Futures 31 (1999) 465–473

Alternative futures for communities

Clement Bezold*

Institute for Alternative Futures, 100 North Pitt Street, Ste. 235, Alexandria, VA 22314, USA

Abstract

Scenario building is an essential element for working on, and creating, alternative futures.This paper, based on the work at the Institute of Alternative Futures, discusses the use ofscenarios in the context of community development and explores three basic types of scen-arios—‘the official future’, ‘hard times’ and paradigm shift or visionary scenarios. Withexamples from Washington and elsewhere, the paper tries to show how communities canreinvent themselves and meet the challenges of the future with the aid of scenarios. 1999Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

‘Alternative futures for communities’ has several meanings. I will focus on two:the first is the use of alternative futures of scenarios as part of a process for betterunderstanding, choosing and creating the community’s future; the second is substan-tive images of the future for communities (the substance or range of futures whichscenarios might portray for communities). I will also attempt to identify some of theinsights gained during 25 years of observing and working with communities doingthis future work [1], giving some examples of scenario sets that illustrate what mightlie ahead for communities.

1. Growth of scenario use

An early example of using alternative futures or scenarios occurred in 1973–1974in Washington state. Governor Dan Evans developed a program called ‘Alternatives

* Tel: 1 1 703 684 5880; fax:1 1 703 684 0640; e-mail: cbezold@altfutures.com; web site:www.altfutures.com

0016-3287/99/$ - see front matter 1999 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.PII: S0016 -3287(99)00006-3

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for Washington’ that used scenarios as one tool for exploring future possibilities.Focused in part on how the state should develop, the effort was a model in involvingthe public and using the media for effective public education and enhanced policychoice [2]. Roughly 2000 people took part in the processes, which lead to the devel-opment of a set of scenarios for framing of policy choices. Forty thousand peoplein the state took part in an orchestrated education campaign using the scenarios andrelated policy options through print and broadcast media. The Governor of Wash-ington then went on to have the program consider the budget priorities and tradeoffsthey preferred to achieve their policy objectives. Nearly 30 000 people took part inthat phase. Alternative futures or scenarios played a role in ‘Alternatives for Wash-ington’ by giving citizens a range of images of the state against which to considervarious development paths and their own values [2] (pp. 92–93).

The use of scenarios or alternative futures for community planning has growndramatically since ‘Alternatives for Washington’. During this time scenarios havealso become a regular part of much business planning [3]. In communities they havebeen used as part of general goal setting or strategy efforts and for consideringspecific topics such as health [4] and transportation [5]. In addition, national projectshave developed resources for communities to do futures work, for example statecourts [6], or aspects of the education community [7]. Some groups which regularlywork with local governments, such as the National Civic League, have often usedalternative scenarios in their work in having communities better choose their future.There are a variety of techniques and issues in developing scenarios as part of abroader futures project for a community. These design issues are beyond this paper,but there are resources available from the Institute for Alternative Futures (IAF) andother sources (see [6]; information can also be obtained from IAF at www.altfutu-res.com and the Global Business Network guides for scenario development atwww.gbn.org).

2. Scenarios as part of better processes for creating the future

Using alternative futures is part of foresight—using tools and commitment to betterunderstand, choose and create your future. This distinction between understandingand choosing and creating is important. Scenarios represent alternative plausibleimages—they depict what might happen. They are intended to aid understanding.They also should aid in choosing and creating the future. This simple observationhas affected how IAF has come to coach communities and organisation to developand use scenarios (often in the context of the development of vision, audacious goalsand strategy). The sequence of steps, from a futures perspective, include:

1. Understanding the future;1a. Trends and forecasts;1b. Scenarios or alternative futures;2. Choosing and creating the future;2a. Vision and audacious goals;

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2b. Strategy and priorities;2c. Implementation.

Trends show patterns of change, which are currently visible. Trends give rise toforecasts for where those 5, 10 or 20 years in the future. For example, what is thenature of employment in the community, or social capital more generally?

Trends often pull in divergent directions. To understand what the future mighthold, scenarios or alternative futures are necessary to portray the likely range thefuture might hold. Communities use scenarios in the context of futures programslooking at specific topics, such as health, transportation or sustainability, or simplyto consider their long-range goals. Scenario development, as I have come to see itthrough our work at the IAF, is best used in particular sequences, to fulfil particularlearning needs. This leads us to an ‘archetype approach’ to scenario development,described below.

Creating a shared vision for a community is essential. Vision, in this context, isthe shared commitment by a community to the future it will create. Visioning pro-cesses ask the community to consider what is the best that could be achieved towhich community members would commit themselves to creating. Visions inspirecommunity members and government employees to be more creative and more pro-ductive. They are an essential ingredient for entrepreneurial government. Audaciousgoals provide concrete measures that show that the vision is being implemented.They are a stretch; while feasible they are not a sure thing. They require effort toensure they happen. Finally, strategy and implementation follow but need to be donein the context of better understanding of what the future holds (learning from trendsand scenarios) and a clearer, more creative and noble commitment to the directionfor the community (vision and audacious goals).

3. ‘Scenario archetypes approach’

Returning to scenarios, it is relevant to summarise what we have learned aboutdeveloping scenarios, as embodied in the IAF’s ‘scenario archetypes approach’.

Scenarios should provide the opportunity to meet multiple objectives: gatheringintelligence, stimulating imagination and creativity, and encouraging visionary com-mitment and action. Scenario sets can have three, four or more scenarios. My experi-ence is that four scenarios are the most that people can absorb when they are firstconfronted with a set of scenarios. Since scenarios are only part of the process, theirsize and the resources spent to develop them need to be determined in the contextof the rest of the community futures or choice process. In developing the four scen-arios there are some consistent types of learning that should be encouraged—theseform the archetypes: (a) most likely or official future; (b) hard times; (c) one typeof structurally different future; and (d) a second type of structurally different future,where either scenario (c) or (d), or both, are ‘visionary’. Let me elaborate.

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3.1. The official future

Called with many names, ‘most likely’, ‘business as usual’, ‘best guess’, this scen-ario, in a disciplined way gathers the best intelligence available to the community,what the local, state and federal governments forecast; what the business communityuses, and puts this together. Over the last two decades this ‘official future’ hasevolved. In many cases they represented simple extrapolations of the past into thefuture. In more recent years awareness of the future has grown so that the ‘officialfuture’ within organisations that regularly consider the future is closer to Alvin Tof-fler’s image, set out in his bookThe Third Wave, in 1980, of fundamental changethat will move us beyond the industrial era.

3.2. What could go wrong—hard times

There are many things that could go wrong in communities and organisations.This archetype of scenarios encourages the community to consider the many thingsthat could go wrong; choose some of the more manageable and yet difficult of these;and construct an image of hard times. This hard times scenario can take many forms.The point of this scenario is to make the community aware and able to talk aboutthings that are often ignored or considered taboo. Considering this scenario enablescommunities to better avoid it and to be able to cope with hard times when theydo arise.

3.3. Paradigm shift/visionary scenarios

Using scenarios or alternative futures provides a ‘learning window’. Some yearsago researchers at SRI international noted that scenario sets should present learningchallenges at the level of ‘structurally different’ settings. Scenarios should considerand portray what ‘paradigm shifts’ might occur. What major changes might occur?Changes in the economic structure are the most familiar form of paradigm shiftsthat can be considered, but there are others as well. Our observations over more thantwo decades reinforce the forecast that visionary leadership from within communitiesand organisations will be a major driver of the future. Scenarios portray a range ofplausible images of what might happen. We argue that these plausible images shouldinclude one or more ‘visionary scenarios’ which ask what would happen if a criticalmass of leaders moved in truly visionary directions. What would the communitylook like if a critical mass of individuals and organisations truly worked to createthe best future that could be? Thus visionary scenarios consider what would happenif the community clarified its values, developed shared images of the preferredfutures that would implement those values, and then went out and created that future.

The need for visionary scenarios can be illustrated with an example. In the early1980s, IAF did a scenario workshop for a large for-profit hospital chain. We usedscenarios to consider the future of in-patient care. In 1980 demand for inpatient carewas running an average of 1200 days in the hospital for every 100 000 people inthe community in the US. At our scenario workshop the client used IAF’s scenarios

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to forecast inpatient demand. They forecast that it would decline somewhere between50% and 90%. At the time the company was buying hospitals to provide more in-patient care. Confused they tossed us out. I was confident in the scenarios we hadused, and in fact between 1980 and 1990 in the US inpatient utilisation droppedfrom 1200 to 600 days per 100 000, and in some health systems in the late 1990sit is down to 150 days. That experience taught me that good scenarios can often beignored if the audience is not ready for the challenge of the future—if the threatsor the opportunities are too demanding. This is not a problem with the future; it isa problem with us, and with our ability to shape the future we truly want. IAF beganusing vision as an essential tool to enable communities and organisations to trulyenvision and commit to creating futures that are the ‘best that can be’.

Why construct plausible scenarios of preferable or visionary futures? As weengaged in more vision work in the 1980s we realised that preferable futures arealso plausible. In fact, part of the work of futurists and futures tools is to enablecommunities to more wisely choose and create the futures they prefer. All the morereason to recognise that what makes a preferable future more plausible is a strongcommitment to it. Scenarios that include visionary options give a clearer sense ofwhat ‘the best that can be’ might look like. To not include these in a set of plausiblescenarios infers that they are not plausible. In addition, visionary scenarios allowthe exploration of some of the most interesting and most difficult features of a com-munity’s future and consider what successful strategies could achieve the com-munity’s vision.

4. Images for communities

What are the types of scenarios that fall out of a community effort to generatealternative futures or scenarios? What images do they give communities to consider?The types have been evolving from the relatively simple but effective, scenarios usedby ‘Alternative for Washington’ in 1973 to a variety of scenario sets of varyingcomplexity. Some use IAF’s or similar approaches that consciously include visionaryimages. Others grow out of the approach popularised by Peter Schwartz of choosingtwo main factors and creating a matrix from them. Here, I will review some examplesof issues which scenarios can address, and provide examples of a range of scen-ario sets.

Scenarios are important, in part because of the challenges communities face nowand the ones they will face in the decades ahead. Scenarios enable communities togo beyond business as usual. Consider three major challenges: loss of jobs; ensuringpersonal meaning and contribution; and, enabling economic and technological growththat is supportive of community values.

1. Jobless growth and structural unemployment—The global economy will continueto force significant movement of capital and jobs. In the years ahead ‘joblessgrowth’ will be accelerated by the power of expert systems to automate many ofthe jobs in the service and retail trade sectors (the two sectors forecast to compen-

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sate for the job losses we have seen as the agriculture and manufacturing sectorshave increased their productivity, but dramatically reduced the number of jobsneeded for farming and manufacturing). While forecasts in this area are hotlydebated, I think we are approaching a time when we will have structural unem-ployment that grows to a significant point. We will be producing all that we need,but we will not be able to rely on paid work to distribute wealth and well beingas we now do (for an early version of the job loss argument see [8]). Europeanpolicies are more advanced than the US in this area.

2. Personal meaning—Second, beyond income is the role of personal meaning, parti-cularly related to a sense of personal contribution. At IAF we forecast that thefastest growing source of disease burden will be from ‘diseases of meaning’. TheWorld Health Organisation in its Global Burden of Disease Study has noted thatdepression is the fastest growing single disease globally. Add to that the diseaseburden of other diseases affected by a weakened sense of self, a diminished senseof identity (e.g. some aspects of alcohol and tobacco use, violence, suicide androad traffic accidents). This challenge will require us to invent several things:first how to ensure that individuals and families can survive materially; second,that we invent effective ways in which each individual can have personal mean-ing, can make and have sense of making a contribution, apart from paid work;a wealth redistribution system which avoids the failures of the welfare state, com-munism, and raw capitalism. No small task. And there are images beingdeveloped, around the world, including from the US1

3. Development patterns have favoured sprawl and disconnected communities inmany areas. What are the transportation options? The American Public TransportAssociation (APTA), with the assistance of Robert Olson, IAF’s Research Direc-tor, developed scenarios which look out to 2050 [10]. The scenarios spanned arange from unlimited sprawl, to reinventing the city. These scenarios pressedAPTA beyond its usual role of promoting transit options to focusing on the largerquestions of how to encourage urban development, strengthen community, reduceenvironmental impacts, and make transit more cost-effective.

The first scenario, ‘Boundless Sprawl’, is the ‘official future’ in many communitiestoday. Low-density, automobile-dominant development continues. Congestionincreases, central cities decline, and other problems worsen, but those troubles provemanageable in a situation of continuing economic growth. In the second scenario,‘Dying Cities’, a host of problems related to pursuing low-density development con-tribute to a slow slide into economic stagnation and social decline. Central cities areracked by poverty and crime. Costs for maintaining far-flung road, sewer and otherinfrastructure soar out of control. Peak hour traffic gridlocks exact heavy tolls inlost time and productivity. Sprawl causes a permanent loss of prime agricultural land

1 Beyond the US, see for example the work of James Robertson and the New Economic Foundationin the UK. Robertson has written scenarios for three decades, recently including providing a scenario fora 10 year transition to a ‘citizens income’ system in the UK. While not scenario focused, ref. [9] providesa wealth of examples of groups creating new approaches to community economics.

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and environmentally sensitive areas. Development geared more to cars, roads andparking spaces than to people weakens people’s sense of community. In the thirdscenario, ‘Community-Oriented Growth’, growth is not limited, but it takes on morecommunity-oriented patterns. Development increasingly occurs in the form of infilland mixed-use, pedestrian scale communities centred on transit stations. This streng-thens community, expands housing and transportation options, and preserves openspace. In the last scenario, ‘Reinventing the City’, the ‘push’ of severe problemsand the ‘pull’ of an emerging vision of sustainable development create a new urbanpattern in which nearly every location can be reached conveniently by transit. Nearlyall development occurs within urban growth boundaries surrounded by greenbelts.The scenario draws on the best of best qualities of traditional neighborhoods suchas public space, town centers, and the ability to walk or bike throughout the com-munity (these are some of the characteristics advocated by the ‘new urbanism’ andexemplified by communities like Seaside and Disney’s Celebration). At the sametime, the scenario has the most advanced technology, such as personal rapid transitsystems with automated car-sized vehicles on lightweight rail structures that run allthrough the urban area, reducing the need for automobiles.

These scenarios became input to APTA that developed a vision, a preferred futurethat fused scenarios 3 and 4. That vision and an accompanying set of goals wereformally adopted by the US National Research Council’s Transit Co-operativeResearch Program (TCRP) as a framework for selecting and funding research pro-jects. The scenarios and vision have been used by several communities, for examplein plans being developed by the Governor’s Commission for a Sustainable SouthFlorida for that region (The Governor’s Commission for a Sustainable South Florida,1550 Madruga Avenue, Suite 412, Coral Gables, FL 33146, USA). Similar kinds ofimages of sustainable urban development were included in a major report ‘Sus-tainable America: A New Consensus’, from the President’s Council on SustainableDevelopment (PCSD). A task force report, ‘Sustainable Communities’, sets out theclearest vision yet developed within the US Federal Government of what sustainabledevelopment means at the community and regional level [11,12].

5. Technological development with equity and sustainability

There are many questions of how the information revolution will develop and howit will affect communities. Scenarios are an effective way to explore the variety ofoptions and to integrate values into that exploration. One set of scenarios which usesthat approach, developed by the Canadian Government with the assistance of SteveRosell, provides an interesting example. Focusing on two dimensions first, speed ofeconomic and technological growth, and second, degree to which equity and sus-tainability are achieved.

One important aspect of scenarios are names—can you choose names that conveythe image, both of the individual scenario and which help set that scenario apart fromothers in the scenario set. The Canadian scenarios do this using nautical metaphors:

1. Windjammer—high sustainability and equity, slow economic/tech growth.

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2. Starship—high sustainability and equity, rapid economic/tech growth.3. Bounty—low sustainability and equity, rapid economic/tech growth.4. Titanic—low sustainability and equity, slow economic/tech growth.

This set gives the Windjammer and Starship as the visionary scenarios dependingon the degree of economic and technological development. Rosell and his colleaguesfound that most people tend to think that the Bounty is where we are. Recall theHMS Bountywas the ship made famous in the bookMutiny on the Bountybecauseof control and repression—that is lurking in this scenario. While the Titanic is clearlythe image of what happens after the info revolution makes society socially and econ-omically vulnerable and we hit the proverbial iceberg [13].

In considering alternative community futures there are always local trends, bothpositive and negative, that must be factored into scenario construction. There arealso sets of regional, national and global trends which communities can and shouldconsider. One source for scanning for trends are the media, particularly publicationsfrom the futures community—such asFutures. Also useful isThe Futurist, a morepopular magazine, andFutures Survey, an abstract of the key books and articles asseen through the lens of professional futurist and trend watcher Michael Marien2. Interms of considering if there are larger forces that would accelerate visionary optionsfor communities, there are some who argue that several forces are in place whichsuggest that the next two decades are ones of an evolutionary jump or a seriouscollapse. Duane Elgin, has summarised both sets in a recent report [14]. And thereare also innovations in the way that communities can poll their members. Alan Kayhas been experimenting with new forms of polling, the results of which indicategreater sophistication in the electorate in the US than the electoral system typicallyevokes [15], and Ted Becker maintains a web site that catalogues many of the experi-ments with new forms of political participation [16].

A scenario named ‘global mind change’ captures the range of changes. To theextent that this scenario comes about, it means that the environment will be support-ive of accelerating the achievement of community visions. The global mind changescenario includes these features:

1. High level of global security;2. People increasingly seek real improvements in their quality of life;3. Growing focus on purposeful living, meaningful relationships, satisfying work;

lifelong learning; family, community, and environmental stewardship;4. Environmentally advanced technology [17].

6. Conclusion

The tools of scenarios and vision are particularly important for helping communi-ties think more creatively about the challenges and opportunities ahead. Scenarios

2 For more information onThe Futuristand Future Surveycontact the World Future Society, 7910Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, Maryland 20814, USA, tel.:1 301-656-8274, web site:www.wfs.org; e-mail: wfsinfo@wfs.org

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help in understanding the range of possibilities. It is nearly impossible to predict acommunity’s future. Scenarios allow the exploration of multiple futures and asking‘what if’. They allow the testing of the strategies in each scenario and considerationof how ‘robust’ they are—how well they work in multiple futures. But even moreimportant than the learning that scenarios give is the commitment and inspirationthat comes with vision. For communities to tap the best of their members’ potential,a powerful, shared vision is critical. Communities are a fit place to explore alternativefutures and to create visionary futures. They are where we live, where the rubbermeets the road, where our highest aspirations need to be grounded in daily lives.

References

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[14] Elgin D. Halfway home: humanity’s journey toward a sustainable, compassionate, and creativefuture. 20 Elford St., San Rafael, CA 94901, October 1998.

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