July 21, 2042 (Fox/MSNBC News): The nation reacted with a mix of horror, outrage, calls for new laws, and debate over the Second Amendment as the scale of the latest mass murder came into focus over the past two days.
Scenario planning requires imagination. Everyone likes to pretend that imagination is fun and games. But really, imagination is often very difficult and painful, because it requires us not just to take incremental steps along a pre-existing path, but to make up an entirely different path.
Scenario consulting has rarely had a better promotional material than Europe has been pumping out the past year or so. Uncertainty abounds.
Sunday’s election in Greece has once again caused the Very Serious People in Europe to breathe a sigh of relief. “New Democracy, the mainline conservative party that wants to stay in the euro, won the election and can form a government! We’re saved!”
In election season as in any other season, when making business decisions in conditions of uncertainty, ideologies can be deadly – and we all have them. Scenarios can help.
Paul Krugman’s column today induces us to create scenarios…it’s what we do.
Some quick and dirty scenarios about this past weekend’s EuroChaos in France and Greece.
Scenario fodder for the week: Raghuram Rajan's "Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy" won many awards as best business book of 2010. A couple of years on, it's worth examining Rajan's major theses to see how they have played out.
Despite our leeriness about extrapolation from the past, we do read a lot of history at FSG in order to write our scenarios. As Mark Twain wrote, “It is not worth while to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man’s character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.” (Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages About Men and Events (1940, Bernard DeVoto, editor).
Possibly frightening scenario fodder culled from the papers over Saturday morning coffee…
Prediction is Difficult, Especially About the Future — Attributed to many
A wave of revolution is sweeping North Africa and the Middle East. Many people want to know what is going to happen next. Will it be good for the United States or bad?