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Thinking our way into the future - scenarios and visioning

Scenarios are stories about how the future environment might unfold for our organizations, our issues, our nations, and even our world. They are not predictions, but rather act as plausible descriptions of what could happen. They are stories built around carefully constructed plots, based on drivers, events and �trends�. They assist in the selection of future strategies, they reveal uncertainties opening up lateral thinking and initiating a learning process. In this way they are part of the planning process, and need to be incuded as part of the wider plan, act, reflect cycle. The following links describe scenario and visioning descriptions, steps and examples. They show how there are different approaches, and indicate which are better suited to different aims.