Polyscene: Scenario Planning as Diversity Planning

Mustafa F. Abdelwahed, Joan Espasa, Felipe Meneguzzi

Scenario planning is a foresight practice in which analysts construct a small set of plausible futures and prepare an organisation for each. Each scenario is a narrative that must be plausible, internally consistent, relevant and challenging, and the set as a whole must be differentiated. The practice remains manual: a workshop (i.e., a facilitated meeting in which a small group of experts writes the narratives) considers only the factors it has time for, carries the biases of the experts who run it, and cannot be redone whenever conditions change. In this paper, we automate scenario planning by casting it as a diversity planning problem, in which two scenarios differ when they end in different narratives on the analyst's drivers. The result is a set of scenarios, one for each narrative that the topic can reach within a budget. Our implementation, Polyscene, is a generic engine that generates scenarios from a topic. We use geopolitical conflicts and shipping-route disruptions as case studies. For the first, we build the planning problem's initial state from the GDELT Project so it reflects current relationships among the countries involved. Polyscene then generates scenarios…