A Time Traveller's Guide to Our Next Ten Years. Frans Cronje
rights are respected, the courts remain independent, the media is free, civil society is allowed to operate, and free political activity is allowed. The alternative would be that all these democratic institutions are eroded by an increasingly powerful state until South Africans lose all control over their future and the government can rule with impunity.
The fourth step is to gain a thorough understanding of the policy environment in the country or economy being studied. What are the major current policies? How successful are they? If they are not successful, why have they been adopted? If the government is under pressure, does it have room to move on policy, and in what direction?
In our case, the question is: Does the government have a vision or national plan, and can it work? Much has been written about the National Development Plan (NDP) that the cabinet recently adopted as South Africa’s developmental blueprint for the next 20 years. However, some analysts say the plan is an exercise in smoke and mirrors, and that the government has no real long-term vision for South Africa, or the political will to implement that vision.
The fifth step is to take all the information produced by steps 2, 3, and 4 and to set them out in a structured list of trends. Initially this will result in a huge amount of often contradictory and seemingly confusing information. However, as one begins to sort and organise the information, some clear trends – between, say, 30 and 50 – will begin to emerge.
The sixth step then is to identify a number of major trends that will play a key role in determining the future direction of the country or system in question. Peter Schwartz, who succeeded Pierre Wack at Shell, and other scenario planners describe these as ‘key driving forces’. These trends are so powerful that, depending on how they play out, they have the capacity to change the future of any given system or country.
While this should not be artificially limited in one way or another, some five to ten of these trends can usually be identified. These trends or key driving forces can lead us to diverse extremes. The direction economic policy takes is a typical example of such a trend – with nationalisation on the one extreme and private ownership of the economy on the other. In this sense these trends provide us with highways that we can use to help navigate our way into the future.
The seventh step is to identify important road signs and route markers along these highways to the future. These will show that we should turn one way or the other in order to reach a certain destination. U-turns are also possible, should the government start to run out of road in a specific direction. There will also be warning signs and even stop signs, where the economy runs out of steam. These road signs and route markers will provide us with much of the information we need to navigate our way into the future.
At the same time, we should bear in mind that trends do not act in isolation of one another. Rather, complex systems theory dictates that these trends, and the actors driving them, constantly interact with each other to produce results far greater than the sum of their parts. If one wants to use the scenario method, it is vital to understand how these trends interact, and what the results of that interaction may be.
To start understanding this interaction, one has to rank the major trends in terms of two criteria: their potential impact on the system and the degree of uncertainty about what their impact will be. For example, no one I deal with has a sure sense of where current economic policy is headed. It would therefore rank as a very uncertain trend.
This ranking is often done on a graph with two axes: one indicating the degree of impact, and the other the degree of uncertainty. All the major trends are then placed somewhere on this graph, varying between four extremes: high impact and high uncertainty; low impact and high uncertainty; high impact and low uncertainty; and low impact and low uncertainty; as suggested by the graph below:
Impact and uncertainty of major trends
The ninth step is to produce a matrix based on the two most important and most uncertain trends identified in the impact/uncertainty graph on the previous page. These two trends then become the axes of a matrix, and the scenarios are developed in the quadrants formed by these axes. For example, if economic growth and political stability are identified as the two most important and uncertain trends influencing the future of a system, the matrix would be constructed with these two trends as its axes as on the figure below.
A scenario matrix
Scenario 1 would describe a society shaped by high levels of economic growth in a stable political environment. Scenario 2 would describe a society shaped by high levels of economic growth in an environment of growing political instability. Scenario 3 would describe a society shaped by low levels of economic growth in an unstable political environment. Finally, scenario 4 would describe a society shaped by low levels of economic growth, but in a stable political environment.
It is important to state here that the selection of two trends to form these axes does not mean that the others have been discarded. They will all be reincorporated or reconsidered in the final step outlined below.
The tenth and final step is to write out the final scenarios. The scenarios in the four quadrants of the scenario matrix are outlines, or wire frames, of four possible futures, based on the interplay of the two most important and most uncertain trends.
In order to turn these outlines into fully fledged scenarios, we now need to flesh them out by adding the impacts of all the other trend highways identified in step 6, as well as some of the road signs and route markers identified in step 7, until this particular future comes alive and forms a coherent whole. In Schwartz’s terminology, each key driving force must be incorporated into each scenario framework, and the practitioner must now ‘weave the pieces together to form a narrative’,[9] comprising a description of a certain future.
The idea here is to suspend disbelief, imagine that you are standing in each of these broad futures,