All data and information consist of signal components and noise components. And it’s the signals that carry the useful bits we are after: news, facts, truth, reality, accuracy, precision and certainty. Unfortunately, they are buried, sometimes very deeply, in noise. Noise is distraction, commotion, disturbance and uncertainty. Noise is background disturbances that smear the signal, all the way to totally hiding it. So, what can we do when our signal gets lost in the noise? We can and must give it context. “Information becomes knowledge only when it’s placed in context.” (Silver, The Noise and the Signal, pg 451) What scenarios are really good at is placing your signal, your data, into not one, but several divergent contexts. Scenarios empower you and your team to actually create these contexts. Decisions you take in the present will turn out to be better ones for the uncertainties of the future that will always confront you.

They are the driving question; conversations; analysis; 2 uncertainties; plotlines; stories and titles, application. For example, #6: Causal stories with titles. The key to a good story is the switch from chronology to causality. In 99% of the cases, the first sketch created in the first workshop is a chronological sketch: A did this, then that happened, then C pushed B, D got elected, promoted or expelled, and finally F did that. The pattern is familiar because this is how we look at life and it is how history, overwhelmingly, gets taught. But chronology condemns you to be reactive. If time drives everything – as a chronological view presumes – then what can you do? Nothing at all – you can only wait. Instead, get participants to give you reasons and logic. Ask, like a pestering five-year-old, why, why, why? If most of the narrative takes place at the edge of a quadrant, ask ‘how on earth did you get there from here?’ If a deus-ex-machina appears, ask for the reason.

This is why we do scenarios: to make better decisions in the here and now for an uncertain future! Scenarios give us a tableau of possible futures. So we now have three choices: 1 we adapt our strategies and (business) plans, at all levels, to the future landscape, so that we succeed by adapting better than others 2 we shape the landscape to play to our inherent strengths. The landscape of the future is not deterministic; it is full of uncertainties, surprises and chance. 3 we transform the future into what we think - with others - it should be.

Scenarios allow and invite you to pay real attention to others, to listen empathetically, to put yourself in the shoes of someone else, to serve and respect others and to help ordinary people reach for the stars. If this kind of intimacy makes you uncomfortable, then perhaps scenarios are not for you. Perhaps, instead, you can serve humanity better by getting a job developing the next great algorithm. Second, remind yourself repeatedly that the future is completely ahead of you and all others. Even though you will spend the rest of your life in the future, no one has ever been there, and no one ever will. No one knows what it will look, feel, smell and taste like. It makes the future subject to my influencing it and gives me great serenity. So, approach the future with humility, be sceptical of people who claim to know what will happen and remain open to surprises, wonder, even magic. Because life is not the sum of the days you will have counted at the end, instead it is all about the days, and the moments, that truly count.

For example Growing the team. Assemble a team you really like to work with, open, playful, yet disciplined and reliable, where each member can blindly rely on the others when needed. And trust me, during the course of a scenario exercise, each of you will need the others. Blind trust at the extreme means that as you grow your team, each member already part of the team has an unconditional veto on who joins. Stay away from people with egos so big that can’t fit through a door, from the ones who know, from the ones who always have to be right, from the ones who always need to be center-stage and the ones who hold a grudge against people. They take energy away from you, the team and even the participants.