book to read, but it's not readily apparent how something that seems a relatively simple process could have such a huge impact in various businesses. Guess I need to see it in action sometime. ( )
This is a book about the use of scenarios in business planning and societal planning. There is a key difference between Schwartz’ approach and the everyday use of scenarios in interaction design: Schwartz advocates the development of multiple scenarios expressing parallel plausible futures, and then using the scenarios to make decisions and prepare for different courses of action. The book outlines the elements of planning-scenarios and the craft of building them, along with a number of examples mainly drawn from business planning. The multiple-scenario approach and the emphasis on the big picture are valuable takeaways for interaction designers, perhaps mainly in concept and product development work.
All the notions we thought solid, all the values of civilized life, all that made for stability in international relations, all that made for regularity in the economy...in a word, all that tended happily to limit the uncertainty of the morrow, all that gave nations and individuals some confidence in the morrow...all this seems badly compromised. I have consulted all the augurs I could find, of every species, and I have heard only vague words, contradictory prophecies, curiously feeble assurances. Never has humanity combined so much power with so much disorder, so much anxiety with so many playthings, so much knowledge with so much uncertainty. - Paul Valery, The Historical Fact (1932)
Dedication
For my mother and father, whose lives inspired mine.
First words
This book is about freedom.
Quotations
Last words
Scenarios help us perceive the nature of these interconnections.
What increasingly affects all of us, whether professional planners or individuals preparing for a better future, is not the tangibles of life--bottom-line numbers, for instance--but the intangibles: our hopes and fears, our beliefs and dreams. Only stories--scenarios--and our ability to visualize different kinds of futures adequately capture these intangibles. In The Art of the Long View, now for the first time in paperback and with the addition of an all-new User's Guide, Peter Schwartz outlines the "scenaric" approach, giving you the tools for developing a strategic vision within your business. Schwartz describes the new techniques, originally developed within Royal/Dutch Shell, based on many of his firsthand scenario exercises with the world's leading institutions and companies, including the White House, EPA, BellSouth, PG&E, and the International Stock Exchange.
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Book description
What increasingly affects all of us, whether professional planners or individuals preparing for a better future, is not the tangibles of life—bottom-line numbers, for instance—but the intangibles: our hopes and fears, our beliefs and dreams. Only stories—scenarios—and our ability to visualize different kinds of futures adequately capture these intangibles. In The Art of the Long View, now for the first time in paperback and with the addition of an all-new User's Guide, Peter Schwartz outlines the "scenaric" approach, giving you the tools for developing a strategic vision within your business.
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