Scenarios

Scenarios methodology

Most organisations try to create certainty about the future and there are many indicators and metrics designed to quantitatively predict what tomorrow will look like.

In contrast, scenarios embrace uncertainty and examine what impacts these uncertainties might have on the future.

Our scenarios use risk as the lens through which to explore the future: we examine risk in all its forms to better understand the issues likely to impact organisations but over which they have little or no control. The greatest risks are those unexpected 'unknown unknowns', and because risk does not respect boundaries but research generally does, this is often a worthwhile place to start looking for them. We have extensive experience in mapping and synthesising diverse perspectives across academic disciplines, institutional limits, geographic borders and technological frontiers. Our approach is holistic: the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Unlike conventional consultancy our focus works outside-in and the process is interactive to ensure that the results become an integral part of the organisation. We use workshops and interviews to distil existing organisational knowledge and find patterns and inter-linkages across disparate issues, supplemented with additional research and interviews as necessary.

For an insightful discussion of the changing balance of power and possible future scenarios in the world of IP see European Patent Office (EPO), Scenarios for the Future... [They] should help the A2K movement to prod more deeply the questions and issues that face us today and consider not whether something will happen but what the movement would do if things happened in a particular way.

Sisule Musungu,
President, IQsensato, Geneva