Yesterday I was involved in a couple of sessions creating some scenario sets. These are usually part of a process that takes several months, but with each of these it was a bit faster. One scenario set was done in 20-minutes, the other in 90-minutes.

The first set (above) was done for Save the Children (part of their Leadership Development Programme) and is basically looking at contextual environments for NGOs in the year 2020. This needs lots more work (for example, stable/unstable context doesn’t really work. Why is context stable/unstable? What are the deeper drivers?). Similarly, why (and how) are people active or passive? Nevertheless, the process did start to flesh out some issues.

One thing that came up again is Africa. I had to admit that I don’t know enough about Africa to make any comments, but that it would be very interesting to create a set of scenarios for Africa (in 2030 say). This has come up once before in a slightly different context, where someone made the good point that most of the scenario documents one sees tend to be about (or from) the US or Europe (sometimes Australia). I’m aware of some very famous scenarios for South Africa and also some for Japan, Singapore and the Middle East, but I’ve never seen anything from (or about) China (apart from a GBN set), Russia, Brazil, India, Mexico, Turkey etc. I’m sure they exist…

The second set (which I’ll blog about tomorrow) was for a meeting organised by Pitman Trustees to look at the future of personal financial responsibility (pensions to you and I).