Governance DG with Dr Jill Jaeger
Yesterday, we had the first session for the governance discussion group. We invited Dr. Jill Jaeger and discussed about how scenario can help governance.
The first step to write a scenario is brainstorming. You need to identify ‘critical uncertainties’ in the issue you are looking at. Then, you develop different stories to reflect what can happen with such uncertainties.
She explained that scenario is a plausible story about future and can be used in two ways; fore-casting and back-casting. My understanding of fore-casting is that you explore possible futures through the exercise of scenario writing.
I thought back-casting is easier to understand. It means that you choose the ideal scenario and assess what you need to get there. It can also work in the other way, you choose the undesirable scenario and assess what you must not do to avoid it.
In either way, the key is who you accommodate in the brain storming session because this has a large influence on what critical uncertainties are.
Another point was that in what way scenario can help negotiation process. If two parties with different ideal stories have to make a single decision, can scenario help? It does help in understanding what the other people want. However, this does not mean they can reach agreement easily. Also there are cases where, even though two parties can have different decisions, two scenarios do not stand together. In such cases, scenarios may not be so useful.
I remember that, in one of the seminars at JMI, it was discussed that who your scenario is developed for as well as who you (the scenario writer) are should matter. I am a bit confused as scenario seemed topic-based rather than user-specific. Are they two different approaches of scenario writing, or am I still missing some ingredients?
Anyway, scenario seems to be one of the interesting tool for governance, and I want to learn a bit more about it.