University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

New theoretical and research directions for foresight scenario work: narratives, sensemaking, and networks

(USC Thesis Other)

New theoretical and research directions for foresight scenario work: narratives, sensemaking, and networks

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content

New Theoretical and Research Directions for
Foresight Scenario Work:
Narratives, Sensemaking, and Networks

Zhan Li
Ph.D. Dissertation
USC Annenberg School for Communication
December 2014

Committee: Prof. Patricia Riley (Chair),
Prof. Henry Jenkins, Prof. Nandini Rajagopalan

! ii!

Dedicated to the Global Business Network legacy—
may its achievements and ideas continue to inspire long into our futures!

! iii!
Acknowledgements
This dissertation would not have been possible without the intellectual, practical,
and moral support I received from my advisors, friends, colleagues, communities, and
family.
First of all, I would like to thank my parents, Chuang-Fei and Tsung-Hsing, and
my sister Tammy for their great understanding, love and help.
Of course, my excellent dissertation committee members, Patti Riley, Henry
Jenkins, and Nandini Rajagopalan were invaluable for their guidance, insights, and
encouragement. I would also like to thank Ben Lee and Andrea Hollingshead, who served
with Patti, Henry, and Nandini on my qualifying exams committee, for their kind and
stimulating advice and encouragement during the early stages of developing my
dissertation project. My colleagues at the USC Scenario Lab as well as at the USC
Annenberg Innovation Lab were also important partners in my explorations of scenario
planning innovation.
I would also like to gratefully acknowledge the inspiration of Fred Turner’s work
on the cultural history of Silicon Valley (including the influence of the famed Global
Business Network scenario planning consultancy) and Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi’s work
on the nuclear war strategist and father of scenario planning, Herman Kahn. Sharon and
Fred, together with Henry Jenkins, were terrific advisors to me when I was researching
and writing my master’s thesis at MIT.
Over the years of the Ph.D. work, I have been lucky to have conversations with a
great range of talented fellow practitioners and thinkers, many of them also good friends,
in foresight and futures—as well those in adjacent and related fields such as transmedia
! iv!
& new media, strategy, entrepreneurship, and participatory culture studies; these
conversations have done much to help shape this dissertation. I’d particularly like to
thank, in no particular order, John Sweeney, Noah Raford, Stuart Candy, Jose Ramos,
Amy Zalman, Napier Collyns, Jay Ogilvy, Mick Costigan, Chris Ertel, Peter Bishop,
Venkatesh Rao, Jake Dunagan, Andrew Curry, Jaime Levy, Farid Ben Amor, Sam &
Amanda Ford, George Gerba, John Callahan, Stephen Greenfield, Chris Huntley,
Melanie Anne Phillips, Sandjar Kozubaev, Greg van Alstyne, Zan Chandler, Brian David
Johnson, Frank Spencer, Yvette Salvatico, John Smart, Susan Fant, Scott Smith, Hal
Hefner, Scott Walker, Dave Snowden, Barbara Heinzen, David Craig, Alex McDowell,
Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Olivier Urbain, Mauricio Mota, John Benjamin Cassell, Liana
Gamber Thompson and the members of the USC Civic Paths research group.
I am also very grateful to the broader communities that have supported me during
my time in Los Angeles, especially at USC and with the Soka Gakkai International USA.
Finally, I would be able to achieve nothing significant without the brilliance of
those extraordinary friends who know me the best and do so much to inspire and help me:
the astounding one-of-a-kind global dance star Sangita Shresthova & the power behind
her throne, Amish Desai, the formidably wise Melissa Brough, the deeply decent
Amanda Beacom—and a special thanks to the two who were incredibly long-suffering
and patient as writing coaches for me during the dissertation process: the valiant luminary
Sarah Kamal and the charismatic spiritual advisor Megan Lubaszka.

! v!
Table of Contents
page
Acknowledgements ii

Dissertation Chapters

INTRODUCTION 1
Foreword 1
Introduction To Foresight Scenario Work 3
Scenario Planning and Its Discontents 10
Sensemaking and Narrative 16
Overview of the Papers 19
References 22

STUDY 1: Narrative Rhetorics in Scenario Work: Sensemaking and Translation 27
Introduction 27
Weickian Sensemaking’s Epistemology 32
The Narrative Perspective of Actor-Network Theory 37
The Convergence of Translation and Sensemaking as Narrative Theories 44
Practical Applications 49
Conclusion 50
References 51

STUDY 2: A Cynefin-based Foresight Scenario Content Analysis Assessment of
the Relationship between Deductive, Inductive, and Abductive
Strategizing Styles and the Centre-Periphery Positioning of Scenario
Participants 57
Introduction 57
The Deductive-Inductive Process Question 61
Strategy-as-Practice and the Reasoning Question 66
VUCA and Abductive Reasoning 76
Cynefin and Defining Research Questions for Wright’s Proposition 83
Methodology 87
The Scenario Exercises and Study Participants 88
Content Coding 93
Research Questions and Chi-squared Testing 97
Discussion of Results 99
Limitations 104
Conclusion 108
References 111

STUDY 3: Towards a Creative Strategic Conversation Concept for Scenario
Planning with Transmedia Storytelling Characteristics 119
Introduction 119
Foresight 2.0 124
Collective Intelligence and Creative Strategic Conversation 130
! vi!
Creative Strategic Conversation as a Source of Narrative 141
Transmedia Storytelling for Scenarios 154
Core Principles of Transmedia 157
Case Studies: Conceptual/Design Discussion and Practical Findings 160
1. Worldbuilding; Subjectivity; Performance 160
2. Seriality; Spreadability vs Drillability 169
3. Continuity vs. Multiplicity; Immersion vs. Extractability 179

Conclusion 189
References 193

CONCLUSION: Future Directions for Foresight Scenario Research 205
Summary of Papers’ Future Research Agenda Possibilities 206
Combining and integrating future research agendas 213
Conclusion 217
References 218

APPENDIX 219
1) IRB Review documents 221
2) “Grassroots”/Remixing Scenario & Sensemaking Survey Questions 230
3) Sample Screenshots of Experimental Transmedia Learning Platform 240
4) Redacted Sample Screenshots of Live Conference Website Scenario
Exercise 241

List of Tables and Figures
Study 2
Table 1. Mapping of Cynefin domains to strategizing/reasoning styles 87
Table 2. Key participant scenario topics identified by qualitative coding
consensus 94
Table 3. Sets and subsets for Centre and Periphery data testing 95
Table 4. p-values from chi-squared testing of Centre/Periphery as
predictors of Cynefin domains 101
Table 5. Significant topic (predictor)-Cynefin p-values for 90% confidence
level chi-squared testing 102
Figure 1. No. of significant (p<=.10) Topics tested vs. Cynefin Domains
per Centre-Periphery Set/Subset 103

Study 3
Figure 1. Brenda Dervin’s original diagram of her sense-making journey
metaphor 175
Figure 2. The SECI processes at work in a conventional face-to-face
workshop based scenario planning strategic conversation. 190
Figure 3. The SECI processes in a Creative Strategic Conversation as
envisioned for a multi-conference online transmedia scenario
storyworld system 190
! 1!
INTRODUCTION

Foreword
Collectively, the papers in this dissertation constitute foresight scenario theory as
communication processes and practices, and contribute novel insights to the relevant
literatures. These contributions focus on new innovative directions for scenario theory-
building, methods, and analytics, intertwined with organizational communication related
theories and frameworks of narrative and sensemaking. The latter two areas have been
given relatively little attention so far in the scenario and foresight fields. The over-
arching goal is to help expand, integrate, and strengthen the foundations of the foresight
scenario discourse and improve its potential to assist strategic decision-making and
organizational change. As discussed below, despite the heightened need for foresight
techniques to aid organizations and decision-makers in dealing with increasing turbulence
and uncertainty in strategic environments, the scenario discourse, and the foresight field
more broadly, suffers from discontents of fragmentation, insecurity, and marginalization.
They also lag in adapting to and harnessing the fast-moving, disruptive networked new
media landscape—so, in addition to bolstering the general intellectual and practical
foundations of foresight scenarios, part of this thesis also explores integrating network
and new media concepts in elaborating narrative sensemaking approaches to foresight
scenario methods.
The first essay, “Narrative Rhetorics in Scenario Work: Sensemaking and
Translation,” focuses on theory-building for foresight scenario work, understanding it as
a narrative endeavour that combines Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 2005) with the
! 2!
organizational sensemaking theory of Karl Weick (1995). The second study, “A Cynefin-
based Foresight Scenario Content Analysis Assessment of the Relationship between
Deductive, Inductive, and Abductive Strategizing Styles and the Centre-Periphery
Positioning of Scenario Participants,” uses a novel content analysis method that adapts
David Snowden’s Cynefin sensemaking model (Snowden, 2000) in order to compare
scenario data from two scenario planning exercises and assess the inductive, deductive,
and abductive reasoning styles in the organizations/communities participating. The third
study, “Towards a Creative Strategic Conversation Concept for Scenario Planning with
Transmedia Storytelling Characteristics,” explores the idea of a “creative strategic
conversation” that helps bridge scenario planning discourse through organizational
narrative sensemaking theories (notably the work of Brenda Dervin (Dervin, Foreman-
Wernet, & Lauterbach, 2003) and David Boje (2011)) reconstituted through the
principles of an applied new media communication paradigm: transmedia storytelling
(Jenkins, 2007). The aim of this last paper is to help ‘Foresight 2.0’ scenario innovation
engage better with today’s participatory culture feature of collective intelligence. The
study is primarily a theoretical advancement although it uses selected examples from
some piloting attempts to develop transmedia scenario planning innovations.
The concluding section of this dissertation considers further research directions
and interconnections between all three studies that might help shape a future research and
innovation agenda for foresight scenarios.
But first, I will describe current foresight scenario work and the areas where it
needs innovation in theory-building and methods, and how organizational theories of
! 3!
sensemaking, particularly through narrative approaches, can respond to these challenges.
The introduction ends with overviews of the three studies.

Introduction to Foresight Scenario Work
The papers in this dissertation, use a range of theories from organizational and
communication studies—particularly related to sensemaking and narrative—to address
the foresight practice of scenario work, which is often called scenario planning (typically
in connection with the dominant scenario matrix technique, but the concept is also used
more loosely), or perhaps scenario thinking or scenario analysis. Foresight is a field
which encompasses a variety of techniques, quantitative and qualitative, that are designed
to help decision-makers and stakeholders in organizations and communities imagine,
think through, and debate the possible actions, goals, challenges, and opportunities of
different plausible futures over the long term (years or decades ahead), as well as the
trends, events, and issues in the present and the past that are likely to lead up to those
futures (Hines & Bishop, 2006; Loveridge, 2009; Millett, 2012). An alternative name for
foresight is futures studies (or simply, futures), which tends to be used to highlight
critical uses of the techniques to problematize hegemonic assumptions about the present
and its presumed futures, and to promote alternative visions of society (Slaughter, 1998;
Ramos, 2003). Another term is forecasting, which typically refers to the quantitative,
predictive set of foresight techniques. Many foresight methods, especially on the
qualitative side, are not meant to be used in predictive ways but, rather, to help people
and organizations develop awareness and readiness through thinking up, engaging with,
and communicating multiple future possibilities (including the apparently improbable yet
! 4!
plausible). In this dissertation, I primarily focus on scenarios, a key qualitative foresight
tool that can evaluate and further the interests and capabilities of an organization seeking
to gain advantage through decision and action in the face of the uncertainty. My
explorations will also occasionally draw on challenges made by critical thinkers to
conventional scenario work, especially as the critical perspective overlaps with my social
constructionist perspective on organizations (Slaughter, 2002).
By scenario work, I mean the process of creating foresight scenarios, discussing
them, and circulating them more widely for the purposes of helping people imagine and
discuss possible futures. Broadly defined, a ‘scenario’ is a crafted story about a possible,
usually plausible if not necessarily probable, alternate future situation for an organization,
community or society that emphasizes the cause and effects of ‘driving forces’ (major
trends) and events that lead up to that situation from the present. Such stories are
composed as part of a planning or policy discussion process that is conventionally
conducted in small facilitated face-to-face group exercises. The leading futures scholar
Wendell Bell, identified scenarios as the most important common feature of all foresight
and futures techniques in his landmark guide to the field (2003): "No matter how it is
constructed, how full and rich or meager and lean, how factual or fictional, how
particularistic or universalistic, the 'scenario' gives methodological unity to futures
studies. It is used by all futurists in some form or another and is, thus, by far the most
widely shared methodological tool of the futures field." (p. 317) By this, Bell means that
whatever method of futures studies—whether quantitative or qualitative—for
communicative reasons, their conclusions must always be translated into the end product
! 5!
of a scenario, an imagined story about the future justified by whatever epistemic criteria
the particular foresight/futures method favours.
Scenario planning is a familiar part of the organizational strategy toolkit for a
wide variety of corporations, government agencies and non-profit organizations in the
United States and many other countries, including international institutions such as the
United Nations and the World Economic Forum. Although this foresight technique
originated in long-term military planning in the 1950s and has since become best known
for its corporate and government use in large scale capital-intensive commercial civilian
projects, it is also increasingly applied in much smaller scale organizational and
community contexts (Scearce & Fulton, 2004). While the scope of scenario planning
exercises is typically limited to the special interests of a particular project or organization,
this method has also been successfully adapted to help move forward grander visionary
schemes (e.g., the prominent use of scenario planning in South Africa’s transition from
apartheid (Kahane, 2012)).
Government, NGO, and corporate usage of scenarios in the United States and
elsewhere began growing during the 1960s. Scenario planning's historical peak in
popularity occurred during the heyday of what was then called “futurology” in the 1970s
(Bradfield, Wright, Burt, Cairns & Van der Heijden, 2005), followed by a relative lull
that began in the 1980s (Miller & Waller, 2003). There has since been a considerable
revival of interest in the early 21st century. A 2006 Bain Consulting annual survey of
management tools showed that scenario planning usage in companies had jumped from
~40% in 1999 to ~70% in 2006 (The Economist, 2008). The scholarly literature on
scenario planning almost trebled in size in the years 2001 to 2007 (Ramírez, Selsky &
! 6!
Van der Heijden, 2008). This unprecedented surge in scenario planning practice and
research activity has been fueled by the mediated story of globally heightened risk and
uncertainty, brought about most notably by the September 11, 2001 events in the US.
The global financial crisis of 2008 and the long-running industrial and ecological sources
of instability intensified the growing urgency. Leaders, managers, and practitioners of all
kinds found that these crises unsettled confidence in established, often highly
quantitatively-based, consensus models of future expectations, and led to a greater need
for innovations in the creation of strategic narratives of the future in virtually every field.
While a variety of scenario planning methods exist (Van Notten, 2006; Bishop,
Hines & Collins, 2007), the most influential and widely practiced scenario planning
method—what Millett (2003, p.18) calls the “gold standard of corporate scenario
generation”—is the scenario matrix. This approach, the development of which is
generally attributed to scenario planning pioneers and evangelists (including Peter
Schwartz and Pierre Wack) at the energy multinational Royal Dutch Shell, and then at the
Bay Area strategy and networking consultancy Global Business Network in the 1970s
and 1980s (Bradfield et al., 2005; Turner, 2006; Wilkinson & Kupers, 2014).
A typical scenario planning exercise will involve multiple scenarios around
central strategic issues—the scenario matrix method usually calls for a 2x2 matrix model
of four alternate scenarios representing four different futures. These four are all based on
the two primary driving forces, represented by the two axes. This set size, along with a
typical scenario length of perhaps a page or two, is designed with the limited attention
bandwidth of participating executive decision-makers in mind. In contrast to forecasting
processes, scenario exercises, while often using some quantitative data, have a focus on
! 7!
helping participants gain insight into the ways they might think through different possible
futures that are difficult to capture quantitatively (Wack, 1985). The timeframe of this
futures thinking approach varies but for the typical organization using a conventional
approach, it is often in the 10 to 20 year range—not so close in time to the present that
forecasting techniques are more useful, and not so far off in the future that the
imagination required becomes too detached from present realities.
In the most conventional type of process, the scenarios are crafted by specialists
after a consultative and brainstorming stage with decision-makers, stakeholders and
subject matter experts. The crafted scenarios are then the focus of “strategic
conversation” discussions in workshops, perhaps lasting an afternoon or a weekend, held
for select decision-makers and stakeholders (Ertel & Solomon, 2014). While ideally
scenario planning is an ongoing process, in practice, a scenario analysis report about the
outcomes of the exercises is typically distributed to decision-makers, or throughout the
organization, or sometimes for public communication, as the final outcome of the
exercises—ideally sparking further ongoing strategic conversation.
Alternative scenario planning methods can involve more participatory scenario-
building during the workshops—for instance, where participants contribute to the
fleshing out of initial imagined futures situations by contributing ideas and content to a
brief description of a scenario (a ‘prompt’) or set of possible scenarios, or a skeleton
framework developed during the workshop itself rather than using pre-crafted detailed
scenarios (Van Notten, 2006). However, in the traditional mainstream of the scenario
methods field, such more open methods typically still face the time and space limitations
of a closed-door small group face-to-face environment. More recently, foresight
! 8!
scenarists have experimented with adding online technologies to their processes, ranging
from augmenting conventional workshop methods with limited online capabilities to
substituting the face-to-face workshop stage altogether with more comprehensive online
media approaches, such as crowdsourcing and interactive games.
Both augmentation and substitution approaches were deployed as alternatives to
conventional face-to-face practices in the foresight scenario case studies analyzed in this
dissertation. The first study is purely theoretical. The second study addresses a pair of
foresight scenario exercises where ordinary website content submission and survey tools
were used to collect and pool participatory scenario content; one exercise involved
augmenting a face-to-face workshop stage by asking participants to upload their own
scenarios beforehand while the other substituted a workshop exercise with an online
survey that guided participants through creating scenarios. Study 3 explored pilot efforts
to apply the principles of a new media paradigm, transmedia storytelling, in ways that
substituted face-to-face workshop exercises. For instance, one option would be to
combine multiple media input platforms for scenario development with the face-to-face
conversation at conference events—while also suggesting how to create an online
knowledge community that can pool scenario data on a remixable platform, (which could
be used to augment future face-to-face workshop exercises).
Whether considering more traditional methods or the latest innovations with
online technologies in foresight scenarios, several popular metaphors are often used in
describing scenario planning's purported benefits for organizations: "the wind tunnel"
(Schwartz, 1991), "memories of the future" (Ingvar, 1985), and “the gentle art of
reperceiving” (Wack, 1985). The metaphor of the "wind tunnel" environment suggests
! 9!
that scenarios are a thought experiment in which participants, by discussing and creating
together alternate future narratives, can model and test future decisions and challenges.
The claim that scenario exercises can create "memories of the future" suggests that they
can help organizations and individuals expand and enhance their abilities to deal with
possible future events should they actually occur. "The gentle art of reperceiving"
compares the cognitive benefits that scenario planning is often claimed to produce with
developing the ability to see the world in new and multiple ways. In organizational terms,
this may mean changing the mental models of members and the organizational culture
they are embedded in to become a more open and imaginative organization when
considering future strategies and uncertainties. A crucial part of fostering this change is
immersing participants in thinking and talking through multiple alternative perspectives
through scenarios. Thus scenario exercises often attempt to introduce increased diversity
of opinion into strategic conversations. As the scenario planning literature asserts, the
strategic conversation generated by scenario planning exercises can catalyze
organizational learning through feedback loops as participants reflect on possible futures
and rework their present mental models (Van der Heijden, Bradfield, Burt, Cairns &
Wright, 2009). In this way, organizational agendas, and their basis in current
sensemaking can be challenged in a liminal space, removed somewhat from daily
organizational politics and routines. Scenario planning—as is explored in the papers—
creates new occasions for organizational sensemaking (Weick, 1995). Beyond such
occasions and the mental model transformations they ideally provoke, the conventional
application of scenario planning exercises’ results are meant to help forge convergent
thinking about divergent futures in organizations (Schwartz, 1991). This thesis explores
! 10!
new directions in foresight scenario theory and methodologies that seek to overcome the
limits of the conventional applications in order to adapt the field to both new ICT
capabilities and the increased complexities and turbulence of the strategic environment.

Scenario Planning and Its Discontents
The widely perceived notion that uncertainty and turbulence in the world have
increased in recent years, across almost every sector, combined with setbacks in our
confidence in quantitative forecasting, would logically warrant an increased demand for
foresight and its chief qualitative technique of scenario planning. Yet the discipline of
foresight in the early 21st century is often characterized by academics and practitioners
who themselves appear insecure about the status of its knowledge and the direction of its
development.
This irony is important for critically understanding the contested and complicated
state of scenario methods today and the attempts to define them as a distinctive approach
within foresight, while at the same time claiming them to be a vital feature of all foresight
methods. As Bishop, Hines and Collins (2007, p. 21) have concluded: “Scenario
development is the heart of futures studies. It is a key technique that distinguishes the
work of professional futurists from other professions who deal with the future. With its
popularity, however, has come confusion about what exactly scenario development is,
and how futurists actually produce scenarios” (2007, p. 21). Similarly, Millett (2003) has
complained that the scenario planning field is beset by confusion caused by too many
practitioners, approaches and techniques that have only limited connections with each
! 11!
other and are rarely openly assessed. And Khakee (1991, p. 52) writes, “few techniques
in futures studies have given rise to so much confusion as scenarios.”
This confusion extends to even a basic definition of scenario planning. Chermack,
Lynham & Ruona (2001) emphasize that “even among the most prolific writings on
scenarios, it was difficult to find crisp definitions that capture the true meaning of
scenario planning” (p. 8). In a wide-ranging literature review and database search,
Chermack & Lynham (2002) identified 18 distinctive definitions of scenario planning in
its academic literature, each espousing its own particular set of dependent outcome
variables, most often expressed without specific criteria. Chermack & Lynham (also see
Chermack, 2004) collapse these variables into five major outcome categories of scenario
planning: changed thinking and mental models, informed narratives about possible
futures, improved decision-making about the future, enhanced human and organizational
learning and imagination, and the particularly vaguely defined “improved performance.”
Unfortunately, these very general categories are not distinguished much further beyond
this simple categorization.
Bradfield et al. (2005, p. 796) argue in their account of the evolution of scenario
planning that "there appears to be virtually no area in scenarios on which there is wide-
spread consensus: the literature reveals a large number of different and at times
conflicting definitions, characteristics, principles and methodological ideas about
scenarios." In a recent analysis of the scenario planning literature, Varum & Melo (2010,
p. 359) see "the growth and the emergence of a plethora of scenario models and
techniques" as a proliferation that has aggravated rather than alleviated what Bishop et al.
(2007, p. 6) have described as the general "chaotic" condition of the scenario planning
! 12!
discourse. Many of these innovations in method and theory may be impractical or will
simply never be tested (Schnaars, 1987), and may often "be vastly different and even
extremely at odds with each other" (Varum & Melo 2010, p. 359). Martelli (2001) argues
that the scenario planning field suffers from extreme versions of the problems of
excessive production and insufficient cohesiveness found in other management and
business discourses.
Certainly there have been a wide variety of efforts by academic and practitioner
scenarists in recent years to develop more rigorous and more unifying theories, models,
taxonomies and histories within the scenario planning discourse. Some of the most
notable include Chermack's work on scenario planning theory-building (2002, 2003,
2004, 2005); the Casual Textures approach developed by Ramírez, Selsky & Van der
Heijden (2008); Bishop et al.'s (2007) attempt to clarify what they see as the major
conceptual confusions in the discourse and provide a suggested consensus list of
techniques and models; as well as the scenario typologies proposed by various
commentators such as, Börjeson, Höjer, Dreborg, Ekvall and Finnveden (2006), and Van
Notten (2006). However, all these efforts are still early in terms of influence, and none of
them, despite their various strengths and merits, have so far attracted anything
approaching the critical mass of support needed for the comprehensive reform of the
scenario planning discourse that they envision. Despite the scenario matrix method
remaining the most well known scenario planning technique, it is not a common standard
or benchmark. The foresight scenario discourse is still characterized by a myriad
variations of methods and models espoused by scenarists who typically develop their own
proprietary, often high personalized, techniques in often secretive organizational contexts
! 13!
where there is little in the way of publicly available evaluation assessments—if any are
even conducted (Bishop et al., 2007; Wilkinson, 2009).
In a journal article summarizing her main conclusions from the 2008 Oxford
Futures Forum, Wilkinson (2009) argues that the future success of scenario practices is
constrained by dissensus among scenarists and their organizational stakeholders on what
the 'effectiveness' of scenarios might mean—a problem that is unresolvable without
greater theoretical development and research in the scenarios field. She worries that "the
lack of systematic and scholarly study into futures practices, in general, and scenario
practices in particular, means it is not possible to confirm or reject, on any statistically
valid or otherwise basis, [the] statement that 'no major contribution or breakthrough' is
possible with scenarios [work in organizations]" (p. 110).
Other commentators have argued that there is a fundamental problem with these
efforts—that they focus excessively on the elaboration of techniques, methods and
models rather than any move towards a rethinking of the field's philosophical
underpinnings and social purposes. This bias can be partly attributed to the cultures of
corporate consulting and bureaucratic planning within which most scenario planning
methods are developed. These cultures emphasize instrumentality-orientated innovations
while limiting critical reflection about the social and ideological context of their practices
(Inaytullah, 2002, 2009; Wright, 2004). Mermet (2009) has also argued that this tendency
is also a consequence of the epistemological and ontological uncertainty in futures studies
in general. This uncertainty breeds insecurity about the field's legitimacy when compared
to more established and institutionalized disciplines.
! 14!
Scenario planning is particularly vulnerable in this way because of its reliance on
the interpretation of narratives and qualitative data. It lacks the reassurance of perceived
legitimacy that a basis in quantitative and more positivist methods might confer. The
most ambitious attempt to lay out a new theory-building and research agenda has been
conducted by Chermack (2002, 2003, 2004, 2005). While still at an initial phase, it calls
for a very large, long-running program of empirical studies, as completed empirical
evaluations of scenario planning remain rare. It is admirable, but it also very much
focuses on its call for finding ways to quantitatively measure the psychological effects of
scenario planning. Such a stance could miss the distinctive qualities of scenario planning
and foresight scenarios as a qualitative, socio-cultural, humanistic tool for transforming
people’s ways of making sense of their possible futures. It tends to move the innovation
in foresight scenarios towards ever greater emphasis on calculative rationalities that can
be automated with algorithms. Such is the vision, for instance, of the Scenario Discovery
approach recently being developed at RAND (Lempert, Bryant & Bankes, 2008; Bryant
& Lempert, 2010), which—rejecting the qualitative logic of the original form of scenario
planning invented at the same institution by the nuclear war strategist Herman Kahn at
the dawn of the Cold War (Ghamari-Tabrizi, 2009)—calls for the deployment of
supercomputing power to generate massive numbers of scenarios for predictive analysis.
I believe in the potential of qualitative organizational communication theories and
methods to help the scenario discourse cohere yet make it more versatile, and provide
better understanding of scenario method effectiveness for scholars, practitioners, and
organizational stakeholders. This perspective is influenced by the social constructionist
stance in organizational studies that sees mental model change not in terms of a positivist
! 15!
psychological process but rather one of social cognition that defines organizations’ and
individuals’ perceptions of reality as fundamentally constructed in an ongoing process
through the power relations of socially constituted knowledge (Czarniawska, 2009). This
can also be usefully understood for strategic thinking purposes in terms of rhetorical
activity for which scenario methods can be both instrumentally and critically used to
assess and influence. At the same time, the underlying materiality of organizational
activities must be retained in analysis. In the first study, I apply Actor-Network Theory
(ANT) to scenario methods to deepen theory-building and practical application
possibilities of this dimension. The socio-materialist paradigm of ANT (Callon, 2001;
Latour, 2005) was also adopted in order to support a social constructivist perspective that
does not marginalize material reality; and the combination of ANT with narrative and
sensemaking theories underlines the centrality of human agency that can be marginalized
in ANT.
Taking a social constructionist influenced perspective, too, is not to dismiss the
value of developing rigorous ways of empirically evaluating scenario processes (though
of course it calls for post-positivist reflection on how these processes are socially
constructed); indeed such qualitative theory-building and framework innovation can help
create discursive consensus and more specific conceptual definitions that are first needed
to provide solid foundations for such empirical efforts. An example is the content
analysis of scenarios in the second study, using a coding scheme based on the Cynefin
sensemaking model combined with chi square testing to analyze a critical social
constructionist view about differences in strategic reasoning styles at organizational
peripheries vs. centres.
! 16!
And as will be seen in the third project’s exploration of scenario theory-building in
relation to the new media paradigm of transmedia storytelling (Jenkins, 2007, 2009),
there is a particular need for framework innovation given the rapid changes in online
ICTs and new media. These offer powerful and disruptive new capabilities for social
interaction, knowledge management, and strategic conversation that scenarists and the
foresight field more generally have only started experimenting with recently (Ramos,
Mansfield & Priday, 2012; Schatzmann, Schäfer, & Eichelbaum, 2013; Raford, 2014)
While these three papers set out starting points for different innovation directions in
theory-building, analysis, and practices for foresight scenarios, they share the underlying
perspective, as the scenario planning pioneer, Jay Ogilvy (Ogilvy, 2012; Ogilvy, Nonaka
& Konno, 2014) has argued, that the distinctive qualities of scenario work as a way to
help organizations make sense of their world and its possible futures are best understood
communicatively—in terms of narrative. The contribution of the dissertation as a whole
is to help address the deficiencies in sensemaking and narrative theory in the scenario
discourse and in doing so illuminate new avenues for deepening the usefulness of
foresight scenario methods for organizations as a strategic tool.

Sensemaking and Narrative
The two main theoretical streams in organizational communication studies that this
dissertation draws upon are intertwined. A brief overview is offered here.
Wilkinson identified the seminal work on 'sensemaking' by the organizational
theorist and social psychologist Karl Weick (Weick, 1995; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007)—
reflecting one of the key themes of the Oxford forum—as a particularly promising
! 17!
established body of work from outside the scenario planning discourse that might be used
to develop a higher degree of theoretical depth and intellectual credibility in scenario
theory. Sensemaking, broadly defined, refers to a social cognitive process through which
humans and their groups, organizations, and communities interpret and structure
perceptions of the novel and the unknown in order to take action. It is an ongoing process
that takes place both routinely and also through special occasions of sensemaking where
more dramatic gaps in our understanding of reality and the environment are addressed.
Effective sensemaking, which extracts and brackets information cues from the
environment, needs only plausible accounts of reality to support action, and such
accounts are subject to social negotiation, empirical testing, rhetorical contests, tweaking,
wholesale revision, or abandonment. Foresight scenarios can be understood as mediums
for sensemaking about the uncertainties of long-term futures.
I concur with Wilkinson’s proposition that Weickian sensemaking has much to
offer theory-building in scenario planning but I favour an alternative way of interpreting
and applying Weick’s perspective that emphasizes its social constructionist foundation as
a counter to the tendency of much of the current scenario discourse to lean towards
positivist, instrumentalist innovation directions. While Weick is the most prominent
sensemaking theorist in organization studies (Sutcliffe, Brown & Putnam, 2006), I also
draw on the work of the other two most noted sensemaking theorists, David Snowden and
Brenda Dervin. David Snowden’s Cyenfin model (Snowden, 2000; Kurtz & Snowden,
2003) offers a model and typology of knowledge inquiry logics under a range of different
levels of uncertainty that I found to be valuable in studying different scenario reasoning
styles under the conditions of increasing uncertainty. Brenda Dervin’s “sense-making”
! 18!
theories (Dervin et al., 2003) revolved around a multiple-stage journey metaphor that has
been influential in information communication design, and which I found useful in
suggesting how scenario narratives might be made remixable for transmedia storytelling
knowledge communities.
There are surprisingly few attempts to integrate the work of these sensemaking
theorists, and attempting to do so was not part of the scope of this dissertation.
Nonetheless, these sensemaking theorists also share a compatibility with theories of
organizational narrative, that being a crucial way in which sensemaking is communicated
and generated.
In part as a result of the influential linguistic turn in the social sciences, the idea
that narrative is the fundamental basis for human understanding of the world has become
increasingly influential (Bruner, 1986; Fisher, 1987). In the organizational sciences,
narrative has become popular as both a method of inquiry and data collection as well as a
paradigm for modeling how organizations are constituted and operate, including as the
key mode of sensemaking (Czarniawska & Gagliardi, 2003; Boje, 2011). Strategizing can
be generally understood as a crucial storytelling function in organizations (Barry &
Elmes, 1997) but scenario planning is notable as both a strategy tool that literally has the
idea of story in its name—Leo Rosten, a Hollywood screenwriter and RAND researcher
suggested to Herman Kahn that a term for screenplay, "scenario"
1
be borrowed (Kleiner,
2008)—yet has had very little attention give to its narrative aspect. As Study 3 suggests
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
As Prof. Henry Jenkins has noted (private communication), the concept of “scenario” in
Hollywood may historically have been an archaic term for the general idea of screenplay dating
from the silent movie era, but it is still used in the industry today to refer to the first draft,
proposal, or broad outline of a film—in contrast to a screenplay, which is a fully developed script.
Such first drafts help filmmakers and industry executives anticipate the requirements of a
proposed project. Scenarios in this sense then, as Jenkins points out, are a planning tool for the
film industry.
! 19!
in its introduction to transmedia storytelling, a new focus by the field on the narrative
aspect could be a way of leapfrogging ahead in adapting to the opportunities of new
media technologies and audiences. This introduction takes the form of a conceptual
bridging from scenario discourse that combines the “creative conversation” idea from
Pierre Lévy’s work on collective intelligence (2013) with the notion of the strategic
conversation in scenario planning (Van der Heijden, 2005).

Overview of the Papers
Study 1: Narrative Rhetorics in Scenario Work: Sensemaking and Translation
With Jerome Bruner and Walter Fisher’s work on narrative as a starting point, this
article presents a narrative-based approach to theory-building for scenarios—relevant for
futures narratives broadly defined—that conceives of them as sensemaking and rhetorical
efforts for organizations that seek to catalyze decision and action through futures work.
The organizational sensemaking theories of Karl Weick are combined with the rhetorical
and narrative perspective of Actor-Network-Theory from which the key concept of
‘translation’ is drawn. Weick’s work emphasizes the disruption of established and routine
organizational certainties as occasions for sensemaking–that is, sites and opportunities for
new accounts of reality that describe and enable options for action in the face of
equivocality. Futures exercises fit well into this conception. Actor-Network Theory is a
theory of power and knowledge from science and technology studies, used to unpack how
accounts of reality are assembled by actors from networks of organizations, technologies,
materials, texts, practices etc. ‘Translation’ refers to how such elements are enrolled by
these networks to legitimate ideas, to argue for particular agendas, and to allow and
! 20!
operationalize decisions and actions. The paper develops a framework for thinking about
how scenarios can be more effectively used for organizational narrative sensemaking
processes.

Study 2: A Cynefin-based Foresight Scenario Content Analysis Assessment of the
Relationship between Deductive, Inductive, and Abductive Strategizing Styles and the
Centre-Periphery Positioning of Scenario Participants
This paper contributes to the inductive vs. deductive reasoning debate in scenario
planning while also reporting on a novel method for assessing the strategizing styles of
organizations through an analysis of the participant-created scenarios generated by
foresight scenario-building exercises. The analytical approach used qualitative content
analysis coding of the participant-created scenarios to represent the range of strategizing
styles in organizations faced with futures defined by VUCA (volatility/velocity,
uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) conditions. In such conditions, it is argued that
scenario planning must account for abductive reasoning in addition to the inductive and
deductive as organizational strategizing styles. David Snowden’s Cynefin sensemaking
and knowledge management model is adapted here to code the range of knowledge
enquiry responses to strategic challenges expressed in the scenarios’ imagined futures.
Alex Wright’s application to scenario planning of Patrick Regnér’s thesis that deductive
strategizing chiefly occurs at the centre of organizational and industrial structures (while
inductive chiefly occurs at the periphery) is assessed through chi-squared testing of the
content analysis results. Two organizational communities were compared in the analysis:
! 21!
an established division of a major multinational corporation and a professional grassroots
and student community associated with an emerging new media paradigm.

Study 3: Towards a Creative Strategic Conversation Concept for Scenario Planning with
Transmedia Storytelling Characteristics
This paper explores a direction for theory-building and practice in scenario
planning that offers an alternative focus for online foresight scenario methods innovation
(“Foresight 2.0”) in today’s new media era. While Foresight 2.0 online experiments thus
far have primarily been engaged with crowdsourcing and data harvesting, this paper
supports an approach that emphasizes the collective intelligence potential of participatory
culture knowledge communities enhanced by online ICTs. As a starting point for
connecting foresight scenario discourse and participatory collective intelligence
discourse, the idea of the creative strategic conversation is considered. This is a
combination of the scenario planning concept of ‘strategic conversation’ and Pierre
Lévy’s concept of ‘creative conversation’ and is explored in relation to organizational
narrative and sensemaking perspectives in the context of foresight scenarios. This in turn
is a bridge to introducing the core principles, as described by Henry Jenkins, of the
increasingly influential applied new media paradigm of transmedia storytelling as a
means of putting the idea of the creative strategic conversation into practice. Insights into
the challenges of this, drawn from a series of pilot tests that attempted to create a
transmedia storytelling based scenario planning system, are also discussed.

! 22!
References
Barry, D., & Elmes, M. (1997). Strategy Retold: Toward a Narrative View of Strategic
Discourse. The Academy of Management Review, 22(2), 429.

Bell, W. (2003). Foundations of Futures Studies: History, Purposes, and Knowledge:
Human Science for a New Era, Vol. 1. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Bishop, P., Hines, A., & Collins, T. (2007). The current state of scenario development: an
overview of techniques. Foresight, 9(1), 5-25.

Boje, D. (Ed.). (2011). Storytelling and the future of organizations: An antenarrative
handbook. Routledge.

Börjeson, L., Höjer, M., Dreborg, K.-H., Ekvall, T., & Finnveden, G. (2006). Scenario
types and techniques: towards a user’s guide. Futures, 38(7), 723–739.

Bradfield, R., Wright, G., Burt, G., Cairns, G., & Van der Heijden, K. (2005). The origins
and evolution of scenario techniques in long range business planning. Futures, 37(8),
795-812.

Bryant, B., & Lempert, R. (2010). Thinking inside the box: A participatory, computer-
assisted approach to scenario discovery. Technological Forecasting and Social Change,
77(1), 34-49.

Callon, M. (2001). Actor Network Theory. In N. Smelser, J. Wright, P. Baltes (Eds.),
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (pp. 62-67). Amsterdam:
Elsevier.

Chermack, T., Lynham, S. & Ruona, W. (2001). “A Review of Scenario Planning
Literature.” Futures Research Quarterly (Summer 2001)

Chermack, T. (2002). The mandate for theory in scenario planning. Futures Research
Quarterly, 18(2), 25-28.

Chermack, T. (2003). The role of constructivist learning in scenario planning. Futures,
35(5), 445-460.

Chermack,T. (2004). A Theoretical Model of Scenario Planning. Human Resource
Development Review, 3(4), 301-325.

Chermack, T. (2005). Studying scenario planning: Theory, research suggestions, and
hypotheses. Social Change, 72, 59-73.

Czarniawska, B., & Gagliardi, P. (2003). Narratives we organize by. John Benjamins
Publishing.
! 23!

Czarniawska, B. (2009). Chapter 4: Social constructionism and organization studies. In
Westwood, R., & Clegg, S. (Eds.), Debating organization: point-counterpoint in
organization studies. John Wiley & Sons.

Dervin, B., Foreman-Wernet, L., & Lauterbach, E. (2003). Sense-making methodology
reader: Selected writings of Brenda Dervin. Hampton Press.

Economist, The (2008). Idea: Scenario Planning. Sept. 1, 2008, The Economist website.
http://www.economist.com/node/12000755 Retrieved September 29, 2014.

Ertel, C. & Solomon, L. (2014). Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic
Conversations that Accelerate Change. Simon and Schuster.

Ghamari-Tabrizi, S. (2009). The worlds of Herman Kahn: The intuitive science of
thermonuclear war. Harvard University Press.

Hines, A. & Bishop, P. (2006). Thinking about the Future: Guidelines for Strategic
Foresight. Social Technologies.

Inayatullah, S. (2002). Reductionism or layered complexity? The futures of futures
studies. Futures, 34(3-4), 295–302.

Inayatullah, S. (2009). Questioning Scenarios. Journal of Futures Studies, 13 (February),
75-80.

Ingvar, D. (1985). Memory of the future: an essay on the temporal organization of
conscious awareness. Human neurobiology, 4(3), 127-136. Springer.

Jenkins, H. (2007). Transmedia Storytelling 101.
http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html Retrieved September
21, 2014.

Jenkins, H. (2009). The revenge of the origami unicorn: seven principles of transmedia
storytelling. http://henryjenkins.org/2009/12/the_revenge_of_the_origami_uni.html
Retrieved September 20, 2014.

Kahane, A. (2012). Transformative scenario planning: Working together to change the
future. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Khakee, A. (1991). Scenario construction for urban planning. Omega, 19(5), 459-469.

Kleiner, A. (2008). The age of heretics: A history of the radical thinkers who reinvented
corporate management. John Wiley & Sons.

! 24!
Kurtz C. & Snowden, D. (2003). The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a
complex and complicated world. IBM Systems Journal 42(3).

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: an introduction to actor-network-theory.
Oxford University Press.

Lempert, R., Bryant, B., & Bankes, S. (2008). Comparing algorithms for scenario
discovery. RAND.

Lévy, P. (2013). The Creative Conversation of Collective Intelligence. In A. Delwiche &
J. Henderson (Eds.), The Participatory Cultures Handbook, 99-108. Routledge.

Loveridge, D. (2009). Foresight: The Art and Science of Anticipating the Future.
Routledge.

Martelli, A. (2001). Scenario building and scenario planning: state of the art and
prospects of evolution. Futures Research Quarterly, 17(2), 57-74.

Mermet, L. (2009). Extending the perimeter of reflexive debate on futures research: an
open framework. Futures, 41(2), 105-115.

Miller, K., & Waller, H. (2003). Scenarios, real options and integrated risk management.
Long range planning, 36(1), 93-107.

Millett, S. (2003). The future of scenarios: challenges and opportunities. Strategy &
Leadership, 31(2), 16–24. MCB UP Ltd.

Millett, S. (2012). Managing the Future: A Guide to Forecasting and Strategic Planning
in the 21st Century. Triarchy Press.

Ogilvy, J. (2012). Facing the Fold: Essays on Scenario Planning. Triarchy Press.

Ogilvy, J., Nonaka, I., & Konno, N. (2014). Toward Narrative Strategy. World Futures,
70(1), 5-18.

Raford, N. (2014). Online foresight platforms: Evidence for their impact on scenario
planning & strategic foresight. Technological Forecasting and Social Change.

Ramírez, R., Selsky, J., & Van der Heijden, K. (2008). Business planning for turbulent
times: New methods for applying scenarios. Earthscan/James & James.

Ramos, J. (2003). From critique to cultural recovery: critical futures studies and casual
layered analysis. Australian Foresight Institute.

Ramos, J., Mansfield, T., & Priday, G. (2012). Foresight in a network era: peer-producing
alternative futures. Journal of Futures Studies, 17(2).
! 25!

Scearce, D., & Fulton, K. (2004). High ambitions and scarce resources in public interest
organizations. Development, 47(4), 73-77.

Schatzmann, J., Schäfer, R., & Eichelbaum, F. (2013). Foresight 2.0-Definition, overview
& evaluation. European Journal of Futures Research, 1(1), 1-15.

Schnaars, S. (1987). How to develop and use scenarios. Long Range Planning, 20(1),
105–114

Schwartz, P. (1991). The Art of the Long View. New York: Currency.

Slaughter, R. (1998). Futures studies as an intellectual and applied discipline. American
Behavioral Scientist, 42(3), 372-385.

Slaughter, R. (2002). From forecasting and scenarios to social construction: changing
methodological paradigms in futures studies. Foresight, 4(3), 26-31.

Snowden, D. (2000). Cynefin: a sense of time and space, the social ecology of knowledge
management. In ed. C. Despres & D. Chauve (eds.), Knowledge Horizons : The Present
and the Promise of Knowledge Management. Butterworth Heinemann

Sutcliffe, K., Brown, A., & Putnam, L. (2006). Introduction to the special issue ‘Making
sense of organizing: In honor of Karl Weick’. Organization Studies, 27(11), 1573-1578.

Turner, F. (2008). From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole
Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press.

Van der Heijden, K. (2005). Scenarios: the art of strategic conversation. John Wiley &
Sons.

Van der Heijden, K., Bradfield, R., Burt, G., Cairns, G., & Wright, G. (2009). The sixth
sense: Accelerating organizational learning with scenarios. Wiley.

Van Notten, P. (2006). “Scenario development: a typology of approaches,” Chapter 4,
pp69-92, Schooling for Tomorrow: Think Scenarios, Rethink Education. OECD.

Varum, C., & Melo, C. (2010). Directions in scenario planning literature – A review of
the past decades. Futures, 42(4), 355-369.

Wack, P. (1985). Scenarios: Uncharted Waters Ahead. Harvard Business Review, 63(5),
73-89.

Weick, K. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage.

! 26!
Weick, K. & Sutcliffe, K. (2007). Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in
an Age of Uncertainty (2
nd
Edition). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Wilkinson, A. (2009). Scenarios Practices: In Search of Theory. Journal of Futures
Studies, 13(3), 107–114.

Wilkinson, A. & Kupers, R. (2014). The Essence of Scenarios: Learning from the Shell
experience. Amsterdam University Press.

Wright, A. (2004). A social constructionist’s deconstruction of Royal Dutch Shell's
scenario planning process, University of Wolverhampton Business School Working
Paper Series, WP004/04.

! 27!
STUDY 1:
Narrative Rhetorics in Scenario Work: Sensemaking and Translation
[This paper has been published in the Journal of Futures Studies’ March 2014, 18(3)
issue. The following is the final published text after peer review and editorial feedback.]

Introduction
In this issue’s lead article, Vuokko Jarva calls for greater theory-building and
practical innovation focused on narrative as a means for filling the gap between futures
scenarios and action; she evokes the seminal work of Jerome Bruner (1986, 1991) who
proposes that the constitution of social reality be divided between logico-deductive (or
“paradigmatic”) reasoning and interpretative narrative reasoning. Such a divide mirrors
the qualitative/quantitative tensions in the futures field as well as in organizational
sciences. This paper sets out a narrative theory-building direction that reconciles the two
sides of the tension by proposing that futures work be understood in the terms of
organizational narrative sensemaking as a rhetorical practice.
All organizational strategizing can be considered as a particularly influential form
of storytelling (Barry & Elmes, 1997). Narration and organization can be understood as
essential components of each other (Czarniawska & Gagligardi, 2003). Scenario
planning, in particular, differentiates itself as a strategy tool through being narrative-
based—indeed, the very term "scenario" was borrowed from an archaic Hollywood word
for screenplay (Kleiner, 2008). Rasmussen (2005) has written of the practical advantages
of scenario-building as a narrative vehicle of organizational communication—the futures
stories told at the heart of scenario planning are easily created, circulated and understood
! 28!
by individuals and communities, so helping creativity and problem-solving,
communicating visions and questions, and reinforcing or challenging ideology. This
paper discusses futures scenario work broadly (after Bell, 2003), rather than scenario
planning narrowly.
Bridging organizational sciences theory with scenario work through understanding
narrative provides intellectual support to the bringing together of strategy, planning, and
futures studies (Lindgren & Bandhold, 2009; Roney, 2010). The emphasis is necessarily
on theoretical depth rather than breadth here, but further work beyond this paper will be
crucial for forging connections with past futures discussion about narrative and
sensemaking in the Journal of Futures Studies (see e.g. Aaltonen & Barth, 2005;
Wilkinson and Ramirez, 2010; Schultz, Crews & Lum, 2012; Li, 2013) and elsewhere.
To return, then, to Bruner: crucially, he views narrative as a social constructionist
mode of knowing—an epistemological and ontological perspective that understands
reality as generated through the cognition of many socially interacting minds (Berger &
Luckmann, 1967). Particularly when this mode is confronted with, or even aims to create,
uncertainty and complexity, it should also be seen as a mode of rhetoric. Rhetoric, that is,
not in the sense of persuasive arts but in the broader meaning of “taking a stand”, as
Bruner puts it (2001, p. 35), over how reality is made sense of. A key target for
organizational decision-makers’ development and engagement of accounts of reality
through narrative is, of course, the question of possible futures. So through the rhetorical
perspective, scenarios can be understood as narratives composed to reflect different
power configurations and claims that persuade and legitimate on behalf of particular,
! 29!
competing accounts of reality–including the arguments for the credibility and
effectiveness of the futures process itself.
Bruner’s approach takes us beyond only assessing a futures exercise’s narrative
qualities in terms of how well the explicitly defined stories
1
engage its participants
(through, as Van der Heijden (2004) suggests, being original, memorable, provocative,
and compelling). Such assessment might, for instance, revolve around a story’s aesthetic
allure (Nordfors, 2007); ability to create immersive experiences (Candy, 2010); or
effectiveness as a reporting or mnemonic device (Schroeder, 2011). However, this falls
short of fully applying Bruner’s view of reality if it does not address the narrative
epistemology of the broader situated context of futures exercises. Social constructionist
and sensemaking views call attention to how the scenario processes themselves are
socially constructed, so disrupting the view of scenarios as driven by logico-deductive
reasoning (Wright, 2004a, 2004b); organizations’ processes for making sense of reality
(and possible futures) are already primarily orchestrated through narrative whether
futures scenario methods are used or not. The futurist’s goal is to effectively intervene in
and become part of an organization’s narrative sensemaking processes—a rhetorical
endeavor in the power/knowledge combinations that make up its construction of reality.
However, Bruner’s view that the narrative-interpretative and the logico-deductive
modes are “irreducible to one another” (1986, p. 11) suggests that while narrative is a
rhetorical way of making arguable claims about reality, effective logical-deductive
reasoning can be entirely separated from rhetoric. The influential communication theorist
Walter Fisher’s conception (1984, 1987) of a narrative reasoning paradigm is a useful
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
There is a far-from-settled debate over defining story vs. narrative in the organizational
sciences, but this is beyond this paper’s scope.
! 30!
addition here. While generally parallel to Bruner’s conception, Fisher’s paradigm sees
narrative reasoning as also crucial to logico-deductive reasoning (which Fisher calls the
“rational world paradigm”); indeed, the first subsumes the second. Moreover, Fisher
treats the logico-deductive mode as rhetorical. This is not to suggest that logico-deductive
reasoning is reducible to story, but rather that any type of reasoning cannot influence
human decision and action without being articulated through the cultural values and
historical contexts that is the special domain of narrative reasoning (story being the most
pervasive and effective human means for making sense of events). For the futures field,
this perspective suggests a theory-building direction that resolves qualitative-quantitative
tensions by making narrative fundamental to all types of futures reasoning.
The emphasis on rhetoric resonates with the growing interest of scenarists in
defining plausibility criteria for assessing scenario effectiveness (Wilkinson & Ramirez,
2010; Ramirez & Selin, 2014). The social constructionist perspective requires reflexive
analysis of how plausibility itself is constructed and contested rhetorically in scenario
processes. Such inquiry should be taken with other efforts seeking to enhance scenario
processes’ legitimacy through addressing methodological confusions, theoretical
deficiencies, and questions of efficacy (Bishop, Hines & Collins, 2007; Varum & Melo,
2010; Inayatullah, 2009).
For instance, in summarizing her key conclusions from the 2008 Oxford Futures
Forum, Wilkinson (2009) worries about how scenario practices’ success is constrained by
dissensus among scenarists and their clients on what scenario effectiveness means—she
argues that this is irresolvable without greater theoretical development and systematic
scholarly research. Wilkinson importantly identifies the seminal work on 'sensemaking'
! 31!
by the organizational theorist and social psychologist Karl Weick (Weick, 1995; Weick,
Sutcliffe & Obstfeld, 2005)—reflecting one of the key themes of the Oxford forum—as a
particularly promising established body of work from outside the futures field that might
be used to develop greater depth in scenario theory. This paper agrees that Weickian
sensemaking has much to offer theory-building here, and proposes a way of interpreting
and applying Weick (who shares with Bruner the social constructionist view of human
knowledge being based on social cognition) that directly links it to narrative and avoids
the pitfalls of reifying the field’s qualitative-quantitative tensions or of overlooking the
power of narrative reasoning in sensemaking through overcommittment to logico-
deductive reasoning. To approach Weickian sensemaking primarily for improving
technical effectiveness measures is to underestimate the importance of its reflexive power
as a social constructionist perspective.
To add analytical depth to this Fisherian rhetorical perspective on how scenario
processes can be understood in the context of organizational narrative sensemaking, this
paper proposes a framework using the concept of ‘translation’ as used in Actor-Network
Theory (ANT) (Latour, 2005). The rhetorical composition of narrative sensemaking can
be understood via ANT in terms of the recruiting and aligning of heterogeneous elements
and interests (i.e. the ‘translation’ of networks of allies, warrants, claims, interests that
make particular visions and agendas for action, decision-making, legitimation etc. more
persuasive, more authentic, more plausible etc.). ANT concepts are borrowed selectively
however. As Castells (2009) suggests, we can value the explanatory abilities of ANT as a
theory of power for showing how rhetorical assemblages underlying accounts of reality
! 32!
are socially constructed, while remaining wary of ANT theory controversies such as its
apparent extension of agency beyond humans.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: first, Weickian sensemaking’s
epistemological fit with futures is discussed, then connections with ANT’s concept of
‘translation’ are examined, and next, a convergence of sensemaking and translation for
scenario theory-building is considered.

Weickian Sensemaking’s Epistemology
Weickian sensemaking is one of the most successful examples of the social
constructionist and interpretative turn in the organizational sciences (Sutcliffe, Brown &
Putnam, 2006). This turn shifted the focus from understanding organizations as structures
which shape action to understanding them as being continuously maintained and altered
by socially interpreted interactions (Taylor et al., 2001). Weickian sensemaking proposes
that macro processes of organizing be understood through micro processes of social
cognition at the individual level that continuously construct (or make sense of) reality
through conversation and other kinds of linguistic and textual discourse. A basic
proposition is that sense of the activities around us—and our own activity—is made
retrospectively—that is to say, we arrive at more-or-less settled accounts of events and
environments after we have experienced them (Weick, 1995). This sensemaking is social
and discursive, working through language, media and communication. Organizations
themselves are understood as social systems for interpreting meaning environments
always saturated with uncertainties and ambiguities. These systems receive and collect
information about the environment as well as about other organizations and their own
! 33!
conditions, with the purpose of reducing their organization’s equivocality in
understanding the world. This reduction is conducted through the continuous attempted
creation of consensuses about social realities. This creation’s processes take form through
improvised and routinized interpretation schema, interaction rules and mental models that
become embedded in the organization through socialization and technical apparatuses.
Sensemaking is articulated through activities that bring order to streams of raw
experience, such as noticing, bracketing, and labeling. Importantly, the sensemaking
process is not understood as simply interpreting environments or investing them with
meaning, but also as reflexively helping to enact environments through coupled action
and cognition (Daft & Weick, 1984; Weick, 1995; Weick, Sutcliffe & Obstfeld, 2005).
The main challenge to be overcome that Wilkinson sees in applying Weickian
sensemaking to scenario planning theory-building is epistemological—she reads Weick's
approach as being defined by the belief that "sense is made ex-post, whereas scenario
practices by definition considers the world ex-ante" (Wilkinson, 2009, p. 110). Weickian
sensemaking inherently assumes, it is implied, a retrospective orientation mutually
exclusive of the prospective orientation of futures practices. Ramirez & Selin (2014) have
noted critical assessments of Weick drawing attention to prospective types of
sensemaking, as in the idea of sensegiving where gaps in organization members’
understanding of reality are filled in by leaders or top-down visions. But when Weick
(1995, p. 30) writes that "The dominance of retrospect in sensemaking is a major reason
why students of sensemaking find forecasting, contingency planning, strategic planning,
and other magical probes into the future wasteful and misleading if they are decoupled
from reflective action and history" he is, rather than rejecting the prospective orientation,
! 34!
underscoring that the prospective necessarily must be coupled with the retrospective.
What binds these temporal orientations together is that they are both socially constructed
products of cognition and action enacted in the present. Moreover, this social
constructionist view emphasizes the connections that narrative reasoning forges between
interpretations of the past as well as possible futures. Seeing Weickian sensemaking as
differentiated from prospective sensemaking or sensegiving breaks this link; sensegiving
also privileges hegemonic actors and undermines the emphasis championed by Bruner
and Fisher on narrative reasoning being a democratic practice everyone uses—an
important consideration especially for futurists interested in making futures work more
participatory and open.
Scenario planning as sensemaking understood in social constructionist terms has
been most notably so far explored by Alex Wright (2004, 2004a, 2005). Wright
acknowledges that the analysis of the underlying discursive text and language that
constitute social construction processes is rare in the scenario field and that "this
conception of scenarios as social constructions is not identified in the practitioner-
focused literature" (Wright, 2005, p. 89). This lack of attention is understandable, given
the subversive irony that the reflexivity of social constructionism can provoke. As Wright
(2004, p. 12) points out in his "social constructionist's deconstruction" of Royal Dutch
Shell's scenario planning methods that while "Scenario planning is located ontologically
and epistemologically as an alternative strategy approach to rationalist techniques, such
as forecasting… positivism remains present in much of the unspoken assumptions in the
most widely known examples…." Furthermore, he notes that "some of [the field's] most
prolific advocates appear to be suffering from epistemic uncertainty… and seek to deny
! 35!
scenario planning's social and constructive natures… and go so far as to apologise for
these interpretive properties."
While positivism envy in scenario planning may lead to defensiveness about social
constructionism’s implications, Weick's sensemaking perspective has subversive
potential when applied to any kind of rationalistic planning effort. This subversiveness
entails a postmodern wryness about strategizing that is neither simply affirmative nor
simply critical. (It is, however, controversial and it should be stressed that Weick here is
out of step with much organizational theory thinking which tends to see more
straightforward value along with nuanced reflexivity in planning practices.) Weick argues
that rather than as guides to future action, plans should be considered primarily as
symbols or signals, advertisements, instruments of political gamesmanship, and excuses
for interaction and conversation. He concludes: "Plans are a pretext under which several
valuable activities take place in organizations, but one of those activities is not
forecasting." (Weick 1979, p. 10). More recently, Weick has emphasized that reliance on
plans and the assumptions they embody can undercut an organization’s mindfulness and
its ability to deal with complex and unexpected events. Planning processes may lull
personnel into complacent, limited expectations about their roles and the environments
around them (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2007, p. 66-67).
This counter-rationality of Weickian sensemaking is disconcerting for the
instrumental view of planning (broadly equivalent to management and strategy in the
organizational sciences literature) that sees planning as a means of gaining control over
the future of an organization and its environment through formalized decision-making
procedures (Mintzberg, 1994). Forecasting is integral to instrumentalist planning
! 36!
(Makridakis, 1990). Even when it is most important for symbolizing reason (Mintzberg,
1994) and there is negligible confidence about an organization's knowledge about its
future, planning is instrumentally useful for an organization's self-maintenance and sense
of efficacy in the face of turbulence and uncertainty. Yet the Weickian reflexive ironic
account of planning need not be only subversively used. Weick is emphatic that the
affirmative purpose of organizational analysis be as important as the critical (Weick,
1979).
From the Weickian perspective, then, scenario exercises are controlled sites for
conscious organizational sensemaking that disrupt and remake existing mental models
through group narrative-making in the present. This dovetails with Weick's observation
that when routinized interpretative schema break down and an urgent occasion for
sensemaking arises, what is presently needed is "something that preserves plausibility
and coherence, something that is reasonable and memorable, something that embodies
past experience and expectations, something which resonates with other people,
something that can be constructed retrospectively, but also can be used prospectively;
something that captures both feeling and thought, something that allows for
embellishment to fit current oddities, something that is fun to construct. In short, what is
necessary is a good story." (Weick 1995, p. 60-61)
Reminiscent of a well-known futures tactic, Weick’s advice includes imagining and
narrating futures events as if they have already taken place in the past—a perspective that
encourages participants to feel more confident about imagining and engaging with those
events. They are able to deploy references to past experiences and causal histories that
have the legitimacy of established consensus and facticity in the discourse. Weick calls
! 37!
this thinking in the "future perfect tense" (1979, p. 198-199). This recommendation
combines two common temporal definitions of strategy described by Mintzberg (1994, p.
23-25)—intended strategy as a plan for the future and realized strategy as a pattern over
time assessed in hindsight—in a way that embodies the coupling, crucial to how Weick
understands organizations should actively use futures imagination, of the prospective and
the retrospective within the sensemaking of the present. As Patriotta (2003, p. 353)
argues: "the strength of narratives as interpretive devices stems precisely from their
ability to link the present to the past and the future, anticipation to retrospection and
repetition"—which consolidates the principle that both the prospective and the
retrospective are ultimately reconcilable as a construction of the present.
While there have been significant work already on connecting scenarios and
sensemaking, as well as scenarios and narratives, so far little has been done on
specifically developing the links between the three subjects. ANT’s ‘translation’ concept
is a useful starting point for developing the Weickian perspective on scenarios further.

The Narrative Perspective of Actor-Network Theory
ANT refers to an analytical approach to how naturalized ideas of nature,
technology and society are constructed through power/knowledge networks that organize
humans and non-human material entities. It originates in Science, Technology and
Society studies (STS) and is associated most notably with French theorists Michel Callon
and Bruno Latour (Latour, 1987; Callon, 1987). ANT has become increasingly popular in
a wide variety of social science and related disciplines. Its principal interest is the
analysis of how socio-material alliances made up of humans and non-humans are created
! 38!
and decomposed by power struggles in order to constitute, maintain, and challenge
accounts of reality. Its concept of ‘network’ is a rhizomatic one (Latour, 1999) rather than
being based on technological or organizational structures; ‘network’ here refers to the
redistribution of action (Latour, 2011). In the organization sciences, ANT has been a lead
element in the recent ‘post-modern turn’ (Alcadipani & Hassard, 2010). An important
part of its appeal is that ANT understands reality as being constructed discursively from
social relations whilst at the same time refusing to detach sociality from materiality.
This paper does not attempt a comprehensive ANT approach to scenario work; nor
will it engage the debates over ANT’s status as theory or methodology
2
. Rather, this
paper will focus on the usefulness for rethinking scenario work through the key ANT
concept of 'translation', which has been particularly popular in organization studies
(Demers, 2007). Latour (2005) describes translation as a process of organizing through
which the creation or maintenance of socio-technical arrangements is attempted. In this
definition, heterogeneous—often radically different—entities are brought together by
actors to build a possible network with a shared agenda. If the actors acquire (or 'enroll')
sufficient allies for their networks to make the socio-technical arrangement materially
and discursively robust and durable, the sociotechnical arrangement is considered—in
retrospect—benign and stabilized. Translation, then, describes the negotiation of socio-
technical relations through which heterogeneous entities, having been convinced that
their differences can be bridged (or set aside) and their interests at least in part aligned
with an actor's, are mobilized in support of the actor's agenda. The organizing actor is
able to promote its agenda by speaking on behalf of, and with the force, of its allies.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2
For critiques of ANT, see e.g. Amsterdamska (1990), Whittle & Spicer (2008).

! 39!
Latour (1987) describes this as a socio-material networked form of rhetoric. Entities,
including ones that have been previously allied, which resist translation by an ‘actor-
network’ may be excluded or attacked. These maneuvers are thought of in ANT in terms
of strategies of association and disassociation (Callon, 1986; Latour, 1986). Importantly,
the term ‘actor-network’ reminds us that all actors are themselves constituted by
networks of heterogeneous aligned interests, relationships, objects, and organizations etc.
while also creating, challenging, absorbing, engaging etc. other networks (Callon, 1991).
While bearing this in mind, for purposes of clarity here only “actors” and “networks” will
be referred to from this point.
ANT’s theorizing of power and of narrative is intermeshed. The development of
ANT by Callon & Latour (1981) grew in part out of the work of the semiotician and
narrative theorist Algirdas Greimas (1990) who, building on the work of folklorist
Vladimir Propp (1984), proposed that narratives could be broken down analytically in
terms of 'actants'—idealized, abstract generic story elements that lack specific character,
detail, facticity or agency until they are operationalized within a storytelling plot by the
author.
In the ANT perspective, actants are human and non-human material entities that are
operationalized through their translation or enrollment into networks/narratives created
by the authorship of actors. The vital difference between actors and actants is that actors
have the agency to compose networks. Actants may develop into actors themselves.
These networks create and support stories that the actors hope are accepted over rivals’ as
more legitimate or important accounts of social reality.
! 40!
There is a significant direct correspondence between Michel Callon's writings on
networks and the scenario discourse. In his 1991 essay "Techno-economic networks and
irreversibility", Callon casts translation as the key operation through which networks are
created by actors recruiting actants. The enrollment of these contingent allies into
networks is inscribed in material objects and structures or "intermediaries" (e.g. paper
documents and published reports, office architecture, computer databases,
telecommunication links, knowledge embodied in humans etc.). Callon lays out his basic
definitions of ANT concepts and writes:
"All groups, actors and intermediaries describe a network: they identify and define
other groups, actors, and intermediaries, together with the relationships that bring these
together. When such descriptions include the imputation of authorship, then actors
emerge in the stopping places, asymmetries, or folds…. But the network of
intermediaries accepted by an actor after negotiation and transformation is in turn
transformed by that actor. It is converted into a scenario, carrying the signature of its
author, looking for actors ready to play its roles. For this reason I speak of actor-network:
for an actor is also a network." (Callon, 1991, p. 142)
The particular use of "scenario" here implies that a network and the processes by
which its relationships are maintained, stabilized, strengthened and challenged is a
narrative with an author and roles that needs to be acted out. Without the "imputation of
authorship" (and therefore of narrative), the conception of network would seem inert and
inoperable. This authorship—the actor’s driving of the network—is the voice that
translates the interests of enrollable actants into its own agenda; as Callon notes
! 41!
elsewhere (1986, p. 26): "Translation is a definition of roles, a distribution of roles and a
delineation of a scenario. It speaks for others but in its own language."
This correspondence is reinforced by Callon's Acting in an Uncertain World: An
Essay on Technical Democracy (Callon, Lascoumes & Barthe, 2009). The authors
describe how modern policy decision-makers face destabilizing controversies created by
new scientific and technical uncertainties. They suggest decision-makers typically
respond by both rationalizing the uncertainties into risk and probability calculations, as
well as through expressing their strategic options in terms of the alternative future world-
states that they believe, in the manner of a self-fulfilling prophecy, they will help bring
about to answer the crises. Whether this belief is borne out by future actions or events or
not (and Weick reminds us that such an accounting would be formed and justified
retrospectively in any case), it is necessary to give a virtual sense of power and efficacy
to the imagined alternative futures along with the policy options and alliance networks
that they imply:
"A state of the world is defined first by the list of human and non-human entities
that make it up, and then by the interactions between these entities with which we decide
to live but also the type of history we are prepared to share with them. We refer to
possible states of the world because we know of causal chains that could produce them.
Another way of talking about these states of the world is to employ the notion of
scenario, a notion dear to futurologists." (Callon, Lascoumes & Barthe, 2009, p. 20)
Here again, and more clearly, the scenario (the "possible state of the world") is
presented as marking a potential and virtual network of human and non-human actants
allied together through "interactions" (or translations) and constituted through narrative
! 42!
("the type of history" and "the causal chains") but waiting for an actor ("with which we
decide to live", "we are prepared to share with them") to put them into play as rhetoric.
While there is a distinct and strong tradition of scenario planning (La Prospective)
in his native France (Bradfield et al., 2005), Callon has not written so far on the potential
connections between futures scenarios and ANT. But the correspondence here is
intriguing. If the organizational use of scenario work is considered in terms of
translation—-that is, the negotiation and contestation of network alliances around the
legitimacy of various accounts of future realities—then scenario work can be thought of
as a narrative medium of power, with the scenarios and scenarists being the
intermediaries of rivalrous or collaborative networks organized around the future. Both
qualitative and quantitative modes of argument and their apparatuses and experts are
recruited and combined in these networks. Translation operates in a dual way here: both
in the sense of composing a space for mutual dialogue in which different conceptions and
agendas regarding alternative possible futures are brought together and in creating new
rhetorical and political linkages and assemblages amongst the various stakeholders.
Scenario work activities as a sensemaking medium can be thought of usefully in
terms of three main narrative levels of translation. There is the macro-level of the
scenarios themselves where they are vehicles for communicating an organization's view
of the future either internally, throughout its community or even publicly. At this level
the scenarios themselves are intermediaries inscribed with visions of the future (both
hopeful and fearful) that can be used to enroll and translate other entities in support of
various networks' agendas. At the meso-level, there is the story of the scenario work as an
organizational process. This involves the question of how scenario processes can be
! 43!
constituted and made viable within a specific organizational context. Simultaneously,
there is also the question of how valued these scenario processes are when compared with
other organizational processes, including rival strategizing processes. The narrative at the
micro-level is driven by the problem of how the network assemblage of scenario work
itself is constructed and comprehended through cognition and action—that is, how sense
is made of it when it is practiced. These levels are collapsible into ANT’s preferred
rhizomatic network topology, in which the macro-level and meso-level scenario practices
can be understood as constituted by locally framed sensemaking acts that are mobilized
across the nodes of competing and collaborating power structures.
The qualitative-quantitative tensions in scenario discourse can be understood in this
perspective as the politico-epistemological consequence of the meso-level encounter of
scenario work sensemaking with rival, more positivist and quantitatively-driven
organizational processes. The practitioners' struggle to make better sense of the value of
scenarios—for both themselves and for their clients—in the face of this challenge has led
to their emphasis on searching for more scientistic rigor and common standards of
instrumentality in the hope of unifying and strengthening the scenario methods discourse.
But this focus overlooks the scope of scenario work as a narrative method—one which is
not simply about what or how stories are told by and within organizations but also how
the storytelling is itself a crucial means through which organizing itself occurs. Exploring
the convergence between the cognitive mode articulated by Weickian sensemaking
theory and the strategic mode of the ANT notion of translation is an useful way of better
comprehending the value of this scope.

! 44!
The Convergence of Translation and Sensemaking as Narrative Theories
The convergence of translation and sensemaking as explanations of organizational
storytelling is built upon a recognition of the essential isomorphism between organization
and narrative. That is, organizing and storytelling should be "analyzed as coextensive
because they both consist of anticipating a series of articulations whose meaning is
attributed retrospectively" (Cooren, 2001, p. 180). This perspective echoes
Polkinghorne's (1988, p. 18) observation that "narrative is a meaning structure that
organizes events and human actions into a whole, thereby attributing significance to
individual actions and events according to their effect on the whole". Taylor & Van
Every's (2000) account of how organizing and narrating are both semantic processes
fundamental to the human cognitive construction of social reality is partly founded on the
same semiotic narrative theories of Gremais that helped shape ANT. Cooren (2001) has
elaborated on this connection in modeling the translational strategies of association and
disassociation involved in organizational coalition-building in terms of a Greimasian
quest narrative. The Greimasian quest narrative is an ideal type of story form in which the
protagonist of the narrative recruits and mobilizes actant helpers and overcomes obstacles
and rivals in order to achieve its agenda
3
.
It is important here to note that the actants may be subject simultaneously to
strategies of association and disassociation from actors in different quarters, for disparate
purposes, and at different levels of discourse. Furthermore, they may be allied to, or
claimed by, multiple networks/narratives whilst also retaining the possibility of
sometimes becoming or being (in another network) an authoring actor themselves.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3
Detailed examination of Greimas’ relevance for organizational sensemaking theory is
unfortunately beyond this paper’s scope, but see Taylor & Cooren (2006) for more.
! 45!
Therefore, as Cooren (2001, p. 185) describes it, a "narrative interpenetration of several
sensemaking activities" is typical, affirming Weick's (1979, 1995) position that effective
collective action requires neither any consensus about goals nor shared meaning so long
as the articulated experience of collective action as an occasion and arena for
sensemaking—storytelling—is shared. This view of translation as a typically multivalent,
pluralistic operation is supported by the understanding that narratives may be authored by
any possible actor—not just victors which dominate—and can co-exist pluralistically as
well as rivalrously. Crucially, this pluralistic multivalency also points to the virtuality of
narratives within the scope of translation. Virtuality is addressed here in terms of Callon's
definition of network formation as a process where actants are "converted into a scenario,
carrying the signature of its author, looking for actors ready to play its roles" (1991, p.
142, my italics). The interpenetrated sensemaking that Cooren delineates as a space of
translation is where many potential, as well as ongoing, narrative schema of
organizational realities are circulated. These schema are ready to be made sense of in
retrospect through the enactment of networks/narratives of social reality by actors. These
potential narrative schema carry a rhetorical weight prior to their actualization. Simply
being ready and sought as a new addition to another network means that an actant may
bear a virtual influence on those networks that it already belongs to—as their actors must
consider the possibility of those new alternative arrangements coming into play.
The dovetailing of translation and sensemaking, then, undergirds a narrative
approach to organizations that focuses upon the deep isomorphism between organizing
and narrating, the multivalency of the constituents of networks, and the influence of
virtual narratives. These qualities expand our understanding of the characteristic modality
! 46!
of scenarios as a narrative form. The importance of modality as a narrative characteristic
of scenarios has been well asserted in Booth & Clark (2009) and Booth et al. (2009).
They state that every use of futures narratives can be understood in terms of a modal
narrative—that is, a narrative which is primarily concerned with the necessity, possibility
and contingency of the worlds we live in. Modal narratives ask 'what if?' Their special
purpose is to consider how necessary and possible the facts of reality are and how they
may have possibly turned out differently. Scenarios are a primary form of future-
orientated modal narratives in organizational and public discourse.
Booth et al. argue that modal narratives operate through cognitive estrangement at
the doxastic-axiological level of beliefs and values. A liminal zone is generated by modal
narrative devices such as scenarios between the accepted consensus knowledge and
values about reality and the tentative, partial knowledge and values articulated through
different alternative accounts of reality. This liminal zone is an institutionally or
discursively legitimated space for participants to experiment with the "strange newness"
of alternative accounts of reality (Booth & Clark. 2009, p. 92).
For Booth et al., the primary purpose of the modal narratives is to "subvert our
belief in what is accepted as real" (Booth & Clark, 2009, p. 93) through their effects as
"sensitizing agents to the multiple possible worlds that might have been and that could
still emerge" (Booth et al., 2009, p. 118). They also see strong parallels with the promises
of scenario planning to liberate organizations from entrenched patterns of thought about
the future and to enhance their learning capabilities with new habits of thought. They also
argue that "modal narratives are most valuable… when employed as 'surprise machines',
highlighting gaps or contradictions in belief (doxastic) or value (axiological) systems"
! 47!
(Booth et al., 2009, p. 124). This emphasis on the doxastic-axiological value of scenario
narratives as "surprise machines" is a more disruptive and destabilizing version of Wack's
(1985) characterization of scenario methods as "the gentle art of reperceiving". Both
versions are parallels to Weick's notion of occasions for sensemaking (Weick, 1995) but
Booth et al.'s version provokes organizational controversy about the future rather than
seeking to manage it. While there may be limited appetite in the current professional
scenario planning discourse for exercising scenarios as confrontational "challenge
artefacts" (Wright, 2005, p. 12) against hegemonic structures within organizations and
society, scenarios as modal narratives could be certainly be deployed in this way
4
. The
idea of scenarios as "surprise machines" is also an alternative perspective to the well-
known analogies of scenario planning as a "wind tunnel" and as a method that creates
"memories of the future". The "wind tunnel" metaphor implies that the most important
product of scenarios be something that is measurable and reproducible. And while the
"surprise machines" could certainly help produce "memories of the future", the memories
metaphor tends to reduce the effects of scenarios to a cognitive instrumentality, a kind of
innate version of contingency planning. The doxastic-axiological dimension is largely set
aside in the two popular metaphors, as it is too in the emphasis by those who favour
steering the scenario discourse towards greater positivist efforts of measurement. The
narrative power of scenarios in the Fisherian sense of argumentation and rhetoric is
marginalized here in favour of greater methodological rigor and a suppression of the,
potentially destabilizing, self-reflexivity that the modality of scenarios can generate.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4
Although there are important precedents for scenarios as an ungentle device of reperceiving e.g.
Kahn's On Thermonuclear War (1960) deliberately created public controversy through its
shocking content.
! 48!
Treating scenario methods as modal narrative generators bolsters the Fisherian
paradigm as an approach to futures narratives. Modal narratives create sensemaking
occasions that constitute a translational space for organizations considering alternative
futures. If storytelling and organizing are co-extensive, processes of modal narration can
be considered as processes of modal organizing—that is to say, a scenario exercise about
the future does not merely create ‘what if?’ narrative objects, but is simultaneously an
organizing process that creates a liminal zone for doxastic-axiological reflection on the
organizational context itself. This liminal zone corresponds with the translational space
where both virtual and actualized networks/narratives can be proposed and exercised.
These are the ‘what if?’ rhetorics of organizing where sensemaking is operationalized
through strategies of association and disassociation. The multivalency of the actants
mobilized by these strategies underscores that modal narratives could be simultaneously
claimed by multiple actors for disparate purposes. Just as the organizational meaning of
plans is rarely simply about the actual rational implementation of policies, the ‘what if?’
narratives here will be made sense of and used differently by different interests.
This Weickian-ANT influenced understanding of the power and purpose of
scenarios explicitly moves away from the trend of emphasizing focus on positivism and
instrumentality in scenario theory-building. Instead, it favours Bell’s stance (2003, p.
317) that sees scenarios as an umbrella term for the narratives that are ultimately the
rhetorical products of all futures methods. The convergence of translation and
sensemaking in the modality of scenario narratives that has been elaborated in this paper
provides theoretical depth to understanding how the umbrella conception of scenarios
operates. In this perspective, the special value of futures narratives is how they create a
! 49!
legitimate liminal sensemaking space within organizations for translation work around
possible futures.

Practical Applications
It is hoped that this paper provides starting points for practical innovation.
For instance, ANT-trained analysts could be tasked with making scenario planning
processes more transparent and democratic, by using ANT modeling to represent how
participants’ and scenarists’ power/knowledge relationships during the experience are
constructed (Dudhwala, 2011)—thereby supporting critical futurists seeking to fashion
more participatory futures methods (Ramos, Mansfield & Priday, 2012).
This means developing typologies of translation specific to different assemblages
of futures techniques in different organizational contexts across micro-meso-macro levels
of rhetoric. Such analyses, in contrast to empirical or objective instruments, should
reflexively engage with subjects’ understanding and use of scenario work in terms of
socially constructed narratives. Moreover, these analyses should be used to develop
models that can also help futures practitioners and their partners to engage in translation
more effectively and so gain advantage over rivals’ (with their competing strategy tools)
narrative sensemaking about futures.
Further ways that such applications could be extended include:
• Modeling successful rhetorical interventions/translations made by both new
and traditional futures techniques to help their practitioners learn from each
other.
! 50!
• Although the micro-meso-macro ANT-narrative sensemaking approach here
has a different focus from the four layer Causal Layered Analysis (CLA)
methodology (Inayatullah, 2004), it might usefully complement it with
models of how CLA’s litany, systematic causes, worldview/discourse, and
myth-metaphor layers are assembled/translated and rhetorically contested
through narrative sensemaking.
• Scenarios communicate futures across diverse audiences’ boundaries. Curry
(2007) has usefully borrowed the STS term of “boundary objects” (Star &
Greisemer, 1989) to describe this. Turner (2008) has also applied this idea in
analyzing Silicon Valley’s rise, including Global Business Network’s
scenario planning success. This paper’s approach might be used to model and
improve how scenarios translate across boundaries and gain influence.

Conclusion
This paper has argued for the importance of understanding the organizational use of
scenarios as a narrative sensemaking practice in terms of ANT and Fisherian rhetorical
analysis. This provides theoretical depth in support of Wendell Bell's (2003) view of
scenarios as a vehicle common to all futures practices. What is being advocated for here
is a theory-building direction that reconciles qualitative/quantitative tensions through
narrative understanding that supports the link between scenario insight and action. This
should complement efforts to develop more rigorous standards and more reliable
measures of scenario efficacy important for enhancing the legitimacy of scenario work as
a strategy practice. Scenario work is well served too by the elaboration of typologies and
! 51!
theoretical models that increase the clarity and intellectual weight of its discourses.
However, pursuing positivist instrumentality alone is insufficient for supporting
philosophical unity and enhanced effectiveness in scenario planning and futures
narratives more generally. Strengthening the presence of the insightful critical and
interpretivist traditions of futures studies (e.g. Inayatullah 1990; Slaughter, 2004) is also
crucial. This paper’s framework aims to help futures theorists and practitioners
encompass both critical and affirmative directions through deeper understanding of
scenario work’s roles in organizational narrative sensemaking.

References
Aaltonen, M. & Barth, T. (2005). How Do We Make Sense of the Future? Journal of
Futures Studies, 9(4), 45–60.

Alcadipani, R. & Hassard, J. (2010). Actor-Network Theory, organizations and critique:
towards a politics of organizing. Organization, 17(4), 419-435.

Amsterdamska, O. (1990). Surely, You Must be Joking, Monsieur Latour! Science,
Technology and Human Values, 15(4), 495-504.

Barry, D. & Elmes, M. (1997). Strategy Retold: Toward a Narrative View of Strategic
Discourse. The Academy of Management Review, 22(2), 429-452.

Bell, W. (2003). Foundations of Futures Studies: History, Purposes, and Knowledge:
Human Science for a New Era, Vol. 1. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Berger, P. & Luckmann, T. (1967). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the
Sociology of Knowledge. New York City: Anchor.

Bishop, P., Hines, A. & Collins, T. (2007). The Current State of Scenario Development:
An Overview of Techniques. Foresight, 9(1), 5-25.

Booth, C. & Clark, P. (2009). Modal Narratives, Possible Worlds and Strategic Foresight.
In L. Costanzo & R. MacKay (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Strategy and Foresight
(pp. 113-127). Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.

! 52!
Booth, C., Rowlinson, M., Clark, P., Delahaye, A. & Procter, S. (2009). Scenarios and
Counterfactuals as Modal Narratives. Futures, 41(2), 87-95.

Bradfield, R., Wright, G., Burt, G., Cairns, G. & Van der Heijden, K. (2005). The origins
and evolution of scenario techniques in long range business planning. Futures, 37(8),
795-812.

Bruner, J. (1986). Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Harvard University Press.

Bruner, J. (1991). The Narrative Construction of Reality. Critical Inquiry, 18(1), 1-21.

Bruner, J. (2001). Self-Making and World-Making. Journal of Aesthetic Education,
25(1), 67-78.

Callon, M. & Latour, B. (1981). Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: how actors
macrostructure reality and how sociologists help them to do so. In K. Knorr-Cetina & A.
Cicourel (Eds.), Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of
Micro- and Macro-Sociologies (pp. 277-303). Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Callon, M. (1986). Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the
scallops and the fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay. In J. Law (Ed.), Power, Action and Belief:
A new sociology of knowledge (Vol. 32) (pp. 196-233). Boston, MA: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.

Callon, M. (1987). Society in the making: the study of technology as a tool for
sociological analysis. In W. Bijke, T. Hughes & T. Pinch (Eds.), The Social
Construction of Technological Systems: Directions in the Sociology and History of
Technology (pp. 83-103). MIT Press.

Callon, M. (1991). Techno-economic Networks and Irreversibility. In J. Law (Ed.), A
Sociology of Monsters? Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, Sociological
Review Monograph (pp.132-161). London: Routledge.

Callon, M. (2001). Actor Network Theory. In N. Smelser, J. Wright, P. Baltes (Eds.),
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (pp. 62-67). Amsterdam:
Elsevier.

Callon, M., Lascoumes, P. & Barthe, Y. (2009). Graham Burchell (Trans.), Acting in an
Uncertain World: an essay on technical democracy. MIT Press.

Candy, S. (2010). The Futures of Everyday Life. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hawaii.

Castells, M. (2009). Communication Power. Oxford University Press.

Cooren, F. (2001). Translation and articulation in the organization of coalitions: the Great
Whale River case. Communication Theory, 11(2), 178-200.
! 53!

Curry, A. (2007). Acting on the future. In B. Sharpe & K. van der Heijden (Eds.),
Scenarios for Success: Turning Insights into Action (pp. 339-372). Chichester, UK:
Wiley.

Czarniawska, B., & Gagliardi, P. (Eds.). 2003. Narratives We Organize By. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins Publishing Co.

Daft, R. & K. Weick. (1984). Toward a Model of Organizations as Interpretation
Systems. The Academy of Management Review, 9(2), 284-295.

Demers, C. (2007). Organizational Change Theories: a synthesis. Thousand Oaks, CA:
SAGE Publications.

Dudhwala, F. (2011). "Opening Up the Future to Inspection: Actor-Network Theory and
Futures-Scenarios in UK Government." Presentation, JRC European Commission’s 4th
International Seville Conference on Future-Oriented Technology Analysis.

Fisher, W. (1984). Narration as Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public
Moral Argument. Communication Monographs, 51, 1-22

Fisher, W. (1987). Human communication as a narration: Toward a philosophy of
reason, value, and action. University of South Carolina Press.

Inayatullah, S. (1990). Deconstructing and reconstructing the future: Predictive, cultural
and critical epistemologies. Futures, 22(2), 115–141.

Inayatullah, S. (Ed.) (2004). The Causal Layered Analysis Reader: Theory and Case
Studies of an Integrative and Transformative Methodology. Tamsui, Taiwan: Tamkang
University Press.

Inayatullah, S. (2009). Questioning Scenarios. Journal of Futures Studies, 13(3), 75–80.

Jarva, V. (2014). Introduction to Narrative for Futures Studies. Journal of Futures
Studies, 18(3), 5-26.

Kahn, H. (1960). On Thermonuclear War. Princeton University Press.

Kleiner, A. (2008). The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who
Reinvented Corporate Management. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Latour, B. (1986). The Powers of Association. In J. Law (Ed.) Power, Action and Belief:
A new sociology of knowledge? (pp. 264-280). London: Routledge and Keagan Paul.

Latour, B. (1987). Science in Action: How to follow scientists and engineers through
society. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press.
! 54!

Latour, B. (1999). On Recalling ANT. In J. Law & J. Hassard (Eds.), Actor Network
Theory and After (pp. 15-25). Oxford: Oxford Blackwell and The Sociological Review.

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: an introduction to actor-network-theory.
Oxford University Press.

Latour, B. (2011). Networks, Societies, Spheres: Reflections of an Actor-Network
Theorist. International Journal of Communication, 5, 796-810.

Li, Z. (2013). A Canticle for Mary Sue: What Transmedia Aesthetics might do for
Futures Communication. Journal of Futures Studies, 17(3), 137–140.

Lindgren, M. & Bandhold, H. (2009). Scenario Planning: The Link Between Future and
Strategy—Revised and Updated Edition. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Mintzberg, H. (1994). The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning: Reconceiving roles for
planning, plans, planners. New York City: Free Press.

Nordfors, L. (2007). The Power of Narrative. In B. Sharpe & K. van der Heijden (Eds.),
Scenarios for Success: Turning Insights into Action (pp. 197-216). Chichester, UK:
Wiley.

Patriotta, G. (2003). Sensemaking on the Shop Floor: Narratives of Knowledge in
Organizations. Journal of Management Studies 40(2), 349-375.

Polkinghorne, D. (1988). Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. Albany, NY:
SUNY Press.

Propp, V. (1984). Theory and History of Folklore. University of Minnesota Press.
Ramírez, R. & Selin, C. (2014). Plausibility and probability in scenario planning,
Foresight, 16(1).

Ramos, J., Mansfield, T. & Priday, G. (2012). Foresight in a Network Era: Peer-
producing Alternative Futures. Journal of Futures Studies, 17(1), 71–90.

Rasmussen, L. (2005). The Narrative Aspect of Scenario Building—How storytelling
may give people a memory of the future. AI & Society, 19(3), 229-249.

Roney, C. (2010). Intersections of Strategic Planning and Futures Studies:
Methodological Complementarities. Journal of Futures Studies, 15(2), 71–100.

Schroeder, K. (2011). Fiction as Foresight: Presenting Foresight Findings as Fiction.
Ontario College of Art & Design University Major Research Paper.

! 55!
Schultz, W., Crews, C. & Lum, R. (2012). Scenarios: A Hero’s Journey across Turbulent
Systems. Journal of Futures Studies, 17(1), 129–140.

Slaughter, R. (2004). Futures Beyond Dystopia: Creating Social Foresight. London:
Routledge.

Star, S. & Griesemer, J. (1989). Institutional Ecology, 'Translations' and Boundary
Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-
39. Social Studies of Science, 19(3), 387-420.

Sutcliffe, K., Brown, A. & Putnam, L. (2006). Introduction to the Special Issue 'Making
sense of organizing: In honor of Karl Weick'. Organization Studies, 27(11), 1573-1578.

Taylor, J. & Cooren, F. (2006). Making Worldview Sense: And Paying Homage,
Retrospectively, to Aldgirdas Greimas. In F. Cooren, J. Taylor & E. Van Every (Eds.),
Communication as organizing: Empirical explorations of the dynamic of text and
conversation (pp. 115-138). Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Taylor, J., Flanagin, A., Cheney, G. & Seibold, D. (2001). Organizational communication
research: Key moments, central concerns, and future challenges. Communication
Yearbook, 24, 99–138.

Taylor, J., & Van Every E. (2000). The Emergent Organization: Communication as Its
Site and Surface. Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Turner, F. (2008). From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole
Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press.

Van der Heijden, K. (2004). Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation. Chichester,
UK: John Wiley & Sons.

Varum, C. & Melo, C. (2010). Directions in scenario planning literature – A review of
the past decades. Futures, 42(4), 355-369.

Wack, P. (1985). Scenarios: Uncharted Waters Ahead. Harvard Business Review, 63(5),
73-89.

Weick, K. (1979). The Social Psychology of Organizing. New York City: McGraw-Hill.

Weick, K. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE
Publications.

Weick, K., Sutcliffe, K. & Obstfeld, D. (2005). Organizing and the Process of
Sensemaking. Organization Science, 16(4), 409-421.

! 56!
Weick, K. & Sutcliffe, K. (2007). Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in
an Age of Uncertainty (2nd Edition). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Wilkinson, A. (2009). Scenarios Practices: In Search of Theory. Journal of Futures
Studies, 13(3), 107–114.

Wilkinson, A. & Ramírez, R. (2010). Canaries in the Mind: Exploring How the Financial
Crisis Impacts 21st Century Future-Mindfulness. Journal of Future Studies, 14(3), 45-60.

Whittle, A. & Spicer, A. (2008). Is Actor Network Theory Critique? Organization
Studies, 29(4), 611-629.

Wright, A. (2004a). A social constructionist’s deconstruction of Royal Dutch Shell's
scenario planning process, University of Wolverhampton Business School Working
Paper Series, WP004/04.

Wright, A. (2004b). The use of scenarios in the social construction of sense, University of
Wolverhampton Business School Working Paper Series, WP001/04.

Wright, A. (2005). The Role of Scenarios as Prospective Sensemaking Devices.
Management Decision, 43(1), 86-101.

! 57!
STUDY 2:
A Cynefin-based Foresight Scenario Content Analysis Assessment of the
Relationship between Deductive, Inductive, and Abductive Strategizing
Styles and the Centre-Periphery Positioning of Scenario Participants

[An earlier version of this paper was submitted to the journal World Futures and is
currently undergoing review.]

[See Appendix for related materials]

Introduction
A key axis of methodological debate in the scenario planning field is the
distinction between deductive and inductive approaches to scenario building processes
(Bowman, MacKay, Masrani & McKieran, 2003; Van Notten, 2006; Van der Heijden,
2011; Ogilvy, 2011). For scenario planning practitioners, the significance of this
distinction between deductive and inductive processes typically stems from a narrow but
pragmatic consideration of which approach is most effective for their clients’ needs in
particular project/workshop contexts, often with logistical, convenience, and resource
constraints as well as client goals in mind. This debate also applies to foresight scenarios
(as per Wendell Bell’s (2003) sense) beyond scenario planning methods. Recent calls for
more rigorous foundational theory-building and methodological innovation in support of
consolidating the legitimacy of foresight scenario methods (Chermack, 2005; Walton,
2008) require examining the deductive-inductive distinction through deeper
epistemological and broader socio-cultural questions concerned with scenario practices’
universal principles. This paper critiques and extends Alex Wright’s (2004, 2004a)
! 58!
application to scenario planning of Patrick Regnér’s (2003) argument that managers and
other decision-makers at the centre of organizations tend to favour strategizing (that is,
interactional and interpretative reasoning process underlying strategy) with a deductive
logic while those at the periphery favour inductive strategizing. In doing so, a further
agenda for research and practice innovation is suggested, one which helps bridge the gap
between scenario planners’ understandings of the question of scenario-building and
discussion as methodological process and the question of scenario usage as the epistemic
basis for reasoning about strategy (Bowman et al., 2013).
Wright does not directly address the process question of inductive or deductive
scenario methodology. His focus is on the reasoning question, as shaped by Regnér’s
work in the strategy-as-practice vein of management studies, a school of thought which
focuses on how managers and other organizational members work through strategy in
day-to-day activity rather than on abstract strategy models and principles (Jarzabkowski
& Spee, 2009). This reasoning question is still a practical one, but one that is focused on
how scenario exercises mesh with and influence the mental model use and social
cognition of participants and client organizations, and how scenario exercises might help
them gain insights on strategic issues and generate more useful conversations about
strategy (Van der Heijden, Bradfield, Burt, Cairns & Wright, 2009; Van der Heijden,
2011).
Wright’s argument, then, is that scenario practitioners are mistaken in generally
preferring to engage the centre of organizations—where central and upper-echelon
management are located and who tend to favour deductive strategizing; greater
possibilities for organizational transformation and innovation, he argues, can be found in
! 59!
managers at the periphery who engage in inductive strategizing (2004, 2004a). If
Wright’s application of Regnér’s thesis to scenario planning holds true, then it has
substantial ramifications for future development of the deductive-inductive process
question as well as the strategizing question. For instance, it would suggest a theory-
building agenda which focuses on such issues as whether inductive scenario development
processes should be favoured over the more currently dominant deductive approach; if
the inductive periphery mental mindset is more favourable for the organizational
transformation goals of scenario exercises; how deductive and inductive scenario
methods should be specifically tailored either as reinforcing or counterbalancing
influences on the purported prevailing deductive and inductive strategizing reasoning
styles at organizational centres and peripheries respectively; whether combinations of
deductive and inductive methods in scenario exercises can help the centres and
peripheries of organizations communicate with each other, and so on.
This paper suggests that Wright’s application doesn’t hold however, while still
supporting Wright’s identification of this area of inquiry into the deductive-inductive axis
as a crucial one for scenario method theory-building. The intention here is constructive
critique that recommends an alternative research agenda to address the reasoning
questions raised by Wright and connects them with the process questions in ways that
promote productive innovation by practitioners.
This paper’s position is based upon an empirical testing of a fundamental tenet of
Wright’s position—that there is a significant correlation between organizational decision-
makers’ positioning at the centre or the periphery and their preference for inductive or
deductive strategizing. Preceding the empirical testing, Wright’s thesis is framed and
! 60!
expanded in the context of current scenario methods discourse that has prioritized
understanding and developing scenario methods as strategy tools especially suited to
environments of heightened uncertainty, rapid flux, disruption and sudden shocks; that is,
environments described by the acronym borrowed from military strategy jargon and now
popular in foresight and business discourse, VUCA (Volatility [or Velocity
1
],
Uncertainty, Complexity & Ambiguity) conditions (Johansen, 2007; Yarger, 2008;
Horney, Pasmore & O’Shea, 2010).
Converging with the VUCA trend is growing interest in abductive reasoning in
strategic thinking as an alternative to deductive and inductive modes. This trend is being
driven in part by the rise of design thinking, traditionally associated with abductive
reasoning and process, as a major force for innovation in the futures field (Candy, 2010),
and in part by a recognition that abductive thinking is more tenable than inductive or
deductive reasoning under VUCA conditions (Dorst, 2010; Paparone & Topic, 2010)
To operationalize the analysis of deductive, inductive, and abductive modes of
reasoning for the empirical field study, David Snowden’s (Snowden, 2000; Kurtz &
Snowden, 2003; Snowden & Boone, 2007) Cynefin model of multi-ontological
sensemaking is adapted. The Cynefin model describes a typology of different perceived
ontologies of strategic decision-making or knowledge challenges under increasing
epistemic uncertainty or VUCA conditions that, as will be proposed, overlap with the
deductive, inductive and abductive modes.
This paper is structured as follows: firstly, differences between deductive and
inductive scenario methods from the process perspective will be reviewed together with
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
As preferred in our scenario work at the University of Southern California Scenario Lab under
Prof. Patricia Riley.
! 61!
Wright’s application to scenario planning of Regnér’s views on deductive and inductive
reasoning at the centre and periphery. Secondly, the issues raised will be reframed and
extended with VUCA and abductive reasoning through the Cynefin framework. Then,
research questions addressing the basic premise of Wright’s perspective are considered
and the procedures by which they were empirically tested are described. Finally, there
will be a discussion of the results and the limitations of the study, with recommendations
for further research.
It is emphasized that this study follows Wendell Bell’s (2003) view that scenarios
are the crucial communication vehicle for all futures methods, and while the study
described here uses particular scenario exercise designs, discussion of its methods and
results is intended to be broadly relevant to all scenario methods. Furthermore, this
paper’s perspective understands communication to be at the heart of the organizations’
sensemaking and reasoning processes as they deal with environmental uncertainties
(Weick, 1995; Cooren, Taylor & Van Every, 2006)

The Deductive-Inductive Process Question
Deductive and inductive logic and knowledge enquiry modes are commonly
contrasted in terms of the former involving applying general principles to specific
knowledge challenges while the latter entails generating generalizable knowledge
principles from deep understanding of limited sampling or specific phenomena (Goel &
Waechter, 2004). Of course, both modes are integral to knowledge development in
science and elsewhere, and while viewed as oppositional in theory, are often
complementary in practice. While the deductive mode offers concretely reliable and
! 62!
rigorous conclusions, the inductive mode is able to process phenomena that cannot, at
least yet, be explained by existing general principles, and in doing so, may lay the
groundwork for future deduction. However, this basic contrast does not directly fit the
contours of the deductive-inductive process question in scenario methodology. Scenario
planning is not a scientific endeavour in the positivist sense, and its epistemological
debate is not so clear-cut. There is an ongoing central tension in the scenario planning
discourse over how its dominant qualitative techniques are more artistic and creative than
scientific in character, and yet simultaneously, empirical-positivist scientific
epistemology and rhetoric are aspired to (Goodwin & Wright, 2001; Bradfield, Wright,
Burt, Cairns & Van der Heijden, 2005; Chermack, 2011).
Of the various typologies ordering the diverse scenario methods landscape that
have been proposed in recent years (see Bishop, Hines & Collins, 2007 and Mietzner &
Reger, 2005 for overviews), Van Notten’s (2006) comprehensive typology is a useful
starting point for considering the key deductive-inductive scenario building process
question. In Van Notten’s scheme, broad distinctions are proposed between scenario
processes for exploratory vs. pre-policy research purposes, for complex intercausal
modeling vs. relatively simple situation modeling, and, what most concerns our focus
here, for intuitive vs. analytical design. Analytical design is characterized by quantitative
modeling and simulation, and/or rigorous desk research to craft complete scenarios that
are then applied as calculative tools in mental model transformation amongst decision-
makers. In contrast, intuitive design typically fleshes out scenarios through participatory
ideation processes that catalyze new mental model development through sparking
strategic conversation that generate qualitative knowledge and insights (Van der Heijden
! 63!
et al., 2009). Bradfield et al. (2005) describe this kind of intuitive approach as the
dominant scenario planning tradition in North America and Britain. Of course, deductive
and inductive approaches as well as analytical and intuitive approaches can be combined
(Mietzner & Reger, 2005).
Following Van der Heijden, Van Notten breaks the typical intuitive scenario
process into several steps which can be performed deductively or inductively:
identification of themes/issues; description of factors impacting themes/issues; selective
sorting of the factors; creation of scenario storylines; and perhaps their evaluation for pre-
policy work. In both deductive and inductive processes, extrapolating how potential
cause-effect relationships and long-term driving force trends may variously play out over
the target time period is a key focus.
The structure of the deductive approach establishes a framework based on a small
set of selected key themes/issues/trends (‘driving forces’) for the scenarios and formally
establishes the orientation, focus, content and narrative of the scenarios before a scenario
exercise’s active workshop/strategic conversation phase. The scenario-building phase in
the run-up to the workshop phase involves wide-ranging data search including interviews
of stakeholders and external experts, brainstorming, causal pattern inference and other
emergent storylining techniques but the scenario focus, structure, and storylines are set by
the organizational leadership in collaboration with the scenario specialists. While
insights, data and storylining suggestions are used to fill in the narratives posed by the
deductive scenario framework and to project potential decision paths and end-states
based on them, the strategic conversation found in such deductive approaches are chiefly
confined to reacting to and reflecting upon the interactions and relations of the small
! 64!
selection of key driving forces pre-established in the run-up (Van Notten, 2006; Van der
Heijden, 2011). This circumscribed focus is typically tied to the scripting of specific
strategic actions by top-down authority in response to how the key driving forces develop
over the future time period addressed (Farrington, Crews & Green, 2013)
An example of this is the 2x2 matrix approach—perhaps the most widely known
scenario technique, and associated with the Strathclyde School, Global Business Network
and Royal Dutch Shell—which uses a framework of two critical driving forces of future
change (Russo & Schoemaker, 2002; Bowman et al., 2013) to form a set of four scenarios
along the two driving force axes. Furthermore these scenarios are engaged as mutually
exclusive of each other, with each representing a particular future situation, as is typical
of deductive approaches: “the emergence of one scenario precludes the emergence of any
others” (Farrington et al., 2013, p57).
In contrast, in the inductive approach, the scenario process typically involves a
freer, more bottom-up process where coherent scenario stories are developed in a
stepwise fashion without a matrix or other strict framework with pre-set dominant driving
forces but rather incorporating a structured but emergent process of scenario building
within the live active workshop or exercise process rather that having the scope of the
scenarios set at the beginning (Van Notten, 2006; Van der Heijden, 2011; Bowman et al.,
2013). Rather than being focused on small set number of select driving forces and
mutually exclusive scenarios, the inductive approach calls for the emergent development
of many scenarios that may overlap and co-exist with each other across various possible
future situations, and which represent interactions and systematic relationships between
an open-ended and relatively unbounded range of factors, trends, events of varying
! 65!
importance that arise both from pre-workshop research and from the ongoing strategic
conversation generated by the scenario exercise.
There is disagreement in the literature over whether deductive and inductive
scenario methods are tied to prospective and retrospective orientations respectively.
Bradfield (2008) and Jungermann (1985a, 1985b) view deductive scenario exercise
processes and their strategic conversation as primarily exploratory and based upon
extrapolation through inferences going forward in time, leading to multiple future end-
states extrapolated from an initial scenario narrative framework set before the exercise
start. This pre-set framework is a set of one or more starting points in a specific time,
space and situation for the scenario narrative, usually rooted in current and/or historical
events and trends. Inductive processes are seen here, by comparison, as primarily
anticipatory in that they start with future end-states set in the pre-designed narrative
framework and the scenario exercise’s strategic conversation process works with
backward inferences to create multiple starting points and storylines converging on the
end-state. Based on Jungermann’s psychological experiments with scenario exercise
participants, it is also suggested that the deductive and inductive methods have
advantages over one another—the deductive forwards inferencing mode is more
instinctive and less psychologically challenging for participants, and so conducive for
knowledge transfer; the inductive backwards inferencing mode generates less robust and
logically cohesive scenario storyline thinking but supports more creative and diverse
strategic conversation.
However, van Heijden (2011) and Bowman et al. (2013) do not identify
correlations between inductive/deductive scenario processes and
! 66!
retrospective/prospective orientations. Van Notten’s (2006) typology describes an
anticipatory/exploratory dimension as separate from the inductive/deductive distinctions
made in the intuitive process domain. Wright & Goodwin (2009) view the prospective
orientation as a convention of intuitive processes in general, but argue that the
retrospective orientation, with its different set of advantages and drawbacks, can also be
valuably applied to these same processes.
For our purposes here, the main point is that the methodological debates over the
deductive-inductive process question have tended to be abstracted from the
organizational context of how strategic reasoning activity takes place beyond the scenario
exercise and how strategic activity might connect with and shape with scenario content.
Farrington et al. (2013, p57) are amongst those scenario practitioners who have suggested
in a general way that deductive scenario methods are “ideally suited for high-level
strategy and risk management applications” while inductive methods are more
“conducive to innovation and design applications”; however more rigorous and deeper
explanations of such suggested distinctions, and how it relates to the styles of strategizing
and sensemaking in action across an organization, has been little explored or tested, let
alone theorized. A crucial contribution of Wright’s work has been to offer the strategy-as-
practice perspective as a bridge for this gap.

Strategy-as-Practice and the Reasoning Question
High-level strategy work at the controlling centres of organizations typically
takes—where, as Wright (2004) argues, most scenario planning is focussed—a formal,
! 67!
ideal-type view of strategy that is the typical management discursive mode that the
strategy-as-practice perspective challenges.
The strategy-as-practice approach (Jarzabkowski, 2005; Johnson, Langley, Melin
& Whittington, 2007) addresses what its advocates see as an underdeveloped area in
strategy research, namely the question of what individual and groups of people actually
do at the micro-level to shape strategy through their actions, motivations, beliefs, and
emotions (Jarzabkowski & Spee, 2009). The dominant perspectives in strategic
management discourse, such as the structure orientated industry-organization perspective
(Porter, 1980) and the resource-based view (Barney, 2001) have been vague on the exact
activity that strategy practice is made up of and the specific human agency that enacts it,
preferring a portrayal of strategy in terms of abstract analysis or idealized instruments.
This lapse is also seen in the tendency in traditionalist strategic management and
planning models that assumed rational, centrally located managers (and their consultant
experts) at the top of organizational hierarchies would come to rational strategic
consensuses (Dess, 1987; Mintzberg, 1994; Cockburn, Henderson & Stern, 2000).
However, the “practice” turn in strategy and management studies (Whittington, 2006) has
highlighted the insufficiency of such traditionalist assumptions in understanding the
difference between formally idealized normative notions of strategy and how strategy is
actually created and practiced at all organizational levels (Regnér, 2003; Jabzabowski &
Spee, 2009).
The strategy-as-practice approach is founded on social constructionist
perspectives and is concerned with knowledge enquiry activities such as creation,
assimilation, and the support of decision and action (Regnér, 2003, 2008). It reaches
! 68!
beyond strategy process research (Johnson & Huff, 1998) that focuses on strategy activity
systematically and includes actors besides top managers and specialists but that falls short
of the micro-level. The strategy-as-practice approach is focused on bridging micro-levels
and macro-levels of strategy creation, i.e. between individual managers’ or groups of
managers’ activities and beliefs and organizational meanings and practices (Balogun,
Jarzabkowski & Siedel, 2007; Denis, Langley & Rouleau, 2007).
Strategy-as-practice focuses on what people do in actual ongoing or everyday
activity in relation to strategy creation, communication and implementation knowledge
enquiry activities—strategizing—at the micro-level and how this shapes and is shaped by
their macro-level organizational/institutional context. The same approach can be used at
the industry sector level of analysis with individual firms comprising the micro-level
(Regnér, 2008).
Wright’s application of the strategy-as-practice perspective to scenario planning
recasts the deductive-inductive epistemological axis as a reasoning question. Whereas a
process question is primarily focused on the methodology and design of scenario
exercises according to deductive or inductive logics, the reasoning question is primarily
concerned with the cognitive and intellectual work—the sensemaking, mental modeling
and knowledge activities—actually carried out by the scenario exercise participants. This
study shares Wright’s focus on this question and seeks to extend it.
Wright (2004, 2004b) notes that the Strathclyde School proponents of the
dominant deductive scenario matrix method have typically favoured engaging senior
managers at the centre and top of organizations. However, he argues, along with Millett
(2003), that this can limit the influence of scenario exercises—firstly, because the
! 69!
scenarios’ significance may be discounted by other organizational stakeholders if they are
seen as merely a tool of the most powerful, and secondly, because new and truly radical
and transformative strategizing generally takes place at the periphery of organizations.
Wright borrows Regnér’s (2003, 2008) framework, which is based on in-depth
case studies of how managers talk, behave, and act at the centre and the periphery of their
organizations, and which can also be applied at the industry-wide level with individual
firms at the centre and periphery of their sector. Within the dominant traditional
hierarchical forms of organizations in government and industry, centres of power are
typically bound up with organizational central structures—exemplified by top
management and the board of directors while the periphery includes management of
subsidiaries, support units, and satellite offices. Deductive strategizing is said to occur at
the centre through preferences for logico-scientific epistemology; the use of planned,
well-established, formalized techniques and expertise; and knowledge enquiries taking
place through mechanistic, routinized theory- and rule-driven knowledge structures
(Wright 2004, 2004a; Tsoukas & Hatch, 2001; Farjoun, 2002). In contrast, peripheral
strategizing takes place necessarily more through intuitive, organic, informal, flexible,
novelty-orientated, knowledge enquiry methods (Farjoun, 2002) that involve “trial and
error, informal contacts and noticing, experiments and heuristics” (Regnér, 2003, p77).
Regnér describes the centre’s knowledge enquiries as primarily engaged in
perfecting existing strategies through well-established knowledge structures, be they
standard best practices or a matter of deepening expertise, while the periphery’s
knowledge enquiries must emphasize generating new knowledge and creating new
knowledge structures. In March’s (1991) terms of exploitation and exploration as being
! 70!
the two fundamental strategic activities of organizations, the dominant centre is identified
here with prioritizing exploitation, and the periphery with exploration. Regnér (2003)
sees both the centre and periphery as engaging in sensemaking but with the centre
predominantly using routinized strategy interpretation processes while the periphery
engages in sensemaking in uncertainty.
In Wright’s account (2004), centre and periphery also differ in terms of where
decision-making occurs and where sensemaking occurs. Decision-making is defined as
how organizations attempt to re-order, or extend order in, their environments and
themselves through practical action, whereas sensemaking refers to how organizations
(re-)order their understanding of their environments and themselves through social
cognition. According to Wright (2004), while decision-making and sensemaking relate to
each other in mutually generative relationships in organizations (Weick, 1995), the elite
managers at the centre of organizations strongly favour understanding their strategizing
in terms of decision-making and sense-giving (Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991) within ordered
knowledge contexts, while those managers at the periphery primarily think of their
strategizing in terms of improvisation and making sense of unordered knowledge
contexts. Organic sensemaking at an organization’s margins is seen as both better suited
in dealing with novel and uncertain elements in the external environment and geared
towards producing novel knowledge stuctures that may be formalized and adopted by the
centre.
Wright (2004, 2004a), through applying Regnér’s framing, challenges the narrow
view that transformational strategizing is formed at the centre and then spread out to the
periphery—he especially criticizes the concept of sensegiving (Gioia & Chittipeddi,
! 71!
1991) for describing a hegemonic activity—the communication of strategic sense from
the center/top to the periphery/bottom—and therefore of limited use for strategy
innovation and mental model change. Rather, he argues, it is the inductive reasoning at
the periphery which, in a well-functioning organization that is successfully adjusting
itself to its environment, should be shaping strategizing at the centre. Regnér (2003)
resists the idea that the centre should also adopt the preference for inductive
epistemology—the deductive mode still has a crucial role to play in formalizing inductive
knowledge insights in hegemonic structures that can magnify inductive insights’ power
and ease their spread. However, Wright (2004) argues that this stance may cause
counterproductive conflicts between centres and peripheries because of their clashing
epistemological styles; instead he favours organization members at the centre taking the
role of facilitators of the strategizing generated by the periphery. In this vision, Wright
(2004, 2004a) describes the inductive strategizers at the periphery as bricoleurs who
engage in the bricolage of strategy-making. A feature of the strategy-in-practice
perspective (Johnson, Melin & Whittington, 2003; Jarzabkowski, 2004), the concepts of
bricoleur and bricolage were borrowed from cultural studies (Lévi-Strauss, 1966; De
Certeau, 1984). They describe a pragmatic, improvisational meaning-making activity
which takes whatever tools, materials, and resources are available to craft a strategy
through induction and interpretation which may be based on temporary or contingent
knowledge of the world, but nonetheless enables effective action. This requires the
bricoleur to be constantly reassessing their approach to challenges and scanning the
environment for changes.
! 72!
Moreover, while not emphasized by Wright and Regnér as De Certeau (1984)
argues, the association of the peripheral with bricolage is also derived from unequal
power relations where those at the periphery are much more likely to be members of
groups who have tended to be marginalized not just within organizations but in wider
society—for instance, women and ethnic minorities. With generally less power and
control over decision-making and their own circumstances than more dominant socio-
cultural groups (e.g. the hegemonic white male in American society), marginalized
members are more likely to frequently rely on improvisation and negotiation practices
using induction rather than command and control practices that work through deduction.
This power imbalance also manifests in a knowledge imbalance—those at the margins
have to deal with more uncertainty with fewer resources, and are consequently more
reliant on inductive reasoning. If scenario exercise designs strove to engage more fully
those at the periphery of organizations, they are likely to increase the diversity of
perspectives, especially from marginalized groups, and therefore enhance the critical and
imaginative capacities of the scenario experience—as well as avoid such collective
decision-making bias problems such as groupthink. This would also both help address the
problems of scenarios potentially reproducing and reinforcing hegemonic
power/knowledge structures (Wright, 2004b), and the lack of diversity in scenario
consulting (Turner, 2008). (Regrettably, this potential of scenario exercise design was
not explored in the two scenario exercises analyzed here, in part due to the difficulties of
asking questions about marginalized groups when collaborating with organizational
leaders authorizing the exercises).
! 73!
De Certeau further makes the distinction that those in power, particularly such
actors who are working within institutions, pursue their agendas through “strategy”—
defined as producing, imposing, and dominating space—while those who are powerless
use “tactics”—defined as only being able to distort and manipulate space while living
under domination. Of course, the range and typology of relative power positions within
an organization, and in society in general, is more complicated and ambiguous than a
straightforward powerful/powerless divide. When Wright and Regnér address
strategizing, they are primarily addressing management and leadership roles at both the
centre and periphery, and the same is true of the scenario exercises studied in this paper.
However, within the experience of the scenario exercises, these roles might be creatively
simulated—whether the participant was a corporate executive or an unemployed artist,
they were asked to imagine the future of their organization or industry from the
perspective of a strategic leader. Furthermore, just as command-and-control reasoning is
not exclusively practiced by those at the hegemonic centre, bricolage is not monopolized
by the peripheral or the marginalized.
For scenario exercises to be impactful in enhancing the strategic responsiveness
and inventiveness of organizations and transforming their mental models—Wright
suggests, drawing on Weick (1993, 1995)—they should be aimed at nurturing the wider
influence and practice of such bricolage at the periphery so that exploration and
sensemaking are given greater priority than exploitation and decision-making (Wright,
2004, 2004a). In terms of the process question, it would also suggest that the combination
of deductive and inductive scenario-building methodologies should be tailored
! 74!
particularly to facilitating inductive strategizing at the periphery while restraining
deductive strategizing there.
The content generated from the scenario exercises analyzed in this study does not
involve examination of the participants’ actual day-to-day activities. While the strategy-
as-practice perspective emphasizes the strategizing contributions of all organizational
members, not just senior managers and executives, it is also rooted in structuration theory
(Giddens, 1984) and thus understands members’ individual agency both shaping and
being constrained by institutional structure, with the two co-evolving over time (Regnér,
2008). The focus then is not on recording micro-level actions in an ethnographic sense,
but on how macro-level social order and meaning structures of organizations (or
industries) interact with the beliefs, values, knowledge and actions of individual members
(or firms at the industry level of analysis). This includes institutionalized macro-level
contexts that catalyze individual members’ (or firms’) novel strategizing opportunities by
encouraging deviation from macro-level norms at the micro-level (Jonsson & Regnér,
2006)—for instance by firms maintaining specialized innovation roles for select
employees (Regnér, 2005). It is also argued that the strategy-as-practice model, because
of its foundations in social constructionism, also promotes attention to the importance of
creativity and imagination in the structuration dynamics of strategizing, particularly the
exploratory, inductive kind of strategizing, and including managers forming beliefs about
anticipated futures in connection with imagining practice (Regnér, 2008; Feldman &
Pentland, 2003).
The scenario data analysis in this study has the above perspective in mind in its
exploratory testing of Wright’s thesis. The study did not involve accounting for
! 75!
participants’ actual day-to-day strategizing activities. Rather, the scenario exercises asked
participants to imagine and write scenarios about their organizational knowledge
community’s plausible strategic responses to industry conditions stretching years into the
future. The individual participants’ imagined scenarios ranged from extensions of the
currently real to wishful future thinking, and they were also constrained by institutional
and industry structures that also evolved. While many participants’ responses went into
some detail about specific tasks or solutions, the level of analysis in this study is that of
the general forms of knowledge enquiries participants made in response to strategic
problems envisioned in the scenario content. These general forms of knowledge enquiries
made by participants reflected in large part preferences for deductive and inductive
strategizing.
The scenario exercise analysis in this study also differed from Wright’s focus on
the centre and periphery within an organization by focusing also on strategizing at the
centre and periphery of an industry. In both scenario exercise cases, the organizational
knowledge communities involved were challenged by turbulent external conditions in
their industry, perceived as being beyond historical norms. Besides being better suited to
the communities’ need to address these VUCA conditions, this was also an opportunity to
both test an expanded version of Wright’s thesis which incorporates Regnér’s (2008)
industry-level scope, and to extend the analysis of scenario exercise participants’
knowledge enquiry to include a major third category of reasoning, abduction, particularly
suitable for the VUCA context.

! 76!
VUCA and Abductive Reasoning
Wright (2005, p86) has championed understanding scenario planning as a
sensemaking and mental model adaptation tool for organizations to develop effective
future-focused strategizing capabilities in the face of “an increasingly turbulent external
environment, which is characterized as uncertain, ambiguous and populated by equivocal
cues that result in discontinuous… change[; that is,] dynamic complexity,”—i.e., a tool
for organizations to effectively strategize in the face of VUCA conditions (see also
Chermack 2011). Similarly, Regnér (2001, p43) has argued more broadly that strategy
now needs to “[reside] in complexity and is best studied in terms of a multiple rationality
set tied to the [organization’s] capability to learn,” where the strategic learning modes
represent different kinds of knowledge enquiry depending on the relative need for
exploitation and exploration, observation and operations, and the level of complexity and
order/disorder in the organization’s situation—or indeed, deductive, inductive and
abductive reasoning styles. This echoes with the criticism of the effectiveness of
systematic, formalized strategy approaches in management studies that emerged in the
early 1980s (e.g. Burgelman, 1983; Pascale, 1984; Mintzberg, 1994). Managing strategy,
as Regnér (2001) emphasizes, should be about knowledge management of knowledge
enquiry styles, and this emphasis anticipates his later work on the deductive-inductive
centre-periphery thesis.
However, the classic Strathclyde School style scenario planning method,
criticized by Wright (2004, 2004a, 2004b) for its practitioners’ excessive focus on
engaging the deductive center, also first became widely popularized in the corporate
world during the same 1970s-80s period. Indeed its most prominent corporate proponent
! 77!
was an oil multinational, Royal Dutch Shell (Wilkinson and Kupers 2014), in an industry
that was heavily engaged with VUCA conditions before most other sectors (Kleiner,
2008). As Grant (2003) describes in his study of the changes in strategic planning at oil
majors since the 1970s, by the late 1990s, strategic planning processes in these
corporations were decentralized, primarily bottom-up and informal, and moreover used
‘planned emergence’ principles consistent with complex adaptive systems theory. Grant
concludes that despite the oil majors’ VUCA-oriented strategic planning systems,
including the use of scenario planning, there was a limited impact on decision-making
quality, due to limited experimentation and little encouragement of innovation.
More recent management discourse has been marked by much more pervasive
perceptions of escalating VUCA as an ongoing norm in the general strategic
environment. Organizational adoption of scenario planning and academic publication
about scenarios have accelerated in a globalized era characterized by elevated risk and
uncertainty in the post-9/11 and post-2008 financial crisis era as well as by the ongoing
disruption of many industries by information technologies. Trends in scenario methods
debates in the same post-2001 period have also seen leading scenario theorists and
practitioners argue that the forms and contexts of strategy reasoning that have historically
dominated the scenario tradition are not longer sufficient given the pervasive and ongoing
destabilizing of organizational knowledge foundations (Ramirez, Selsky & Van der
Heijden, 2010; Kahane, 2012). Such a shift goes to the heart of the epistemological
assumptions underpinning the deductive-inductive binary of the traditional scenario
process question in foresight practice as well as Wright’s extension of it to strategizing
(Ramirez & Wilkinson, 2013; Van Notten, 2005).
! 78!
Notably, the discipline of design has emerged as an important new hub in
foresight and futures work (Candy, 2010), as well as adjacent fields such as innovation
(Johansson & Woodilla, 2009) and strategy in general (Liedtka, 2000; Farjoun, 2008).
This has been driven in part by the rise of design fiction practices that have introduced
creative new techniques of making future concepts materially manifest. Crucially there
also has been recognition of the particular usefulness of the abductive reasoning that
underlies design, most notably in the key practice of design thinking (Martin &
Christensen, 2013). The value of abductive reasoning is fundamental to the application of
design processes to strategy (Hatchuel, Starkey, Tempest & Masson, 2010). But this form
of reasoning is overlooked by Wright and Regnér; the improvisational and exploratory
characteristics of abduction are comparable to induction, so abductive thinking appears to
be completely subsumed into induction in their accounts. However, abduction is actually
a major form of reasoning and epistemology that is both distinct from and interlinked
with induction and deduction. It has also been suggested by VUCA theorists as the
preferred mode of reasoning for such conditions (Paparone & Topic, 2010)
Abductive reasoning dispenses with the relationship between general principles or
premises and specific cases and conclusions that underpin deductive and inductive
reasoning, and makes them two sides of the same epistemological coin (Frankfurt, 1958).
It relies on informed speculation processes, operating by connecting potential patterns
with tentative hypotheses that work more effectively in contexts of highly imperfect
and/or scarce knowledge than inductive/deductive logics. Abductive reasoning deals with
knowledge enquiries which lack the minimal initial knowledge and understanding needed
for even inductive reasoning (i.e. no confident knowledge about a specific instance or
! 79!
sample to draw generalizing conclusions from)—but where the knowledge enquiries have
to be followed through to take actions and decisions.
The process relies on alternative validation criteria of presumptiveness,
defeasibility, and plausibility (Dew, 2007). The first criterion, presumptiveness, means
that the problem statement frame chosen for the reasoning task is presumed to be true,
and further hypothetical problem-solving and decision-making to find possible solutions
to the presumptive problem builds upon it. The second criterion, defeasibility, means that
the problem frame and the imagined solutions are disposable if more promising versions
are found. The third criterion, plausibility, ensures that the conjectures of the problem
statement frame and the solutions generated reasonably account for the limited
knowledge we have, and that there is prima facie support for the viability of the realities
imagined.
Of course, while abductive reasoning is fundamentally epistemologically distinct
from the deductive and inductive modes, it is not simply a substitute. Abduction is suited
to hypothesis generation, exploratory inquiry and other ways of laying the groundwork
for deductive and inductive reasoning. It can also be deployed in the form of oscillations
between deductive and inductive modes of inquiry to strengthen the overall
epistemological thrust of research and theory-building (Dubois & Gadde, 2002).
Going beyond epistemological questions to consider abductive reasoning’s role in
decision-making, a further crucial dimension is that abductive reasoning is
characteristically very pragmatic (Frankfurt, 1958; Dew, 2007). That is to say, it is biased
towards taking action in the world using provisional hypotheses that suggest both
problems and their solutions, even when decision-makers’ knowledge of the situation
! 80!
falls short of that required for deductive and inductive reasoning. There are two main
rationales for this kind of action bias. Firstly, taking action with deficient information
conditions constitutes sensemaking, in which cognition is coupled with action (Weick,
1995); it is a means of probing the unknown in order to discover the emergent
groundwork for deductive and inductive reasoning. Secondly, the action bias may be
crucial for taking necessary steps forward under tight time and/or resource constraints,
bypassing the paralysis that decisionmakers may feel in the face of VUCA conditions by
embracing tentative, temporary suppositions. Both these rationales are crucial to scenario
planning’s value in helping organizations and communities understand the potentials and
challenges of their futures effectively (Lindgren & Bandhold, 2009). And as Wilkinson
(2009, p111) argues, the abductive approach is a newer “practice of scenarios that
hopefully and helpfully bridges the quant-qual, expert-stakeholder, model-story divides
of old.”
In the field of scenario methods, the criteria of presumptiveness and defeasibility
can be understood as commonly part of the ideation and brainstorming part of the
scenario exercise or model development process. These aspects can be understood as
laying the groundwork in terms of case selection, problem framing, hypothesis
generation, etc., for deductive and inductive reasoning in scenario exercises. It is the third
criterion of plausibility which marks out a distinctive abductive approach in scenario
methods, and indeed, dovetails with a major effort in scenario theory-building and
methodological innovation in recent years to cultivate plausibility as a new key criterion
for assessing the potential efficacy of scenario narratives and content to create mental
model change (Wiek, Keeler, Schweizer & Lang, 2013; Wilkinson, Kupers &
! 81!
Mangalagiu, 2013). Plausibility is an alternative to the stalled initial attempts to develop
empirical and quantitative assessment criteria for scenarios described by Chermack
(2005). The plausibility debate echoes with Wright’s (2004, 2004a) argument that the
inductive strategizing of periphery bricoleurs relies on pragmatic verisimilitude as a
knowledge criterion (Brown & Jones, 2000); but a crucial difference is that verisimilitude
implies that established knowledge structures with which the degree of truth or
correctness of inductively-created strategies can be assessed—abductive strategizing
under VUCA conditions may even lack such verifying structures.
As an alternative, VUCA-focused point of departure for Wright and Regnér’s
portrayal of centre-deductive strategizing and periphery-inductive strategizing, Ronald
Heifetz makes a distinction between technical and adaptive challenges for understanding
the epistemological needs of strategic decision-makers facing “permanent crisis”
(Heifetz, Grashow & Linsky, 2009, 2009a). Technical challenges can be defined and
resolved within well-understood knowledge domains where hierarchical decision-making
and knowledge enquiry works well. The simpler end of the technical challenges spectrum
can be characterized as mainly involving deductive reasoning (because general principles
are well-known) while the more sophisticated end calls for greater inductive reasoning
(general principles are being developed from straightforwardly knowable specific
phenomena). Adaptive challenges, on the other hand, are poorly defined and knowable
both in terms of general principles and specific phenomena.
2
Their unstable and
incomplete knowledge domains call for problem and solution development based on
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2
Note that Regnér (1999), writing on strategy under complexity conditions, has used the term
“adaptive learning” (typical of the deductive mode at the organizational centre) as the solution to
what Heifetz describes as “technical challenges”; for the equivalent of Heitfetz’s “adaptive
challenges”, Regnér prescribes “creative learning” (typical of the inductive mode at the
periphery).
! 82!
open-ended, messy experimentation and tentative sensemaking. Heifetz argues that the
VUCA world calls for understanding leadership as “an improvisational and experimental
art” (Heifetz, Grashow & Linsky, 2009) with a strong tendency towards non-hierarchical
knowledge processes and practices, and this matches Liedtka’s (2000) recommendation
of applying design principles to strategy. Overall, these processes can be described as
abductive strategizing.
Engaging with adaptive challenges here is as important at the centre as it is at the
periphery. However, it is crucial to understand that focusing on VUCA and abductive
strategizing does not mean that technical challenges have been entirely or even mostly
supplanted. On the contrary, organizations’ engagement of VUCA environments
logically involves a diversity of technical and adaptive challenges that requires
sensemaking to deploy the most appropriate form of reasoning. If we understand the
bricoleur’s strategizing style championed by Wright as occurring at both organization
centres and peripheries, perhaps the bricolage can be characterized in terms of mixtures
of deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning logics. As per Wright’s and Regnér’s
thesis, the centre and periphery still might be distinguish themselves from each other with
characteristic preferences for one form of reasoning over another. This leaves us still with
the question of how to schematize the place of abductive strategizing in this mix, and
how Wright’s proposition about inductive/deductive strategizing in scenario work can be
recalibrated into testable research questions that accommodate the VUCA context defined
here.

! 83!
Cynefin and Defining Research Questions for Wright’s Proposition
To expand the Wright thesis to include abductive reasoning and the VUCA
context, this study applied the Cynefin framework which offers multiple ontologies for
knowledge enquiry classification in support of sensemaking and decision-making.
Cynefin was first created at IBM Knowledge Management by David Snowden and
Cynthia Kurtz (Kurtz & Snowden, 2003), and has been further developed by Snowden
and others as an aid for organizational leaders facing VUCA conditions (Snowden
& Boone, 2007).
The Cynefin model incorporates five ontological domains that range from the
stable and ordered conditions to the disordered and in flux. These domains are ways of
classifying knowledge challenges and the types of inquiry and problem-solving that they
call for. Notably, these are not categories asserting the true essence of the knowledge
challenges themselves but rather the domains relate to the how the challenges are
perceived, interpreted and acted upon by the decision-maker. That is to say, they are
domains of ontological sensemaking.
In applying Cynefin to strategic decision-making problems, different components
of the knowledge challenge and its environment can be assigned different ontological
categories. These categories in turn suggest particular broad types of strategic actions to
take in response to the sensemaking characterization (see Snowden & Boone, 2005 for
more detail). Importantly, the modeling is variable—how various aspects of knowledge
challenges are made sense of can differ from each other and across perceivers. Their
Cynefin assessments can shift over time as strategic realities both change and are
reinterpreted.
! 84!
The five sensemaking ontological domains of Cynefin are as follows:
• Simple
3
: A straightforward, orderly knowledge context where learning about
established best practices, formal rules and general principles is sufficient to make
sense of knowledge challenges and inform good decisions. “Simple” does not
mean necessarily easy; much learning may be needed. But knowledge
development here is clear, stable, predictable, and can be in principle well
understood by most; a best set of solutions is knowable. Such knowledge can
support more uncertain or unordered knowledge generation.
• Complicated: An orderly knowledge context where having sufficient
understanding for good decision-making requires expert interpretation and
analysis of the idiosyncrasies and mysteries of knowledge challenges to support
good decision-making. A variety of good answers can be generated but there is no
“best answer”. General principles and ordered knowledge is often generated from
this kind of knowledge enquiry.
• Complex: A fluid and dynamically changing knowledge context shaped by many
forces and a large number of actors finding their own way but also influencing
each other. A solid understanding of good practices and important
patterns/analyses is likely to emerge only in retrospect, and might go out of date
relatively quickly.
• Chaotic: A knowledge context characterized by high turbulence and pressure
(time, resources); decisions need to be made, but the situation is changing too
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3
From late 2013, David Snowden and his consulting network began spreading a shift in Cynefin
terminology that replaced the label “Simple” with “Obvious”, while maintaining the same
definition for that category. (See: http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/entry/6149/great-is-the-power-
of-steady-misrepresentation/; accessed October 29, 2014) This change took place after the
fieldwork for this paper was carried out, so the old term has been kept here.
! 85!
rapidly and uncertainly for deep analysis or reliable practice. Action to establish
more stability and control of the situation, or perhaps strong leadership through a
decisive, pioneering initiative, is needed first. There may even be a purposeful,
constructive sense of urgency here that ultimately helps transform the situation
into something new.
• Disordered: There is too much confusion and conflict for useful knowledge
enquiry and/or the decision-maker is stuck in, or falls back defensively on,
outdated or inappropriate mental models – or is perhaps paralyzed, not knowing
what to do. This is the only negative domain of the five—where sensemaking and
knowledge enquiry fails.

For the purposes of this study’s inquiry, these ontological domains can also be
mapped onto the epistemological categories of deductive, inductive, and abductive
strategizing. In building the Cynefin model, Snowden also highlights a key higher level
dividing line between ordered and unordered knowledge ontologies. Simple and
Complicated challenges are ordered; Complex and Chaotic, unordered. The fifth domain
of Disordered represents unwillingness or incapacity to sensemake that goes with
confusion, conflict or the falling back on, or entrenchment of, outdated, mismatched or
irrational mental models of the knowledge challenge at hand.
We propose in this study that within the Cynefin framework, the epistemologies
of deductive and inductive strategizing are identifiable with the ontology of ordered
knowledge, with the Simple domain of best practices representing the deductive, and the
Complicated domain of expertise representing the inductive. This does not mean that
! 86!
deductive knowledge tasks are not often sophisticated and requiring considerable effort
and learning—rather, the resonance with the Simple domain is due to how successful
solutions gained by deductive reasoning can be straightforwardly codified into best
practice, best solution knowledge that can theoretically knowable by everyone . In
contrast, inductive reasoning seems to characterize how specific knowledge challenges
that have the Complicated ontology require specialist interpretation for their problem-
solving that can handle the lack of knowable perfect or best solutions; the optimal
complicated solutions that can be hoped for here are good solutions. However,
Complicated domain problem-solving is still guided by the derivation and use of general
principle knowledge structures, reflecting the derivation of general principles from the
particular in inductive reasoning. Abductive strategizing maps onto the unordered
knowledge ontologies. The Complex domain can be understood as where abductive
thinking gradually generates knowledge over time about emerging phenomena or poorly
understood challenges before they are sufficiently grasped and ordered to be targeted by
deductive and inductive reasoning. The Chaotic domain, in contrast, is where abductive
thinking is used to support immediate decisions and emergency actions to stabilize or
even resolve a crisis situation in the absence of ordered reasoning. Such stabilization lays
the groundwork potentially for shifts to ordered knowledge ontologies, both deductive
and inductive (Kurtz & Snowden, 2003). Finally, the Disordered ontology represents
dysfunctional sensemaking and was used in the analysis to represent imagined strategic
knowledge enquiries that failed or which had negative counterproductive effects. See
Table 1 below for a summary of these correspondences.
! 87!

Table 1. Mapping of Cynefin domains to strategizing/reasoning styles

Methodology
Using the Cynefin model, this study modifies Wright’s centre-periphery thesis
about scenario work for the VUCA context via research questions testable by the
qualitative content analysis of participant scenarios produced by scenario exercises.
The scenario exercise data analysis used here considers not only the centre-
periphery/deductive-inductive associations highlighted by Wright but also distinguishes
between the centre-periphery positioning within an organization and within an industry.
Furthermore, a range of knowledge topics seen as important to the possible futures of the
organization and industry amidst VUCA conditions were generated from the participant
scenarios through the qualitative content coding. These knowledge topics were also
inputted into the testing of a series of research questions (see later Research Questions
and Chi-squared Testing section) to see, for example, if any significant relationships
found between the center/periphery status of participants and the Cynefin-defined
knowledge styles found in their scenarios held up only in relation to particular knowledge
topic areas or if they were universal.

! 88!
The Scenario Exercises and Study Participants
The scenario exercises involved two Los Angeles-based media industry
knowledge communities, one representing the traditional centre of the industry and the
other periphery. The media industry itself is widely seen as experiencing ongoing
uncertainty and disruptions as ‘the new normal’ currently and for the foreseeable future
(Picard, 2004; Berman, Abraham, Battino, Shipnuck & Neus, 2007; Kung, 2007). This is
true for the centre community (dubbed ‘the corporate case’) used here—the executives
and departmental leaders, from both the United States and abroad, of a key division of a
major media & entertainment transnational corporation, a traditional hierarchical
organization—and the periphery community—the local area professional association
supporting a popular emerging media industry paradigm, and students being taught the
same paradigm at a nearby university, together representing a grassroots network-style
organizational ecology (dubbed ‘the grassroots case’).
Both the exercises were framed for the organizations’ participants as efforts to
collectively imagine and generate strategic paths for their organizational knowledge
communities amidst the future of an industry facing chronic VUCA conditions. In the
corporate case, the ‘VUCA as the new normal’ theme was set by the organization’s
leadership; in the grassroots case, the Cynefin approach to VUCA environments was built
into participant orientation in the exercise.
Both exercises focused on generating a collective pool of participant-written
scenarios about the future of their organization and industry over the next 5-10 years.
Both used a mixed methods approach to scenario generation that established initial
‘prompt’ scenarios describing general VUCA trends into the future and that gave loose
! 89!
guidance and focus to the participant’s writing. Framed through Bradfield’s (2008)
distinction between deductive and inductive scenario processes, both exercises contained
deductive (a start-state proposed in the prompt with multiple journeys to future end-states
being derived in the workshop process) and inductive (an end-state proposed in the
exercise prompt, and multiple starting points and journeys are reverse-engineered from
each in the workshop process) logics. And understood through Farrington et al.’s (2013)
perspective, both contained deductive (there was a pre-established focus in both
exercises’ prompts on certain trends that helped structure the process for the participants)
and inductive (the process was still loose enough that the participants were encouraged to
write about and discuss whatever variables, trends, futures and interpretations of the
present and past that they liked and felt suitable for the exercise) strategic conversation
processes.
Viewed through Van Notten’s (2006) typology of scenario approaches, both
exercises’ goals can be described as exploratory, rather than directly related to
policy/decision research; their issue focus was centred on VUCA conditions around their
local organization/community but with a global scope; and their values applied were
descriptive rather than normative: the VUCA conditions were described as the ‘new
normal,’ but not portrayed as inherently negative or positive. The design of the exercises
was intuitive rather than analytical, as well as qualitative, participatory and exclusive
(limited to community members). The scenario content, to borrow a term from outside of
Van Notten’s typology, was approached with an incasting (Curry & Schultz, 2009)
logic—that is to say, the scenario prompts set up points of departure and basic framings
for participant scenario writing but much freedom was given to the participants in ‘filling
! 90!
in’ the future worlds suggested by scenarios. So, in Van Notten’s terms, the temporality
(besides the time horizon), the relative heterogeneity, the level of
integration/fragmentation, and the degree of complexity/simplicity in the scenario data
pools generated was very much determined by the participants. Such dimensions of the
data pools lie outside the scope of this study but may be important to further research.
Specific differentiating details of the two exercises follow.
The corporate scenario exercise was created for an in-person executive workshop
at their division’s headquarters in Los Angeles, and was designed and operated by a
university research team, including the author.
4
The entertainment sector (a business
model mainstay of established traditional large-scale media industry) and transnational
corporate organization here represent a centre-identified industry knowledge community.
The workshop was held in Fall 2011 for 39 senior executives and staff members, both US
and LA-based and from overseas offices. The same exercise was repeated for a smaller
set of fast-tracked junior executives a few months later. The distribution of the prompts
and the participant scenario writing took place through a custom-built website in the two
week preparatory period leading up to a face-to-face discussion of the scenarios.
The scenario prompt set centred around one main mandatory prompt, describing a
current VUCA industry environment that would continue indefinitely, and called for
organizational and business model adaptation to engage VUCA conditions over the next
5 years (the time horizon requested by the client). Participants were asked to imagine and
write about their strategic vision of what their employer, the transnational corporation,
should do. Three optional prompts were also provided (participants were asked to choose
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4
This was a USC Scenario Lab exercise, led by Prof. Patricia Riley.
! 91!
one) which focused upon specific sub-themes: media piracy, the rise of social networking
services, and the undermining of the media release windows distribution model. These
optional prompts also provided framing for the main prompt in terms of starting points
and end-states. This study’s analysis though is aimed at responses to the main, mandatory
prompt. Participants were asked to write scenarios of at least one substantial paragraph in
length; in practice, the response scenarios varied widely in length and complexity,
ranging from a few sentences to multiple pages.
The grassroots exercise was designed, implemented, and conducted by the author
during 2013 for a local LA knowledge community based around a new media paradigm
that, while popular and successful, is still emerging at the relative periphery of the
industry. It exclusively used an online survey instrument for distributing scenario
prompts and collecting participant scenarios. Practical constraints meant that face-to-face
workshops and follow-up discussion were not possible. The exercise was in this case
entirely designed and implemented by the author. The target audience was much larger—
the professional association membership numbered in the several hundreds and the total
population of the three university classes that taught the emerging new media paradigm
numbered approximately 60-70. However, participation in the exercise was entirely
voluntary (in the corporate scenario, participants was required to join by their leadership),
and depended on collaborative promotion by the author and the organizers of the
professional association and the university classes. Total participation in the end
numbered 25. The grassroots exercise used one main prompt describing a VUCA-like
future over the next 10 years (the time horizon negotiated with the professional
association leaders) that asked the participants to write a scenario amounting to at least
! 92!
one significant paragraph that imagined how a media industry organization (real or
fictional) based on the new media paradigm, and that they led, strategically responded to
the VUCA conditions. Additional subprompts called out both trends towards greater
standardization of knowledge in their media sector space and towards expansion of the
boundaries of this space to incorporate links with new fields, leading to possible
hybridization of the paradigm. As with the optional prompts in the corporate scenario,
these provided starting point and end-state framings for the main participant scenario
input; but they were treated here as effectively one whole VUCA-focused scenario. As in
the corporate exercise, participant responses in the grassroots scenario exercise ranged
from a minimal couple of sentences to an extended discussion far beyond the prompt
suggestion.
For the participant set of each of the exercises (with each participant producing
one scenario response), subsets were created differentiating those identified with the
centre of their knowledge community from those identified with the periphery. In the
corporate case, based on information gathered through interviews conducted by the
university research team about the company’s culture and structure, this paper’s author
placed all scenario responses from the 21 participants who were senior executives and
staff at the company’s LA headquarters in the centre set. A second set, numbering 17,
consisted of participants peripheral in the corporate structure who were senior executives
from the company’s overseas offices, more junior staff and the fast-tracked junior
executives. In the grassroots case, the 10 participants who were experienced professional
members of the industry association were labeled the centre subset, while the 15
participating university graduate students were labeled the periphery subset. The former
! 93!
subset was deemed centre as they were professionals engaged in developing and
spreading expert knowledge about their new media paradigm; the latter was deemed
periphery as they were all comparatively inexperienced newcomers learning about the
new media paradigm.

Content Coding
The participant response scenarios were understood as describing a journey from
present starting points to future end-states of how their relevant knowledge community
made sense of and dealt with the knowledge challenges of the VUCA context in the
media industry. The sensemaking/knowledge challenges were identified in the response
scenario text through qualitative content analysis (Neuendorf, 2002; Krippendorff, 2012).
This involved applying the five domains of the Cynefin framework in a coding scheme
set up within MAXQDA, a qualitative data analysis software package. In addition to the
Cynefin framework, the coding scheme incorporated 13 key topics (see Table 2) of
knowledge challenge foci raised by the scenarios—identified by intercoder consensus
across all the participants’ scenarios after multiple coding rounds. The application of the
topic codes was designed to control for particular topics attracting particular knowledge
enquiry styles in interpreting the study results.
! 94!

Table 2. Key participant scenario topics identified by qualitative coding consensus

In this coding process, specific textual instances could have multiple Cynefin and
topic codes assigned to them (for instance, if a paragraph or sentence discussed multiple
topics and described multiple or ambiguous knowledge approaches to addressing
challenges). The coding method used two coders, the author and an assistant, to develop
the Cynefin and topic scheme. The coherence, reliability, and validity of the scheme was
evolved and tested through multiple coding rounds. Inter-coder consensus emerged
through extended debate over coding disagreements as well as through the use of a meta-
coding layer through which coders assessed the confidence of their Cynefin domain
coding on a 5-point scale.
The scenario coding data was aggregated to produce 4 sets based on 4 subsets: an
industry centre (corporate case) set and an industry periphery (grassroots case) set, each
with centre and periphery subsets internal to their particular knowledge community (see
Table 3 below). While the key research questions generated for testing Wright’s thesis
! 95!
focused on the sets, possible correlations between individual subsets with the topics and
the Cynefin domains were also examined in the statistical analysis to provide support to
interpreting the results of the testing.

Subset A: Corporate Case
Centre
(Industry Centre & Internal
Centre)
Subset B: Corporate Case
Periphery
(Industry Centre & Internal
Periphery)
Set 3: Industry Centre
(Subsets A+B)
Subset C: Grassroots Case
Centre
(Industry Periphery & Internal
Centre)
Subset D: Grassroots Case
Periphery
(Industry Periphery & Internal
Periphery)
Set 4: Industry Periphery
(Subsets C+D)
Set 1: Internal Centre
(Subsets A+C)
Set 2: Internal Periphery
(Subsets B+D)

Table 3. Sets and subsets for Centre and Periphery data testing

The analysis did not focus on individual participants, the focus being rather on the
pool of scenario data as a representation of the collective tendencies for particular kinds
of knowledge enquiry when tasked with strategizing for the future under VUCA
conditions. The basic unit of analysis in the chi-squared testing and research question
coding of the scenarios is not the assessment of individual participants then but the
strategizing instance of a specific knowledge enquiry sensemaking act (as classified by
Cynefin) combined with a topic, as described in a participant’s response scenario. So the
hypothetical scenario line, “Over the next 10 years, my organization’s globalization
strategy will see both substantial investment in standardized best practices and long-term
innovation, although many outdated approaches will linger” would yield three instances.
! 96!
The first instance, “substantial investment in standardized best practices,” would
represent Simple sensemaking; the second instance, “[substantial investment in] long-
term innovation,” would represent Complex sensemaking; and the third instance, “many
outdated approaches will linger,” would represent Disordered sensemaking. All three
instances would be related to globalization as a topic.
The coding data were cleaned for incomplete and flawed entries before being
subject to chi-squared correlation testing between the sets and subsets as per the research
questions below. In addition, the quality of the data sets was improved by removing
codings from the pools when the coders had low levels (1 to 2 on the 5-point scale) of
confidence.
Due to the guidance of the scenario prompt questions and the organizational
context of the exercises that emphasized imagining successful strategic responses, the
overwhelming majority of participant-generated scenarios in both exercises imagined at
least moderately positive future strategic responses (i.e., hopeful or effective knowledge
enquiry strategies even under adverse industry conditions) for their organizations and
industries after addressing the challenges of VUCA environments. In the few instances
where there were negative strategic responses described, these were assessed as
Disordered in the Cynefin scheme—that is, the participants imagined that their
organization was unable to find a suitable effective strategic knowledge enquiry response
to VUCA conditions.

! 97!
Research Questions and Chi-squared Testing
The following research questions were developed from the recontextualizing of
the Wright thesis within the VUCA and Cynefin context. The chi-squared test for
correlation significance was chosen as appropriate for initial testing of the categorical
variables of the 5 Cynefin domains. The centre-periphery sets and subsets depicted in
Table 3 as well as the topics generated by the participant scenarios seen in Table 2 were
tested as covariate predictors of Cynefin domain counts.
In order to produce the minimum number of expected case counts needed for
valid chi-squared testing and also to standardize the results across sets/subsets, the
number of instances in each set or subset testing was inflated from the actual Cynefin
domain counts in the initial content analysis to a representative 100 cases, so that the
standard expected count in each of the 5 Cynefin domain categories would be 20 for an
unproven research question correlation (that is, null hypothesis proven) in the chi-squared
testing phase (Greenwood 1996). So, for instance, if there were 16 instances of Cynefin
coding in total found in set, with 4 in each domain except for the Disordered domain with
a null count, then for the purposes of chi-squared calculation, the overall number of cases
in the set would be treated as 100, with 25 in each domain except the Disordered domain,
which would have 0.
The data was fed into a statistical software package, Wizard, with the p value of
statistical significance set at a 90% confidence level
5
(df=4)—chosen as this was an
exploratory study intended to find significant relationships predicted by Wright’s thesis
that then could be tested in more detail by more specific studies. It is acknowledged that
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
5
Each set/subset or topic category was subject to chi-squared testing as a predictor of 5 Cynefin
domain counts separately (so degrees of freedom = 5-1).
! 98!
chi-squared test results are unable to indicate directionality. If correlations implied by
Wright’s thesis are found to be significant, then further testing of the data would be
needed, beyond the scope of this current study, in order to determine directionality.
However, initial indications can be suggested based on the relative level of Cynefin
domain counts in question (e.g., a higher extrapolated observed count compared to the
averages for the other sets/subsets suggests a positive correlation).

The following research questions were tested:
RQ1) The internal centre data (Set 1) will have a significant relationship with the
Cynefin Simple domain (representing deductive strategizing).

RQ2) The internal periphery data (Set 2) will have a significant relationship with
the Cynefin Complicated domain (representing inductive strategizing).

RQ3) The industry centre data (Set 3), representing the whole Corporate case, will
have a significant relationship with the Cynefin Simple domain (representing
deductive strategizing).

RQ4) The industry periphery data (Set 4), representing the whole Grassroots case,
will have a significant relationship with the Cynefin Complicated domain
(representing deductive strategizing).

! 99!
RQ5) The internal periphery data (Set 2) will have a significant relationship with
the unordered Cynefin domains (Complex and Chaotic, representing abductive
strategizing).

RQ6) The industry periphery data (Set 4) will have a significant relationship with
the unordered Cynefin domains (Complex and Chaotic, representing abductive
strategizing).

Discussion of Results
None of the research questions’ proposed correlations were proven by the chi-
square testing, meaning that no significant correlations supporting the modified statement
of Wright’s thesis through the research questions were detected at the 90% confidence
level (see Table 4). This means that, within the Cynefin framework, no significant
relationship was found between the centre and deductive strategizing at the
organizational level or the industry level—and the same for the periphery and inductive
strategizing. Furthermore, no significant relationship was found between the peripheries
at the organizational and industry level with the range of abductive strategizing
represented by the Complex and Chaotic domains.
Correlations found to be significant at the 90% confidence level included Set 1
and Subsets A, B and C as covariate predictors of the Complex domain; Subset C for the
Simple domain; Subset B for the Complicated domain (also satisfying a 95% confidence
level); and Subsets A and C for the Disordered domain.
! 100!
The Set 1 significant relationship with the Complex domain (p=0.088) suggests
that the centres across both corporate and grassroots case strategizing favoured the
emergent abductive thinking (the extrapolated observed count across all topics was 34.9
for the Complex domain in this set vs. an average of 29.2 for this domain across all sets).
This, in the absence of other significant correlations found in this set suggests that the
centres in general in this study favoured, or at least preferred imagining about, abductive
strategizing for dealing with VUCA conditions gradually rather than crisis (Chaotic)
abductive, inductive or deductive strategizing. This finding contradicts the idea that
abuctive knowledge enquiries are only favoured in a prevailing way at the periphery.
For Subset A, representing the centre of the corporate case, significant
correlations were found with both the Complex (p=0.088, 34.9 observed count vs.
average of 29.2 for all topics) and Disordered domains (p=0.089, 4.9 vs. 6.7). This
suggests that in the corporate division’s organizational centre, emergent abductive
strategizing is favoured with the presence of Disordered imaginings of organizational
dysfunction in the future scenarios, but with perhaps decreasing presence of the
Disordered expressions as strategic conversation becomes more voluminous or denser
(i.e. from our Cynefin perspective, if the total number of Cynefin instances across all
domains go up, then perhaps the number of Disordered instances go down.
Subset B, the periphery of the corporate division, had significant correlations with
the Complicated (p=0.033, 63.0 vs 36.96) domain and the Complex domain (p=0.085,
29.6 vs. 29.2). This suggested partial support for Wright’s thesis—the periphery of the
industry-centre organization significantly favoured inductive strategizing as well as
abductive strategizing. However, this possibility is undermined by the other findings,
! 101!
especially the lack of significant correlations in the Subset D—the periphery of the
industry-periphery organization, which should show even clearer evidence of correlations
with inductive and abductive strategizing to support Wright’s thesis. Finally, Subset C,
the centre of the grassroots organization case, demonstrated significant correlations for
the Simple (p=0.088, 16.8 vs. 12.4), Complex (p=0.088, 34.9 vs. 29.2), and Disordered
(p=0.089, 4.9 vs. 6.7) domains; these suggest a preference for deductive and emergent
abductive strategizing and and that there was a presence of imagined dysfunction in the
scenarios but that this might decline with increased volume in the strategic conversation
represented by the scenario content pools.
For the sets/subsets that showed no correlations (including the combination of all
sets together, a control representing the activity of carrying out a scenario exercise itself),
there was no significant tendency toward any Cynefin domain, suggesting a mix of all.

Table 4. p-values from chi-squared testing of Centre/Periphery as predictors of Cynefin domains

In light of all the research questions’ proposed correlations being unproven, the
supplementary chi-squared testing of the topics as predictors of the Cynefin domains is
not needed for interrogating apparent proof of the Wright thesis statements. However, as
! 102!
discussed later, the significant correlations discovered in this supplementary analysis (see
Table 5 and Figure 1) may be useful for suggesting alternative exploratory research
questions and directions.

Table 5. Significant topic (predictor)-Cynefin p-values for 90% confidence level chi-squared
testing
! 103!
Figure 1. No. of significant (p<=.10) Topics tested vs. Cynefin Domains per Centre-Periphery
Set/Subset

The significant correlations of Cynefin domains with individual covariate topics
within specific sets and subsets shown in Table 5 are useful for an alternative research
direction that focuses on whether the particular mix of strategizing modes varies
significantly according to topic and centre/periphery positioning. Table 5 suggests
departure points for further analyses of specific topics that were shown to have
significant initial correlations, but detailed consideration of the individual topics is
beyond the scope of this study.
Figure 1 shows a high level overview of the topics analysis, depicting the number
of topics that tested significantly as covariate predictors of Cynefin domains within each
! 104!
centre-periphery set and subset. A key conclusion from this overview are that only Sets 3
and 4 as well as subsets A and C had a greater number of significant topic covariate-
Cynefin domain correlations than the benchmark group representing all the scenario data
pooled from all the sets (all the others had fewer). This suggests that when the internal
centers and peripheries of the corporate and grassroots organizations are working
together as a knowledge community, their strategizing is more likely to produce a
collective mental model or strategic conversation about the future that connects particular
use of strategizing modes with specific topics. Those Cynefin domains within sets/subsets
that correlated with the “All Topics” category also suggest a co-variance with the overall
frequency of topics. Set 3, representing the combined centre and periphery of the
corporate organization, stands out as both the set with the most correlated topics, and the
only set with topics correlated to all five Cynefin categories. An interpretation of this
result would be that it reflects a combination of training and skill in strategic thinking
within the corporate organization and the benefits of the collective diversity of the
corporate centre and periphery combined. Where other sets fall short of having correlated
topics in the five categories, this suggests blind spots in the scope of the strategic
conversation occurring in those sets.

Limitations
Before considering variations or alternatives to Wright’s centre-periphery-focus,
the limitations of this study must be acknowledged. This study is an exploratory one,
utilizing a novel methodology that introduces a theoretical framework, Cynefin, not
widely known in the scenario planning field, to augment a debate within scenario
! 105!
planning discourse which itself is very young. At best, it is hoped that this study offers
interesting new directions for research, despite its practical and theoretical limitations.
In terms of the methodology developed and employed, several key flaws are
identifiable. Firstly, due to logistics issues as well as the needs of the client organizational
communities, the design of the two scenario exercises differed in important ways: the use
of scenario submission to a website for a face to face workshop in the corporate case
while the grassroots case used a website scenario submission method that was self-
contained; the content and sub-themes of the scenario prompts in the two exercises
differed significantly; in contrast to the voluntary participation with no social pressure in
the grassroots case, the participation in the corporate case was mandatory and involved a
sense of competition amongst participants to demonstrate their knowledge and views in
their scenarios for their leadership’s approval. This last point is likely to have
substantially influenced the results in the corporate case; however the impulse to support
more conservative view of the future under such conditions may have been tempered by
the leadership’s explicit endorsement of VUCA as the ‘new normal’ during the period of
the exercise. In addition, ideally, the total participant pools in each organizational
community would have been more equal in number. Furthermore, it was unfortunate that
the time horizons used in the future scenarios were different, though not by a large
amount. Ideally they should be the same. In both cases, however, these time horizons
were agreed upon in negotiation with the scenario exercise clients and both represented a
time horizon over which VUCA conditions in their industry context were expected to
make planning and prediction very difficult.
! 106!
The industry sectors of the two organizational communities in which the exercises
were conducted, while broadly fitting the centre-periphery for the industry level variation
of Wright’s thesis, differ in many ways beyond the scope of this study: for instance, the
corporate case organization is primarily in the distribution business, while the
professionals and students which made up the new media grassroots case community are
primarily in the creative media and marketing business. Moreover, while both
experienced VUCA conditions, the corporate case was experiencing it as large incumbent
industry player facing disruption and potential steep decline, whilst the new media
grassroots community was experiencing VUCA through the growth pains of its paradigm
as it experienced tensions and doubts over its definition, trajectory, and boundaries as it
drew in new sector entrants and spread to new fields (this difference, however, can be
understood as a characteristic distinction between the problems of the entrenched centre
and the emerging periphery).
The sorting of the participants in each case into centre and periphery groups is
also open to question. In the corporate case, this was done on the basis of title, work
group function, and whether the employee belonged to overseas office or was based at
the division’s HQ. While this reflects Regnér’s (2003) framework, a closer enquiry into
individual employees’ roles and use of organizational knowledge structures through
ethnography and interview, while not possible in the scope of this study, may have
suggested alternate centre-periphery sorting. The same would apply in the grassroots case
with the additional question of whether the student group, while certainly at the periphery
of the new media paradigm community relative to the veteran professionals, was engaged
in knowledge structures in their classrooms that were more akin to deductive learning.
! 107!
It is acknowledged that there are other potentially important dimensions of the
participant scenarios that could be analyzed and coded on an individual basis, such as the
length and structure, optimism/pessimism, use of narrative tropes and genres (such as
humour), supporting evidence, argumentation styles etc. However, these other
dimensions of the scenarios were outside the focus and practical scope of the present
study and thus were set aside to maintain focus on the research questions generated to
address the Wright thesis.
It should be emphasized that the application of the Cynefin sensemaking model in
this study shares a limitation with the application of the strategy-in-practice perspective
seen in Wright and Regnér’s centre-periphery framework: the shifting of analytical focus
away from the individual sensemaking to sensemaking in a strategizing style identified
with organizational structures. The lack of proof from the chi-squared testing for the
Wright thesis based research questions also suggests that further research should include
greater attention to individual sensemaking, notably drawing upon the literature on
management cognitive styles (Haley & Stumpf, 1989; Wally & Baum, 1994).
While bearing these issues in mind, the results questioning the Wright thesis can
be used to open up new avenues of research on the question of strategizing modes
engaged by scenario exercises. It should also be noted that the rather fixed traditional
model of hierarchical organizations favoured by Wright and Regnér does not capture the
great and increasing diversity of organizational structures and metaphors in active use
(Morgan, 1986), and that the VUCA context inherently implies that established and
entrenched notions of organizational structure and function are being disrupted and
challenged. So even in a case where the Wright thesis applies well, such a status quo is
! 108!
vulnerable under VUCA—particularly, as suggested earlier, if the marginalization of
abductive thinking undermines the organization’s ability to adapt effectively.

Conclusion
This study suggests both ways that the Wright thesis could be further explored as
well as alternative directions for research and theory-building.
Certainly, the Wright thesis is not at all repudiated by this study. It remains a
valuable point of departure for scenario planning theory-building, extending the
deductive-inductive issue in foresight scenario work beyond the process question. The
lack of proof from this study’s chi-squared testing of Wright thesis based research
questions is best understood as encouraging both deeper testing of the Wright thesis as
well as a broader search for possible explanations of the phenomena observed--which
might then serve the next level of theory-building for understanding how to best apply
different scenario strategizing styles to different parts of organizations. And of course,
results with greater uniformity and from more organizational scenario exercise studies—
ideally extending the scope to abductive strategizing under VUCA conditions too—are
needed before any solid conclusions can be reached. In the case that other studies
provide initial validation for Wright’s thesis, the VUCA and abductive reasoning
extensions will help support broader development of its implications for practice and
theory-building.
A primary contribution of this study, beyond the exploratory testing of the Wright
thesis, has been the demonstration of a novel methodology using the Cynefin framework
for assessing the mix of deductive, inductive, and abductive modes in strategizing content
! 109!
as generated in scenario exercises. This new methodology using the Cynefin framework
can help bridge the process and reasoning questions of scenario planning in the VUCA
era.
Further study of topic-based correlations with strategizing modes across centres
and peripheries is also called for—to what extent do particular specialized subjects of
strategic conversation within an industry generate deductive, inductive, and abductive
modes? This should be combined with an assessment of individual sensemaking and
management cognitive styles to provide a fully rounded strategy-in-practice account.
Finally, it is hoped that this study helps further expansion of Wright’s important
contribution of the notion of bricolage to the scenario planning discourse. Despite this
study’s challenging of Wright’s focus on inductive strategizing at the periphery, it also
suggests a new approach to the role of the bricoleur which is a crucial one for VUCA
conditions. Bricolage is a compelling concept for the kind of adaptive and pragmatic
sensemaking that scenario planners should encourage in organizations, and the concept
becomes more flexible with the expansion of its scope to abductive strategizing. In
addition, while regrettably unaddressed by the studies here, the potential connections
between bricolage thinking and marginalized groups, as suggested by De Certeau (1984)
could be used by future scenario exercise research and design to increase the diversity of
perspectives as well as power balance in scenario-based strategic thinking processes.
Such diversity would both address inequality issues as well as increase the epistemic
variety of the strategic thinking, and help avoid decision-making bias issues such as
groupthink. These connections may be especially fruitful for the new wave of
crowdsourcing and collective intelligence based scenario processes because of their
! 110!
championing of bottom-up participatory methods in contrast to traditional top-down ones
(Schatzmann, Schäfer, & Eichelbaum, 2013).
But the challenging of Wright’s thesis in this study also points to how inductive
and abductive strategizing as well as an emphasis on sensemaking over deductive-based
decision-making can prevail in the centres of organizations and industries as well as the
periphery. What this means for the bricoleur in an organizational knowledge community
is that we should consider their activity as the assembling of strategy from a mixture of
deductive, inductive, and abductive knowledge structures, processes, and enquiries
without making their position in the centre or periphery the overarching frame. As
embodied in the Cynefin model and in this study’s analysis, our effective understanding
of ontologies and the appropriate corresponding epistemologies in a VUCA context
should be more mosaic in form than monolithic. VUCA contexts, properly understood,
do not simply consist of the Complex and the Chaotic, but a combination of all five
domains, with our understandings of particular strategic issues always possibly shifting
from one to another domain or existing in several at once, according to multiple
perspectives. This mosaic view entails embracing the pluralism intrinsic to complexity
(Jarzabkowski & Fenton, 2006), which is somewhat marginalized in the Wright thesis.
This can also help fuel innovation, as Jarzabkowski (2004, p. 20) argues: “existing
practices are drawn upon and adapted to serve a particular set of ends. Such practices are
used because they have established technical and cultural legitimacy. However, through
bricolage they may be significantly altered, generating hybrid practices that offer new
modes of acting whilst retaining some traces of the past.”
! 111!
In helping bricoleurs imagine the future, scenario planners can apply this
approach to help organizational knowledge communities evolve mental models of
possible policies that anticipate different mixtures of deductive, inductive, and abductive
knowledge strategies most suited to particular future visions and topics—whilst also
supporting innovation of knowledge enquiries, processes and structures in the scenario
planning field itself.

References

Barney, J. (2001). Resource-based theories of competitive advantage: A ten-year
retrospective on the resource-based view. Journal of Management, 27(6), 643-650.

Bell, W. (2003). Foundations of Futures Studies Vol. 1: Human Science for a New Era.
Transaction.

Berman, S., Abraham, S., Battino, B., Shipnuck, L., & Neus, A. (2007). New business
models for the new media world. Strategy & Leadership, 35(4), 23-30.

Bishop, P., Hines, A., & Collins, T. (2007). The current state of scenario development: an
overview of techniques. Foresight-The journal of future studies, strategic thinking and
policy, 9(1), 5-25.

Bowman, G., MacKay, R., Masrani, S., McKiernan, P. (2013). Storytelling and the
scenario process: understanding success and failure. Technological Forecasting and
Social Change 80(4), 735-748.

Bradfield, R., Wright, G., Burt, G., Cairns, G., & Van der Heijden, K. (2005). The origins
and evolution of scenario techniques in long range business planning. Futures, 37(8),
795-812.

Bradfield, R. (2008). Cognitive barriers in the scenario development process. Advances in
Developing Human Resources, 10(2), 198-215.

Brown, A. & Jones, M. (2000). Honourable members and dishonourable
deeds: sensemaking, impression management and legitimation in the 'Arms to
Iraq Affair'. Human Relations 53(5), pp. 655-689

Burgelman, R. (1983). A process model of internal corporate venturing in the diversified
major firm. Administrative Science Quarterly, 223-244.
! 112!

Candy, S. (2010). The Futures of Everyday Life. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Hawaii.

Chermack, T. (2005). Studying scenario planning: Theory, research suggestions and
hypotheses. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 72(1), 59–73.

Chermack, T. (2011). Scenario planning in organizations: How to create, use, and assess
scenarios. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Cockburn, I., Henderson, R. & Stern, S. (2000). Untangling the origins of competitive
advantage. Strategic Management Journal, 21, 1123-1145

Cooren, F., Taylor, J. & Van Every, E. (Eds.) (2006). Communication as organizing:
Empirical and Theoretical Explorations In the dynamic of text and conversation.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Curry, A., & Schultz, W. (2009). Roads less travelled: different methods, different
futures. Journal of Futures Studies, 13(4), 35-60.

De Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley.

Denis, J., Langley, A., & Rouleau, L. (2007). Strategizing in pluralistic contexts:
Rethinking theoretical frames. Human Relations, 60(1), 179-215.

Dess, G. (1987). Consensus on strategy formulation and organizational performance:
Competitors in a fragmented industry. Strategic Management Journal, 8(3), 259-277.

Dew, N. (2007). Abduction: a pre-condition for the intelligent design of strategy. Journal
of Business Strategy, 28(4), 38-45.

Dorst, K. (2010). The Nature of Design Thinking. Proceedings of the 8th Design
Thinking Research Symposium.

Dubois, A., & Gadde, L. (2002). Systematic combining: an abductive approach to case
research. Journal of business research, 55(7), 553-560.

Farjoun, M. (2002). Towards an organic perspective on strategy. Strategic Management
Journal 23(7) pp. 561-594.

Farjoun, M. (2008). Strategy making, novelty and analogical reasoning—Commentary on
Gavetti, Levinthal, and Rivkin (2005). Strategic Management Journal, 29(9), 1001-1016.

Farrington, T., Crews, C., & Green, L. (2013). Vision 2038: Exploring the Future through
Scenarios. Research-Technology Management, 56(5), 57-59.

! 113!
Feldman, M. & Pentland, B. (2003). Reconceptualizing organizational routines as a
source of flexibility and change. Administrative Science Quarterly, 48(1), 94-118.

Frankfurt, H. (1958). Peirce's notion of abduction. The Journal of Philosophy, 593-597.

Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society: Outline of the theory of structuration.
Berkeley, CA: Universtity of California Press.

Gioia, D., & Chittipeddi, K. (1991). Sensemaking and sensegiving in strategic change
initiation. Strategic Management Journal, 12(6), 433-448.

Goel, V. & Waechter, R. (2004). Inductive and Deductive Reasoning. Encyclopedia of
Human Behavior, 2nd Edition. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Goodwin, P., & Wright, G. (2001). Enhancing strategy evaluation in scenario planning: a
role for decision analysis. Journal of Management Studies, 38(1), 1-16.

Grant, R. (2003). Strategic planning in a turbulent environment: evidence from the oil
majors. Strategic Management Journal, 24(6), 491-517.

Greenwood, P. (1996). A Guide to Chi-squared Testing. John Wiley & Sons.

Haley, U., & Stumpf, S. (1989). Cognitive Trails in Strategic Decision-making: Linking
Theories of Personalities and Cognitions. Journal of Management Studies, 26(5), 477-
497.

Hatchuel, A., Starkey, K., Tempest, S., & Le Masson, P. (2010). Strategy as innovative
design: An emerging perspective. Advances in Strategic Management, 27, 3-28.

Heifetz, R., Grashow, A., & Linsky, M. (2009). Leadership in a (permanent) crisis. Harvard
Business Review, 87(7/8), 62-69.

Heifetz, R., Grashow, A., & Linsky, M. (2009a). The Practice of Adaptive Leadership.
Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing.

Horney, N., Pasmore, B. & O’Shea, T. (2010). Leadership Agility: A Business
Imperative for a VUCA World. People & Strategy 33(4), 32-38.

Jarzabkowski, P. (2004). Strategy as practice: recursiveness, adaptation, and practices-in-
use. Organization studies, 25(4), 529-560.

Jarzabkowski, P. (2005). Strategy as practice: An activity based approach. Sage.

Jarzabkowski, P., & Fenton, E. (2006). Strategizing and organizing in pluralistic contexts.
Long Range Planning, 39(6), 631-648.

! 114!
Jarzabkowski, P., Balogun, J., & Seidl, D. (2007). Strategizing: The challenge of a
practice perspective. Human Relations, 60(1), 5-27.

Jarzabkowski, P., & Spee, A. (2009). Strategy-as-practice: A review and future
directions for the field. International Journal of Management Reviews, 11(1), 69-95.

Johansen, B. (2007). Get There Early: Sensing the Future to Compete in the Present. San
Francisco, CA: Berett-Koehler.

Johansson, U., & Woodilla, J. (2009, April). Towards an epistemological merger of
design thinking, strategy and innovation. In Proceedings of the 8th European Academy of
Design Conference, 1-5.

Johnson, G., & Huff, A. (1998). Everyday innovation/everyday strategy. In G. Hamel, C.
Prahalad, H. Thomas, D. O'Neal (Eds.), Strategic Flexibility: Managing in a Turbulent
Environment, 13-27. Chichester, UK: Wiley.

Johnson, G., Melin, L. & Whittington, R. (2003). Micro strategy and strategizing:
towards an activity-based view. Journal of Management Studies 40(1), 3-22.

Johnson, G., Langley, A., Melin, L., & Whittington, R. (2007). Introducing the strategy
as practice perspective. In G. Johnson, A. Langley, L. Melin & R. Whittington (Eds.),
Strategy as Practice: Research Directions and Resources. Boston: Cambridge University
Press.

Jonsson, S. & Regnér, P. (2006). Institutional Barriers to Imitation: Competitive Logics,
Core Competences and Norm Reflexivity in the Swedish Mutual Fund Industry. Academy
of Management Best Paper Proceedings.

Jungermann, H. (1985a). Inferential processes in the construction of scenarios. Journal of
Forecasting, 4, 321-327.

Jungermann, H. (1985b). Psychological aspects of scenarios. In V. Covello, J.
Mumpower, P. Stallen & V. Uppuluri (Eds.), Environmental Impact Assessment,
Technology Assessment, and Risk Analysis. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Kahane, A. (2012). Transformative scenario planning: Working together to change the
future. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Kleiner, A. (2008). The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who
Reinvented Corporate Management. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Krippendorff, K. (2012). Content analysis: An introduction to its methodology. Sage.

Küng, L. (2007). Does media management matter? Establishing the scope, rationale and
future research agenda for the discipline. Journal of Media Business Studies, 4(1), 21-39.
! 115!

Kurtz C. & Snowden, D. (2003). The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a
complex and complicated world. IBM Systems Journal 42(3).

Lindgren, M. & Bandhold, H. (2003) Scenario planning: the link between future and
strategy. Palgrave.

Liedtka, J. (2000). In defense of strategy as design. California Management Review,
42(3): 8-30.

Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966). The Savage Mind. University of Chicago Press.

March, J. (1991). Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning. Organization
Science, 2(1), 71-87.

Morgan, G. (1986). Images of Organization. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

Martin, R. & Christensen, K. (2013). Rotman on Design: The Best on Design Thinking
from Rotman Magazine. University of Toronto Press.

Mietzner, D. & Reger, G. (2005). Advantages and disadvantages of scenario approaches
for strategic foresight. International Journal of Technology Intelligence and Planning,
1(2), 220-239.

Millett, S. (2003). The future of scenarios: challenges and opportunities. Strategy &
Leadership, 31(2), 16-24.

Mintzberg, H. (1994). The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning. Simon and Schuster.

Neuendorf, K. (2002). The Content Analysis Guidebook. Sage.

Ogilvy, J. (2011). Facing The Fold: Essays on Scenario Planning. Devon, UK: Triarchy
Press.

Paparone, C. & Topic, G. (2010). Design and the Prospects for Artistry. Small Wars
Journal. December 10, 2010.

Pascale, R. (1984). Perspectives on strategy: The real story behind Honda's success.
California Management Review, 26(3), 47-72.

Picard, R. (2004). Strategic responses to media market changes. Jönköping International
Business School.

Porter, M. (1980). Competitive strategy: Techniques for analyzing industries and
competitors. New York: Free Press.

! 116!
Ramírez, R., Selsky, J., & Van der Heijden, K. (Eds.). (2010). Business planning for
turbulent times: New methods for applying scenarios. Taylor & Francis.

Ramirez, R., & Wilkinson, A. (2014). Rethinking the 2× 2 scenario method: Grid or
frames? Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 86, 254-264.

Regnér, P. (1999). Strategy creation and change in complexity: adaptive and creative
learning dynamics in the firm. Ph.D. dissertation. Stockholm School of Economics.

Regnér, P. (2001). Complexity and multiple rationalities in strategy processes. In H.
Volberda, & T. Elfring (Eds.), Rethinking Strategy, 43-56.

Regnér, P. (2003). Strategy creation in the periphery: inductive versus deductive strategy
making. Journal of Management Studies 40(1), 57-82.

Regnér, P. (2008). Strategy-as-practice and dynamic capabilities: Steps towards a
dynamic view of strategy. Human Relations, 61(4), 565-588.

Russo, J., & Schoemaker, P. (2002). Winning decisions: Getting it right the first time.
Random House.

Schatzmann, J., Schäfer, R., & Eichelbaum, F. (2013). Foresight 2.0 - Definition,
overview & evaluation. European Journal of Futures Research, 1(1), 1-15.

Snowden, D. (2000). Cynefin: a sense of time and space, the social ecology of knowledge
management. In C. Despres & D. Chauve (Eds.), Knowledge Horizons: The Present and
the Promise of Knowledge Management. Butterworth Heinemann.

Snowden, D. & Boone, M. (2007). A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making. Harvard
Business Review, November 2007.

Spee, A. & Jarzabkowski, P. (2009). ‘Strategy tools as boundary objects.’ Strategic
Organization. 7.2: 223-232.

Tsoukas, H. & Hatch, M. (2001). Complex thinking, complex practice: the case for a
narrative approach to organizational complexity. Human Relations, 54(8), 979-1013.

Turner, F. (2008). From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole
Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press.

Van der Heijden, K. (2011). Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation. New York:
Wiley.

Van der Heijden, K., Bradfield, R., Burt, G., Cairns, G. & Wright, G. (2009). The Sixth
Sense: Accelerating Organizational Learning with Scenarios. Chichester, UK: Wiley.

! 117!
Van Notten, P. (2005). Writing on the wall: Scenario development in times of
discontinuity. Universal-Publishers.

Van Notten, P. (2006). “Scenario development: a typology of approaches,” Chapter 4,
pp69-92, Schooling for Tomorrow: Think Scenarios, Rethink Education. OECD.

Wally, S. & Baum, J. (1994). Personal and structural determinants of the pace of strategic
decision making. Academy of Management Journal, 37(4), 932-956.

Walton, J. (2009). Scanning Beyond the Horizon: Exploring the Ontological and
Epistemological Basis for Scenario Planning. Advances in Developing Human Resources
10(2), 147-165.

Weick, K. (1993). The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: the Mann Gulch
disaster. Administrative Science Quarterly 38(4), 628-653.

Weick, K. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. SAGE.

Wiek, A., Withycombe Keeler, L., Schweizer, V., & Lang, D. (2013). Plausibility
indications in future scenarios. International Journal of Foresight and Innovation Policy,
9(2), 133-147.

Whittington, R. (2006). Completing the practice turn in strategy research. Organization
Studies, 27(5), 613-634.

Wilkinson, A. (2009). Scenarios practices: in search of theory. Journal of Futures
Studies, 13(3), 107-114.

Wilkinson, A. & Kupers, R. (2014). The Essence of Scenarios: Learning from the Shell
experience. Amsterdam University Press.

Wilkinson, A., Kupers, R., & Mangalagiu, D. (2013). How plausibility-based scenario
practices are grappling with complexity to appreciate and address 21st century
challenges. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 80(4), 699-710.

Wright, A. (2004). The use of scenarios in the social construction of sense. University of
Wolverhampton Business School Working Paper Series, WP001/04.

Wright, A. (2004a). Enhancing inductive strategizing through sensemaking and scenario
thinking. University of Wolverhampton Business School Working Paper Series,
WP002/04.

Wright, A. (2004b). A social constructionist’s deconstruction of Royal Dutch Shell's
scenario planning process, University of Wolverhampton Business School Working
Paper Series, WP004/04.

! 118!

Wright, A. (2005). The role of scenarios as prospective sensemaking devices.
Management Decision, 43(1), 86-101.

Wright, G., & Goodwin, P. (2009). Decision making and planning under low levels of
predictability: Enhancing the scenario method. International Journal of Forecasting,
25(4), 813-825.

Yarger, H. (2008). Strategy and the National Security Professional: Strategic Thinking
and Strategy Formulation in the 21st Century. Greenwood Publishing Group.

! 119!
STUDY 3:

Towards a Creative Strategic Conversation Concept for Scenario
Planning with Transmedia Storytelling Characteristics

[The target publication for this paper is the journal Foresight.]
[See Appendix for related materials]

Introduction

This paper considers a new concept and theory-building direction for scenario
planning which combines the strategic conversation (Van der Heijden 2005, Ertel &
Solomon 2014), a key concept already established in scenario planning, with the concept
of the creative conversation from Pierre Lévy’s work on collective intelligence (1997,
2011)
1
. The resulting concept, the creative strategic conversation, is intended to support
the efforts in the fields of scenario planning, and foresight scenario work more generally,
towards harnessing the potential of the networked ICT/participatory culture era as
suggested by Lévy’s vision. Using theories from organizational studies, this new concept
is supported by considering the process of scenario planning in terms of a knowledge
community whose activities can be understood through narrative and sensemaking
theories.
Among other influences from organizational narrative and sensemaking
theories, the sensemaking work of Brenda Dervin (Dervin, 1998; Dervin, Foreman-
Wernet & Lauterbach, 2003) and David Boje’s postmodern narrative model of
organization (Boje, Rosile & Gardner, 2004; Boje, 2011) are highlights. Dervin’s
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
I thank Prof. Henry Jenkins for introducing me to Lévy’s concept and its relevance to
transmedia storytelling in workshops at USC.
! 120!
framework was useful for suggesting a sensemaking model that mapped well onto the
idea of a scenario narrative being comprised of recombinable narrative elements. Boje’s
model offered a conceptual bridge between the organizational studies storytelling
discourse and that of the media arts. Two influential interrelated ideas from the Japanese
knowledge management literature are also introduced in the concept elaboration, the
SECI (Socialization-Externalization-Combination-Internalization) knowledge activity
model and how these activities related the organizational structure as understood through
the notion of ba (Nonaka, Toyama & Konno, 2000). As will be explained later in this
paper, these ideas describe a spread of interrelated activities that generate and spread
knowledge, through its tacit and explicit forms, through an organization. They are used in
this paper to reframe Lévy’s conception of a knowledge community for scenario-based
strategic thinking.
Overall, this new conceptual direction supports “Foresight 2.0” (what
Schatzmann, Schäfer & Eichelbaum, 2013 labels the recently emerged generation of
foresight exercises which leverage online technologies) applications of scenario planning
methods that more fully appreciate the importance of narrative, not just for
communicating foresight knowledge, but also for community-building, management, and
knowledge generation. “Narrative” is a discursive account of events that attempts to give
them coherence and explain their meaning, causes, and effects (Ganzin, Gephart &
Suddaby, 2014).
2

To better connect with practice, this theory-building approach also incorporates
elements from transmedia storytelling (TS)—a paradigm for artistic creativity and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2
There are considerable unsettled debates in the narrative theory field over the definitional
differences between narrative vs. story, which Ganzin et al. take a position on. However, these
debates are beyond the scope of this paper, and the terms are used interchangeably here.
! 121!
business strategy in the networked participatory culture era that during the last decade has
become highly influential in both commercial and non-profit new media production
(Giovagnoli, 2011; Rose, 2011; Phillips, 2012; Herr-Stephenson, Alper, Reilly & Jenkins,
2013). This paper argues that TS is particularly apt for refining the concept of the creative
strategic conversation for scenario planning method innovation..
Scenario planning and related scenario methods have become a widely used set
of foresight techniques for organizations and communities since their modern
development in the aftermath of WWII (Ringland & Schwartz, 2006; Kleiner, 2008; Bell,
2011). Like other foresight tools, scenarios help construct and communicate a range of
possible long-term trends and conditions, years or decades into the future, for
organizations, communities, and societies—and harness imagination, encourage debate
and enhance decision-making about such issues. Distinctively, scenarios are plausible
stories about alternate futures (usually coming in a set of multiple scenarios) that frame
particular analytical perspectives on the future possibilities of the strategic issues in
question. Methods like scenario planning are processes for thinking and talking through
possible decisions and outcomes in an organization’s strategic conversation—that is, an
organization’s informal and formal discussions about ways it can break out of or evolve
beyond its existing mental models
3
and decision-making/action scripts in order to adapt
to uncertainties and changes. Such discussions can inhabit everyday organizational
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3
Mental models are essentially knowledge or cognition structures (which might be tacit and
internal or externally codified) that allow people to describe, explain, and make predictions about
their world. Mental models are both held individually and shared—and, to lesser and greater
degrees, they can be systematic representations about how different elements of the world relate
to each other (Johnson-Laird, 1983; Rouse & Morris, 1986). Maintaining effective organizational
sensemaking calls for introducing strategic tools like foresight scenario exercises to make sure
that organizational mental models change to keep up with their environment and don’t become
outdated or wrongheaded due to, for instance, internal politics or inertia.
! 122!
routines at a more tactical level but their strategic impact is most felt through liminal
occasions of sensemaking (Van der Heijden, 2005; Weick ,1995) where the need for new
thinking to address challenging issues is overtly acknowledged by high-level decision-
makers and stakeholder representatives (Ertel & Solomon, 2004).
Scenario planning is a strategic conversation process—a site for sensemaking
occasions; as Weick (1995, p. 9) emphasizes (citing Shotter, 1993), “managing is like
authoring a conversation” which helps organizational members make and share sense
about situations. Scenario planning typically uses multiple scenario narratives to change
organizational participants’ shared mental models, enhance decision-making and promote
organizational learning through thinking through alternative futures (Schwartz, 1991;
Chermack & Lynham, 2002). Yet despite their widespread use in all kinds of
organizations, scenario planning methods’ use of new and online media is still in its
infancy. Most scenario work remains limited to processes that prepare expert-crafted
scenarios for face-to-face workshop discussions with the findings communicated through
client organizations through traditional reporting and presentations. Moreover,
convention, time and space constraints, and the limited attention bandwidth of the
participants involved in such occasions mean that the crafted scenarios typically come in
brief form, limited to sets of three or four futures narratives, perhaps around a page of
text each with a few diagrams or illustrations (Lindgren & Bandhold, 2002; Scearce &
Fulton, 2004).
These deficiencies limit the power, scope, and reach of scenario methods—at a
time when foresight methods such as scenarios are needed to help manage organizational
and community responses to turbulent and complex environments more than ever
! 123!
(Ramírez, Selsky & Van der Heijden, 2010), and when networked information and
communication technologies offer unprecedented scaling up and participation expansion
capabilities for both strategic and critical foresight purposes (Chachia, Compañó & Da
Costa, 2007; Raford, 2011; Ramos, Mansfield & Priday, 2012).
The transmedia storytelling (TS) paradigm offers a way for scenario planning,
and the foresight field more generally, to leapfrog ahead by using an approach reflective
of today’s networked, multiplatform media landscape in addressing such constraints (Li,
2013; Von Stackelberg & Jones, 2014). While cross-media storytelling practices similar
to TS are ancient (Johnson, 2013), the TS paradigm today emerged as a response to the
contemporary era’s media system fragmentation and the rise of participatory culture
defined by new do-it-yourself ICT tools that give consumers greater power to create,
appropriate, comment on, alter, and recirculate content (Jenkins, 2002, 2004). The TS
paradigm has become popular in media, entertainment, and marketing industries because
it offers a framework for optimally engaging audiences for both artistic and business
purposes. The most famous Hollywood example of a large-scale TS implementation was
The Matrix movie trilogy and its various story extensions in other media, such as video
games and comics (1999-2005).
This paper’s analysis has been inspired by various scenario method prototyping
efforts designed and carried out by the author that sought to apply TS principles to
narrative sensemaking and knowledge community building through online participatory
culture practices. These experimental efforts were challenged by various technical,
logistical, and methodological issues, but as pilot tests, they still provide useful learning
moments that can inform the concept development and theory-building proposed in this
! 124!
paper.
This analysis is structured as follows: first, recent developments in online media
innovation in scenarios and other foresight methods are discussed, and the significance of
the TS paradigm for scenarios is explained. Second, the idea of the creative strategic
conversation as a knowledge community and organizational narrative response to
Foresight 2.0 challenges is elaborated. Finally, the core TS principles as described by
pioneering transmedia scholar Henry Jenkins (2009) are considered in relation to
application of the creative strategic conversation idea, along with the testing of practical
prototyping experiments, and their results and challenges.

Foresight 2.0
Scenario planning, like the foresight field it is embedded in, has generally
(rather ironically) been late to adapt to the capabilities and environments of new and
online media. The emerging literature on such approaches for strategic foresight includes
highlights such as studies of creating an open futures library online (Priday, Mansfield &
Ramos, 2014); web-based horizon scanning (Palomino et al., 2012); online technological
road-mapping for IT enterprises (Skulimowski & Pukocz, 2012); collaborative online risk
management using prediction markets and trend databases (Markmann, Von der Gracht,
Keller & Kroehl, 2012); public sector innovation policy agency setting using Web 2.0
technologies (Haegeman, Cagnin, Könnölä & Collins, 2012); and situation mapping for
entrepreneurial foresight (Acar, Anokhin & Troutt, 2010). Besides the interest in
developing novel forms of foresight inquiry through new media means, another powerful
motivation has been to use virtual capabilities of online scenario planning and other
! 125!
foresight practices to both lower their cost and increase their ease of scalability,
particularly with organizations with small foresight budgets (McWhorter & Lynham,
2014).
There has been generally little published academic work reviewing this new
landscape as a whole—recent publications reviewing these tentative efforts include
Keller & Von der Gracht’s (2014) speculative account of how ICT infrastructure might
reshape the foresight discipline, and two accounts considering the transformation of the
strategic foresight field that summarize Web 2.0 applications which are either still in beta
form (Paliokaitė, Pačėsa & Sarpong, 2014) or in “perpetual beta” (Sarpong & O'Regan,
2014). The most detailed survey in this literature was conducted by Schatzmann, Schäfer
& Eichelbaum (2013). They define the umbrella term of “Foresight 2.0” as encompassing
all foresight processes which combine online frameworks with a massively collaborative
approach. This conception is inspired by the “Web 2.0” internet business paradigm that
prioritizes the scaling of network effects by pursuing large-scale user populations
(O’Reilly & Battelle, 2009) but it also highlights volunteer-generated content and open
access for the commons, as influenced by the peer-to-peer and open-source internet
movements (Benkler, 2009). It calls for foresight process participation and access by a
much larger, more diverse, and perhaps more open audiences than seen in traditional
foresight exercises, which are primarily designed for small groups of elite decision-
makers, stakeholder representatives, and authoritative experts. Often these are held
behind closed doors (Wright, 2004)—even when the exercises try to introduce more
participatory process elements.
! 126!
Schatzmann et al. identify a typology of four Foresight 2.0 categories:
databases/wikis, prediction markets, social rating systems, and collaborative scenarios.
The first category, database/wikis, is a knowledge management archiving practice that
revolves around a participatory collective intelligence in its wiki form; the second,
prediction markets, involves the application of financial futures markets techniques to
aggregate predictions about any future event; the third, social rating systems (the most
common type), uses crowd-based quantitative evaluations of weak signals and
predictions; the fourth, collaborative scenarios, is “the only class of Foresight 2.0
approaches that tries to weave interconnections between predictions by the participants”
(p. 7) through their collaborative generation of qualitative scenarios about possible
futures. This is the one that most concerns my application of TS. The overlap between
collaborative scenario examples with the collective intelligence knowledge management
focus of the first category especially resonates with this paper’s interest in combining
scenario planning with Web 2.0 practices. As Schatzmann et al. point out, despite their
typically “fairly chaotic structure” (2013, p. 8), collaborative scenario knowledge
communities resemble wikis, although they also say the former are often time constrained
and so lack the knowledge evolution over time that wikis/databases offer (p. 12).
This paper’s perspective differs from Schatzmann et al. in that first, along with
most professional qualitative-focused scenarists, I believe that the greatest value of
foresight activities lies not in the formulation of data-based predictions but rather, the
mental model and organizational cultural transformation that may occur through the
dialogues about possible futures. Second, this paper argues that the open participatory
culture developments through the web should be promoted to support the creativity of the
! 127!
dialogues about possible futures. Third, as suggested by work of my colleagues and I and
the USC Scenario Lab
4
, face-to-face scenario methods should not be entirely displaced
by online alternatives developments; hybrid approaches are preferable, as they would
preserve the qualities of face-to-face scenario planning conversations while enhancing it
with online media platforms—in effect, emphasizing the understanding that the face-to-
face dimension is another media channel. Furthermore, Schatzmann et al.’s view that
‘Foresight 2.0’ should exclude online communities’ knowledge generation, which they
regard as simply expanded brainstorming that creates data that are too unstructured and
unruly for the more precise requirements of today’s machine-reading analysis capabilities
(p. 5), overlooks the longer-term evolution and impact of such communities. And most
crucially, their emphasis on machine-readable data subscribes to an overly constrained
view of how valuable the foresight knowledge generated by online communities could
be, and is inherently inconsistent with the goal of increasing participation that they also
emphasize. The measure of value should not be limited to seeing the Foresight 2.0
platform as a data source to be harvested after an exercise has ended—this paper’s
approach views the process of having organizations develop scenario narratives and
engage in dialogue about those narratives as constituted through communication
(Ashcraft, Kuhn & Cooren, 2009).
Furthermore, the success of a scenario exercise should not just be based on increasing
or extending participation. In his pioneering review of five Foresight 2.0 case studies,
Raford (2014) highlights lines of inquiry that can help evaluate this goal. Raford
examines the following cases: an online data generation platform with structured, form-
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4
For more information about the University of Southern California Scenario Lab’s work, see
http://www.uscscenariolab.com (accessed November 1, 2014).
! 128!
based input designed to support brainstorming and discussion of driving forces and trends
affecting the future, as preparation for later, off-line scenario building in a more
traditional manner; a free-form narrative anecdote collection platform, where the
collected stories were subject to scenario archetype content analysis based on Dator’s
framework (Dunagan, 2010); an interactive gaming platform that used online game cards
as a discussion forum and scenario-building medium for a number of scenario prompts; a
crowdsourcing-driven wiki platform for analysts and subject matter experts exploring a
pre-established set of geopolitical scenarios; and an “open foresight” process with a
“Future of Facebook” theme using a variety of mainstream commercial online media
tools—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Skype—to coordinate an extended open crowd-
forecasting discussion (guided by an expert-created multiple set of questions about the
future) from which several scenarios were ultimately derived and turned into a video by
the project owners and coordinators.
Raford proposes two key categories for measuring the impact of these
Foresight 2.0 case studies in comparison with traditional methods—participation
characteristics (number, type of participants, etc.) and interaction characteristics (number
of variables, type of opinions and analyses, etc.). He concluded that across the case
studies, there was increased diversity and amounts of participation as well as greater
volumes of data along with faster analysis and more transparent processes. But in his
conclusions, Raford also questions the argument, popular among many scholars (Healey,
1997; Innes & Booher, 2004), that assumes greater participation will lead to better
planning analysis and decision-making because greater scale, speed, and volume of
participation are needed to effectively understand, and act within, complex and fast-
! 129!
moving environments. He acknowledges that the general lack of existing objective
metrics for evaluating scenario method quality and impacts makes well-supported
conclusions from these experimental case studies difficult. But he also argues that his
case study review points to the conclusion that the Foresight 2.0 systems tested do not by
themselves enhance the purported positive social and cognitive effects of scenario-based
foresight as a whole (although they do seem to improve, each in their different way, on
specific elements of scenario planning data generation, gathering, and analysis considered
in isolation).
One of Raford’s conclusions is the importance of designing processes that
promote more deeply engaged, more meaningful interaction between participants across
both face-to-face contexts and various forms of media in hybrid efforts if scenario
planning is to be both efficient and productive. Such efforts are intended to maximize the
benefits of Foresight 2.0 platforms in harmony with the benefits of face-to-face
interactions. This goal is not about increasing participation or data collection per se but to
achieve the purported value of scenario exercises (Argyris & Schön, 1978; Van der
Heijden, 2005), particularly as a means for transforming the participants’ shared mental
models. The theoretical perspective offered in this paper is that Foresight 2.0 methods
can be at the heart of this transformative capability by fostering a communal knowledge-
generating experience. This is in contrast to the data harvesting perspective prevalent in
Schatzmann et al., as well as to the piecemeal improvements of certain scenario process
elements described by Raford. Indeed, Raford uses the label “Foresight Support
Systems”—which implicitly falls short of suggesting the possibility that new online
media capabilities could drive whole foresight processes.
! 130!
I concur with Raford’s other conclusion (and in the spirit of Wilkinson, 2009)
that additional new concepts and framework developments are needed in Foresight 2.0
scenario methods before attempts at building rigorous evaluation methods are possible.
The combined exploration of organizational narrative sensemaking theories together with
transmedia storytelling in support of the creative strategic conversation concept offered
here is intended to offer conceptual starting points for Foresight 2.0 frameworks that treat
hybrid interactions across online media and traditional face-to-face scenario planning
contexts as themselves whole experiences for participatory transformation of discussion
and thinking about future strategy. In the established scenario planning literature, such
whole experiences are typically described as strategic conversations, whether they
describe ongoing knowledge processes across an organization (Van der Heijden, 2005) or
an especially crafted occasion for targeted strategic conversations (Ertel & Solomon,
2014). Combined with the concept of the creative conversation, this perspective is
intended to help scenario practitioners and theorists understand the collective intelligence
potential of new ICTs for enhancing their methods and outcomes. In turn, a connection
will be made between these conversations and a more particular focus on narrative
sensemaking, in support of the distinctive functions of scenario planning. This lays the
groundwork for an exploratory discussion of applying TS principles as a scenario
planning innovation with the creative strategic conversation concept in mind.

Collective Intelligence and Creative Strategic Conversation
“Strategic conversations” can be broadly understood as the practice of creating,
debating and discussing decision-and-action options for furthering organizational goals
! 131!
through verbal or textual interactions among organizational members—whether those
interactions are informal or formal, spontaneous or designed. The interactions may range
from single communication acts to extensive networks of arguments and narratives (Ford
& Ford, 1995). The concept of a strategic conversation has been a substantial topic of
general management studies’ interest (Eden & Ackerman, 1998; Hoon, 2007; Lafley &
Martin, 2013). But this concept has a special place in scenario planning, primarily due to
the work of Kees Van der Heijden, (who is credited with coining the term), Peter
Schwartz and others (Schwartz, 1995; Van der Heijden, 2005; Van der Heijden,
Bradfield, Burt, Cairns & Wright; 2009) who highlighted and popularized its particular
compatibility with scenario planning.
Schwartz, in his seminal 1996 scenario planning book, The Art of the Long
View, gave this definition: “A strategic conversation is a carefully thought-out but
loosely facilitated series of in-depth conversations [aimed at strategic action taking] for
key decision makers throughout an organization” (p. 221) and argued that scenario
planning was particularly suited as a tool for designing this conversation.
In Van der Heijden’s account, a strategic conversation is “the essential medium
of any strategy process” and “the most powerful lever” for orientating organizations’
paths (2005, p. xvi). The conversation it describes occurs in organizations to create and
communicate the context and premise for strategic decision-making and action. Van der
Heijden argued that, “In the world of institutions the [understanding that organizations
are processes] revolves around conversation. The learning loop model shows the
interwovenness of thinking and action. If action is based on planning on the basis of a
mental model, then institutional action must be based on a shared mental model. Only
! 132!
through a process of conversation can elements of observation and thought be structured
and embedded in the accepted and shared organizational theories-in-use.” (2005, p. 43).
As Van der Heijden describes it, strategic conversation involves both formal
top-down designed or managed elements and informal emergent ones, all chiefly
concerning possible future situations and related decision/action options. Strategic
conversation is a reasoning process that is also shaped by shared mental models—and
attempts by participants to promote new or change existing mental models (Johnson-
Laird, 1983; Converse, 1993), and so leading to greater organizational learning (De Geus,
1998; Manning, 2002). To avoid rigid thinking and blind spots and other cognitive and
reasoning flaws as well as to keep up with changing reality, the successful support of
decision-making here calls for space in which mental models about possible futures can
be challenged and rethought by participants at some remove from their everyday
organizational pressures and routines. Organizational sensemaking thus needs
imagination, flexibility, and the nurturing of diverse perspectives to respond effectively
to the uncertainties of strategic environments. Dysfunctional strategic conversations
might mean either a culture of groupthink or, at the other extreme, overly fragmented
communication (Van der Heijden, 2005; Ertel & Solomon, 2014), acknowledging the
inherent tendency toward fragmentation in organizational communication (Eisenberg &
Riley, 2000).
Scenarios, it is argued, are “the best available language for the strategic
conversation” (Van der Heijden, 2005, p. xviii) as they bring people together and create a
special space for imagining different perspectives and engaging participants’ mental
models to challenge and rework them through dialogue (Kahane, 2004). Changing
! 133!
people’s mental models in turn helps build knowledge for the organizations they are
members of (Chermack, 2003). If established as an ongoing institutional activity, they
can deeply instill double-loop learning (that is, organizational learning that will modify
the problems/goals targeted as needed, according to feedback from action in the
environment, rather than simply attempt various solutions for fixed problems/goals) so
organizations can learn and take action rapidly and reflexively around changes in their
relationship with the strategic environment (Argyris & Schön, 1978). Chermack (2004)
conveys Van der Heijden’s view of an effective strategic conversation as incorporating
participants’ myriad semi-structured ideas and arguments to create shared interpretations
of possible futures in terms of an “organizational dialogue through which individuals can
reveal, analyze, share, and reconstruct their mental models, thus opening their minds to
consider new possibilities” (p. 305). Drawing on Vygotskyian social psychological
theories of constructivist learning, Chermack (2003) describes these semi-structured
elements, as the “building blocks” (p. 302) for scenarios which arise, from, and help
constitute the strategic conversation—as well as the mental models that the conversation
is in play with, and the negotiations over their shared form. However, Chermack’s vision
for scenario planning theory-building and innovation is determinedly positivist-rationalist
(Swanson & Chermack, 2013). In contrast, this paper’s perspective emphasizes the
crucialness of encouraging imaginative interactions around ‘what-ifs’ in the liminal
(Turner, Harris & Park, 1983) and playful (Dodgson, Gann & Salter, 2005; Schrage,
2013) space of engaging with alternative futures and strategizing that scenario planning
permits. That is to say, the use of creative, less inhibited thinking and sensemaking; as
well as the encouragement of abductive and inductive reasoning styles and not just the
! 134!
deductive (what March (2006) meant when he argued that “technologies of foolishness”
were an essential complement to technologies of rationality in management thinking)
should also be treated as core to effective qualitative scenario and futures work if the aim
is to stretch and challenge participants’ mental models (Brooks & Bowker, 2004; Roos,
Victor & Statler, 2004; Jacobs & Statler, 2006). This requires a narrative, not a
deterministic, approach.
Chermack (see Chermack, Van der Merwe & Lynham, 2007) has argued that
the strategic conversation concept as currently constructed is too abstract and is only
generally and vaguely understood in practice. His admirable efforts at attempting to
define the strategic conversation concept and its effectiveness through the quantifiable
measures of a participant self-administered “conversation quality” checklist failed due to
methodological limitations. His conception is also overly focused on what he calls
“genuine” conversation in a face-to-face setting, it overlooks how organizations can be
understood as networks of conversations (Ratcliffe, 2002)—with the impact of scenario
planning exercises ideally stretching their influence beyond their workshop events to
influence these everyday networks. The scope of this influence potential also raises the
question of alternative communication modes beyond the face-to-face, but Chermack
argues: “scenario planning cannot be effectively implemented via online participation as
the face-to-face interaction and dialogue is thought to be the mode by which scenario
planning happens. As there is no research to support this claim, further study on the topic
might see an opportunity to explore the effectiveness of scenario processes via varying
delivery methods.” (2007, p. 384). As described above, this position has already been
overtaken by a wave of Foresight 2.0 scenario experimentation. Furthermore, while new
! 135!
theorizing is especially needed for emerging online practices in scenario planning, even
in conventional scenario planning the question of effectiveness criteria is highly unsettled
and vaguely defined, calling for greater fundamental theorization (Wilkinson, 2009).
There have been practitioner-focused advances in more precisely defining the practical
and logistical nuts-and-bolts of strategic conversation workshops as well (Ertel &
Solomon, 2014) although little attention has been given to theory-building or evaluation
for online scenario work.
So, in general, considerations of strategic conversation in scenario planning or
management studies have been preoccupied with traditional face-to-face settings and
have ventured little into considering online/new media. Pierre Lévy’s vision of “creative
conversation”(2013) can open up this direction; it builds on his seminal work defining
“collective intelligence” (1997) in an ICT-networked age.
Lévy’s vision champions the sharing of knowledge, cognitive resources, and
abilities in ICT-empowered communities as the most important societal goal of
networked computing. Lévy (2013, p. 99) proposes the “creative conversation” to be “the
fundamental [cognitive] engine of knowledge communities.” In Lévy’s explanation,
effective cognition is dependent on two phenomena. There is the inherited knowledge
individuals have access to through socio-cultural institutions, tools and other resources.
More importantly—and what energizes and evolves society’s cognitive capabilities—is
how “distributed processes of problem solving, decision making and knowledge
accumulation emerge from conversations and, more generally, symbolic interactions
among individuals” (p. 99). Indeed, Lévy goes so far as to describe vital social
institutions such as the market, democracy, and science as “well-ordered conversations”
! 136!
(p. 100) in terms of how they manage the users and their conflicts and collaborations. But
for a healthy and successful society, the idea of conversations being creative is also
crucial—conversation is not just about knowledge management but is also a crucial
process for the social emergence of ideas, including the translation of personal
experiences or data into shared knowledge that needs to be distributed through social and
organizational memory structures.
Lévy describes how collective intelligence should ideally operate through ICTs
from a knowledge management perspective: “explicating, accumulating and organizing
knowledge in the shared memories of knowledge communities” (p. 99). This operation of
collective intelligence is distinct from the mass effects of the “wisdom of crowds”
principle (Suroweicki, 2005) underlying most Foresight 2.0 projects that utilize the most
common kind of “large-scale collective intelligence systems” (Raford, 2014)—
crowdsourcing. The wisdom of crowds concept assumes that members of society or any
large collective act individually with no or little interaction with each other and their
individual acts of sensemaking can then later be aggregated for assessment. In contrast,
Lévy’s idea of collective intelligence is founded on the idea of members interacting
directly with each other and collaborating within an ongoing community of practice that
they consciously help maintain.
In Lévy’s conception, individual community members filter, categorize, and
record data and information through Web 2.0 media of various kinds before critically
synthesizing it to create knowledge that is contributed to the community conversation.
This leads to a virtuous loop as individuals draw on the knowledge community’s memory
for their own knowledge capabilities. Creative conversation also encourages collective-
! 137!
referential
5
modeling where the community reflexively evaluates and adjusts its aims and
methods while also consciously assessing and evolving the values and worldviews that
justify those aims and methods—that is, double- and triple-loop learning (Tosey, Visser
& Saunders, 2011). This reflexive loop learning can be particularly intense in the
participatory online knowledge communities that the creative conversation concept
favours: an example would be the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, where the
collaborative culture creates content according to established processes and goals but its
participants are also encouraged to constantly subject both processes and goals to debate
and possible revision.
The “engine” for creative conversations is an interface for converting tacit
knowledge to explicit knowledge (and vice versa). Thus explicit knowledge can then be
shared, distributed, and manipulated by the community and used to drive action, the
results of which can be fed back into the dialogue, shaping tacit knowledge. Tacit
knowledge is by definition uncodified and usually held in people’s heads or
communicated informally (in idiosyncratic communication systems not easily understood
by others: for instance, local workplace slang) by individuals or groups. Explicit
knowledge becomes codified, held and distributed formally (for instance, in instruction
manuals, wikis or corporate databases). The flows of tacit and explicit knowledge are
framed by Lévy’s use of the SECI model of organizational knowledge creation and
management as developed by knowledge management theorist Ikujiro Nonaka and his
colleagues (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; Nonaka, Toyama & Konno, 2000). The SECI
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
5
“Collective-referential” is used in place of “self-referential” here as the latter is self-defeating
when the topic addressed is dialogic decision-making. Thanks to Patricia Riley (personal
communication) for pointing this out.
! 138!
model introduced the concept of hypertext into organizational theory and is also seen as
resonating with Web 2.0 (Chatti, Klamma, Jarke & Naeve, 2007).
The SECI model describes a spiral of organizational knowledge creation and
sharing—the process operates as a cycle, but higher levels of knowledge are reached each
time the loop completes. The spiral is made up of four activity stages: Socialization
represents the sharing of tacit knowledge through personal or group conversation and
shared experiences (e.g., in conventional scenario planning, this would be brainstorming
and workshop discussion sessions); Externalization, the codification/documentation and
sharing of tacit-turned-explicit knowledge (e.g., the crafting of formal scenario narratives
and post-workshop analyses by scenario planners); Combination, the organizing,
integration and remixing of explicit knowledge (e.g., scenario planners or scenario
workshop participants drawing on codified/published reports and remixing their elements
for scenario-building or analysis); Internalization, explicit-to-tacit knowledge absorption
by individuals (e.g., organizations and individuals learning from scenario reports and
changing their uncodified behavior).
6
These reciprocal activities, it is argued, are greatly
enhanced and extended by ICTs such as social media.
The SECI model describes the dynamics of the Japanese knowledge
management concept of (Nonaka & Konno, 1998), which Lévy uses to describe the siting
of creative conversation interfaces across the technological and socio-cultural media
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6
New work by colleagues at the USC Scenario Lab suggests that a fifth activity stage should be
introduced in future evolution of the SECI model—this stage would represent the activity needed
to translate or transfer knowledge and interest agendas across different communities or sub-
communities. The conventional SECI model assumes that the knowledge community it is applied
to is unified in terms of goals, capabilities, agendas, beliefs etc. but in practice, communities and
organizations may be much more complex and fragmented, with different parts contrasting and
conflicting along these lines. Exploration of this proposed fifth stage is beyond the scope of this
paper, but it is an intriguing avenue for future elaboration of the strategic creative conversation
concept.
! 139!
ecology that encompasses the collective intelligence knowledge community. Ba (a
concept originally developed by Nishida, 1970 and elaborated by Shimizu, 1995) can be
thought of as a shared space or context that harbors meaning and thus supports emerging
knowledge creation and conversation between people. Ba emphasizes the integration of
physical world action and virtual discourse in media—so all physical and
digital/mediated contexts for community conversation/SECI flows, including both
ongoing efforts and occasional or special encounters can be understood to be part of the
same ecology of knowledge creation.
Lévy’s vision is a compelling way to understand the generation and sharing of
explicit knowledge in scenario exercises—e.g., the research and crafting that goes into
scenario-building—as well as their dependence and impact on implicit knowledge in
organizational communities (i.e., participants’ mental models and sensemaking abilities).
It focuses our attention on how scenario processes socialize and externalize participants’
tacitly-held strategic mental models for recombination and internalization as new models
(Ogilvy, Nonaka & Konno, 2014). The SECI model could influence Foresight 2.0
innovation by suggesting a framework for the ways knowledge flows in foresight
exercises and is understood that spur a wider diversity of foresight participants acting
together to challenge or complement entrenched traditional expert knowledge hierarchies.
Moreover, the focus of ba on integrating physical and virtual interactions within a
knowledge community promotes hybrid combinations of face-to-face and online media in
Foresight 2.0 innovation.
Lévy focuses on knowledge community members carrying out rational data-
orientated activities such as using ICTs to generate, categorize, archive and disseminate
! 140!
both new and existing knowledge, relying on an austere “library” model that tends to
overlook how playful liminality catalyzes not only engagement but also imagination to
overcome entrenched mental models in strategic conversations. This recalls the data
harvesting focus emphasized in Schatzman et al.’s vision of Foresight 2.0 but it does not
fulfill the communal meaning-generation and sharing mission of the ba concept, nor does
it encompass the generative dialogues that emerge in organizational sensemaking. A
corresponding contrast can be found in the Foresight 2.0 discourse between scenario
planner Jamais Cascio’s (2006) vision of “open source scenario planning” and ARG
designer Jane McGonigal’s public participatory futures game projects for Institute For
The Future and other clients (McGonigal, 2011). The first resonates with the library
model in calling for an open source Wikipedia-style collection of scenario building
blocks (such as data elements for driving forces, weak signals, futures tropes, etc.)
derived from existing and hypothetical scenario exercises that all foresight professionals
and amateurs can access and contribute to. In contrast, McGonigal’s game design
philosophy is founded on the idea that the transformative emotional power of fun through
social play experiences is central to changing participants’ cognitive habits and mental
models. Her future-orientated ARG designs crucially have participatory knowledge
creation and organization, often through new media tools, at their heart but these are
understood as being secondary to the social experience of sensemaking about the future
in a context of creative liminality and playfulness. McGonigal’s futures ARG
experiments, however, have only loosely used narrative and have primarily been intended
for intellectual experimentation, education and entertainment and have little or no
connection with the vital decision-making and sensemaking processes of organizations
! 141!
where the strategic conversation functions of scenario planning are presumed to change
both the organization’s strategic vision and its members’ understanding of the future. The
potential of the ba in this notion of creative strategic conversations depends on the
intertwining of narrative sensemaking with impactful strategic thinking and doing within
organizations.

Creative Strategic Conversation as a Source of Narrative
We can define the creative strategic conversation concept within the
organizational scenario planning context as changing strategic mental models in a SECI
based knowledge community that is instantiated through ICTs. In addition, this
conversation is constituted through narrative sensemaking as a liminal creative space for
shared meaning-making and action across different kinds of media, a ba, that can drive
both these functions for foresight scenarios. This is a social process that turns shared data
and tacit knowledge (mental models about the future) into explicit knowledge (scenario
construction and analysis) and then reconstitutes it as narrative building blocks to create
new or revised mental models. The key question is how does this narrative sensemaking
perspective help extend theory-building for the creative strategic conversation concept?
Influenced by the “linguistic turn” that swept the social sciences, since the
early 1980s there has been an increasingly robust theorization of the role of narratives in
organizational communication and management (Czarniawska, 1999; Gabriel, 2000;
Boje, 2001; Johansson & Heide, 2008). This multi-faceted focus treats narrative not only
as a methodological approach, theoretical lens, and form of data (Rhodes & Brown,
2005), but it also concurs with a broad theoretical consensus, as first argued by Eisenberg
! 142!
& Riley (1988), that narrative is a fundamental form of sensemaking process through
which organizational reality is constituted and made meaningful—and that this also
converges with the principle that communication is the foundation of organizational
reality (see also Brown, Stacey & Nandhakumar, 2008). This consensus is rooted in the
belief that human reasoning about how to make sense of, and to take action in
organizations is constituted and performed through narrative.
This understanding begins with the premise that all humans are storytelling
animals and therefore narrative is fundamental to how we interpret and communicate
about the world; consequently it is also crucial to how all institutions and social
relationships operate (Fisher, 1984; Bruner, 1991). Our storytelling abilities, whether as
individuals, groups, or in terms of larger collectives such as organizations entails drawing
on a pool of narratively interpreted events and experience elements in the past and
present to understand and enact possible trajectories—the completion of further stories—
into the future or in relation to other kinds of uncertainty (Polkinghorne, 1988). These
operations of ordering and meaning-giving to explain, make claims about, and to predict
causalities and sequential logics in events are the workings of narrative sensemaking.
This is the knowledge generation that storytelling drives. In organizational
communication and management studies, the development of strategy is considered “one
of the most prominent, influential and costly stories told in organizations” (Barry &
Elmes, 1997, p. 430). Stories are considered a preferred currency for sensemaking (Boje,
1991) in organizations’ internal and external activities (Weick, 1995). They are not
merely vehicles for communicating or generating data, nor are they simply a way of
creating emotional and psychological engagement but are inherently a crucial means for
! 143!
“interpreting [events], enriching them, enhancing them, and infusing them with meaning”
(Gabriel, 2000, p. 31), whether that involves professional and highly crafted public
narratives (Brown, 2004) or casual anecdotes, story fragments, and narrative cues in
everyday informal office politics and reality comprehension (Boje, 1991; Pacanowsky &
Trujillo, 1983; Riley, 1983). Stories are “the main source of knowledge in the practice of
organizing” (Czarniawska, 1997, p. 5-6).
How then can we understand the relationship between stories and
conversation? Cooren, Taylor and Van Every (2006), proponents of the Montreal school
of Communicative Constitution of Organization (CCO) theory which equates organizing
with communicating, argued that organizations are best understood as conversations
constituted through networks of obligations, transactions and other interactions. While
texts are defined as what is being said, conversation is understood as “what is
accomplished in the saying” (Robichaud, Giroux & Taylor 2004, p. 617). Conversations
are understood through interpretative frameworks of sensemaking—the semi-fixed,
shifting “metaconversation” of rules, contracts, that create a variable assemblage of
scripted elements for talking about issues and shaping individual and organizational
identities. The events—and the actions, motivations, and causalities related to them—in
the conversations are necessarily expressed as narrative since that is the foundation of
sensemaking. Thus creating plausible understanding out of uncertainty and/or new
information, which in turn can lead to enactment and assertion attempts, is the
accomplishment of the conversation.
Expressing narratives of accomplishment, whether they refer to past successes
or lessons learned or the goals and challenges of the future, is at the heart of
! 144!
organizational strategy discourse. As Freedman (2013) describes in his magisterial
history of strategy, strategists are dramatists attempting to persuade others to believe and
act upon their stories; they constantly develop new story options for their characters—the
decision-makers and players of a situation under analysis. Whether this involves, as
Freedman puts it, writing new “scripts” of strategic decisions or recycling (or rewriting)
old ones from organizational memory, the argument a strategist makes is “a story about
power told in the future tense from the point of view of a leading character”.
7
Such
practices are not just about making targeted persuasive arguments but are also acts of
strategic shared meaning-making that help create or reorientate discourses and mental
models in both collaborative and conflict-driven ways (Miskimmon, O’Loughlin &
Roselle, Routledge, 2013). As Chermack (2006) has argued, scenario creation itself is a
form of rough theory-building about the way the world works. Narrative creativity in the
knowledge community of the creative strategic conversation can be thought of then as the
generation and critique of theories about how different strategic options make sense and
work in various future contexts through recombining script elements or scenario building
blocks.
If we understand the creative strategic conversation as providing a knowledge
community source for strategic narrative sensemaking, we can hybridize Cascio’s wiki
vision and McGonigal’s focus on the liminality of creative play. This combination
highlights the narrative foundation of scenario liminality in combination with the library
metaphor and knowledge management focus of Lévy’s vision. This combination is the
basis for this paper’s suggested theory-building and practical innovation route for
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
7
Indeed, the term “scenario” itself was originally coined in the 1940s for foresight use by a
Hollywood screenwriter working at the RAND Corporation thinktank, Leo Rosten, who
borrowed a now archaic term for screenplay (Ringland & Schwartz, 2006).
! 145!
scenarios that can take the foresight field beyond the limitations of the current prevailing
data and piecemeal foci of Foresight 2.0 experimentation.
In their initial work on developing a storytelling-based theoretical focus for
evaluating scenario planning, Bowman, MacKay, Masrani & McKiernan (2013) support
other scholars’ concerns that bringing participants together for a strategic conversation is
insufficient for scenario planning goals (Jarzabkowski & Balogun, 2009). However, one
crucial dimension of scenario-based strategic (and, I would add, creative) conversation
that Bowman et al. identify, but is not addressed significantly by the strategic
conversation and scenario planning literature, is the function of storytelling within the
process.
While the importance of scenarios’ status as narrative has been generally
acknowledged in the scenario planning and foresight literatures (Schwartz, 1991; Fahey
& Randall, 1998, Provo, Ruona, Lynham & Miller, 1998), little attention has been given
to its development as the basis of practice or theory in scenario planning. What attention
has been given to serious theory-building in the scenario planning field has generally
focused on narrative as a secondary support function—as simply a communication
vehicle for information (Rasmussen, 2008) or a mnemonic device (Schroeder, 2011)—
rather than as being central to the generation of new knowledge or cognitive change.
Even Bowman et al., who promote the importance of foresight participants being co-
creators of the storytelling experience, are concerned primarily with the emotional and
psychological affective power of stories to help engage participants with strategic
reasoning rather than narrative processes as a medium for knowledge creation itself
! 146!
through which the participants can also transform their organization’s and each others’
mental models.
This undertheorization can be attributed to both professional insecurity in
comparing narrative approaches with rival positivist and quantitative methods (Ogilvy,
Nonaka & Konno, 2014) as well as the previously discussed anxieties about serious
foresight expertise being confused with science fiction entertainment (Godet & Roubelat,
1996; Li, 2013).
Jay Ogilvy, one of the original founders of Global Business Network
8
has
argued, while scenario practitioners may often have been embarrassed to admit it, the use
of narrative as a creative reasoning mode has long been a core part of how scenario
planning has attempted to change people’s mental models about the future. As he and
knowledge management/SECI theorists Ikujiro Nonaka and Noboru Konno have argued,
narrative is “uniquely appropriate to… the development, not just the communication,
of… strategies” (Ogilvy, Nonaka & Konno, 2014, p. 5) and is the “new epistemology of
business, the best route to sense-making in what is otherwise a very confusing
environment” (Konno, Nonaka & Ogilvy, 2014, p. 4). They believe that narrative-focused
strategy “promotes the restoration of a dynamic world making that [data-focused]
analytical or deductive strategies tend to miss” (Ogilvy, Nonaka & Konna 2014, p. 17).
Crucially, this “world making” through narrative is not just a matter of transmission to
audiences: “The story is something more than a descriptive text; as the story becomes
related to the reader’s own experience, the reader acts as an operator and creator of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
8
Founded in 1987, GBN ceased business in 2013 (it was acquired by Deloitte in January 2013, as
part of the assets of the bankrupt Monitor consulting group; GBN was subsequently shut down).
GBN had long been widely regarded as the most influential and high-profile of scenario planning
consultancies.
! 147!
meanings” (p. 9). And this knowledge creation takes place through the virtuous SECI
cycle that is fostered by ba: “Narrative strategies can be shared through a process of
large-scale enplotment and smaller processes of meaning generation. Thus, ‘Ah, now I
see how I fit into the story!’” (p. 9). That is to say, now organizational members can
potentially construct their place within the new organizational vision.
In the creative strategic conversation, the interactions between the tacit mental
models of individual participants and the official narrative’s explicit mental models of
strategic options and decision rationales codified in organizational memory is being
“stirred up” and catalyzed by the scenario planning process. In the SECI flows created by
the process, the expression of the tacit mental models of future strategic options ideally
spur participants to greater creativity and imagination so that they are able to challenge
and transform those aspects of the official strategy that don’t make sense. In this way, the
symbolic interactions and claims about the strategic possibilities of the futures discussed
in this process are being conducted through the narrative process.
This spurring corresponds with the idea of scenario processes offering a
collective space of playful liminality that helps make sense of and answer organizational
strategy needs. In SECI terms, this playful liminality excites and extends the
Socialization and Combination stages of the cycle beyond the norms of the everyday
organizational strategic conversation. This is a richer idea of narrative creativity for our
conception of creative strategic conversation, although the question of how the forms and
sensemaking operations of narrative change in this adapted cross-media collective
intelligence vision remains.
! 148!
As previously mentioned, in the most well-known type of conventional
foresight scenario process (Schwartz, 1991; Scearce & Fulton, 2004)—sometimes known
as the scenario planning matrix approach—the crafting of narratives is typically done by
scenario experts who construct the stories in an Aristotelian beginning-middle-end
(BME) form reflecting a cause and effect linear argument: a starting situation, which is
influenced by trends or events, and then an endpoint at a set future horizon date.
Typically a 2x2 matrix set of scenarios is constructed, depicting four alternate futures
(along two “driving force” trend axes) encapsulating insights and data points gleaned
from extensive research, expert interviewing, and an organizational stakeholder
brainstorming process. Further workshop discussion of the scenario narratives by client
organization members will take place but the boundaries, driving force trends, and
endpoints of the narratives have been established by the experts and set in a closed, linear
narrative fashion—once participants are past the decision of which scenario to focus on
for the moment. The scope and radicalism of the strategic conversation is blunted; the
structure may in fact encourage the client organization management to focus on
promotion of new hegemonic “official” BME-style strategic narrative/mental model as an
end product. Davis, Bankes and Egner of RAND have argued that:
“One of the troubling aspects [of conventional scenario planning] is that while
scenarios… can open minds relative to the canonical future, they can also trap
people in new conceptual structures that are as limiting in their own way as was the
original structure. In the worst instances, and despite the admonitions of experts…
people may emerge from scenario-based exercises with a sense of inevitability…
participants may succumb to their instinctual desire to pick a story of the future and
then embrace it firmly” (2007, p. 4).
! 149!
Unfortunately, their solution is massive algorithmic scenario generation
through brute supercomputing power, which takes the emphasis on deductive data
harvesting and analysis and the removal of human sensemaking from the scenario-
building process even further. Despite rhetoric about “participatory” engagement of
stakeholder and expert representatives, the new RAND solution, typified by the
“Scenario Discovery Approach”, centres on algorithmic processes that are a black box for
most participants (Lempert, Bryant & Banks, 2008; Bryant & Lempert, 2010). The BME
linearity of strategic conversation structured by the conventional scenario process does
still generate a SECI-style knowledge community flow of human sensemaking that the
RAND algorithmic massive computing solution would seem to negate.
Client organization and stakeholder participants in that conventional process
experience Socialization and Combination effects especially in brainstorming and
interviewing processes in the early phases which are designed to produce insights, facts,
trends, visions, and other elements that can be recombined and incorporated into the
official scenario narratives. Schoemaker (1995) identifies four kinds of scenario
“building blocks” that come out of these early ideation processes: drivers of change (or
driving forces), key uncertainties, basic (i.e. , predictable) trends, and rules of interaction
(i.e., causal and system relationships). However, these building blocks are then assembled
into BME narratives by experts and typically carried out “backstage” in a tightly
controlled, fairly linear process; scenario exercise participants typically only see or
engage with the finished crafted whole stories. This is why Chermack (2003) in the quote
cited earlier, views whole scenario narratives themselves as building blocks for strategic
conversation. Even in more participatory varieties (Van Notten, Rotmans, Van Asselt &
! 150!
Rothman, 2003) of traditional face-to-face scenario planning, where attendees in
workshop sessions write their own stories in response to prompt scenarios set by the
scenario consultants, the emphasis is typically on the final story form of the scenarios and
their analysis/recrafting by expert facilitators and analysts. Furthermore the logistical
constraints of the face-to-face format by itself again makes even more participatory
scenario-building workshop exercises a closed-off, small-scale affair both in terms of
attendance and time.
There is a danger that this kind of narrowly conventional and limited BME
version of narrative will help perpetuate top-down, expert-led hegemonic knowledge
attitudes if it is carried over to new media collective intelligence adaptations of foresight
scenario processes. This undermines both the participatory creative potential of new
media ecology use as well as the special value of narrative as a polyvocal and flexible
sensemaking mode for handling turbulent, complex strategic conditions—as scenario
planning theorists (Ramírez et al., 2010; Ogilvy, 2012) and post-“linguistic turn”
organizational narrative researchers have emphasized (Boje, 1991).
The encapsulation of organizational knowledge community interactions by the
idea of creative and strategic conversations highlight what is in principle an endless and
constantly fluctuating process within organizations. The Montreal school of CCO argues
that while many different perspectives and voices are contained in an organization, the
organization’s constitution relies on a process that produces a “metanarrative that enfolds
and transcends the narratives of the communities composing an organization” (Robichaud
et al., 2004, p. 617). As was previously mentioned, the metaconversation provides rules
for possible scripts of accomplishment in organizational communication—and this
! 151!
provides the framework for expressing the sequence of motivations, rationales, events,
causes, and effects (i.e., narrative generation) that allow accomplishment according to a
legitimated range of strategic understandings and decision points dealing with
uncertainty. This could be understood, then, as the mental modelling of future
possibilities. As other organizational sensemaking theorists argue, the reality of
organizations is socially constructed through narrative processes from networks of
conversations. (Ford & Ford, 1995; Brown & Rhodes, 2005).
Bowman et al. propose that for a scenario planning exercise to be deemed
successful, we must look beyond the too-broad conception of conversation and consider
instead the salient feature of scenario planning—storytelling. Such “storytelling should
involve temporal sequencing, enplotting, novelty and be memorable” (2013, p. 737) for a
scenario exercise to be effective in their view. The last two elements of that proposal are
not characteristic dimensions intrinsic to narrative, but the first two are and can be
understood as bound up with the cause and effect accomplishment logic in how the
Montreal School distinguishes the notion of narrative from the concept of the ongoing
forms of conversation. In the classic and still dominant Aristotelian form of narrative, the
temporal sequence—defined by the univocal controlling author—is the beginning-
middle-end (BME) formula, and this conceptually parallels similarly unilinear cause and
effect plotting. Brown & Rhodes (2005) highlight the prediction of future organizational
behavior based on narrative analysis (Martin, 1992) as one of the main uses of stories by
members of organizations as revealed in organizational studies. Key to this, they argue,
“is the use of narrative order to delineate emplotment and causality out of potentially
chaotic and disorganized (Cooper, 1990) life at work” (2005 p6-7). This sensemaking is
! 152!
always about constructing paths from one situation to another, meaning that it is always a
temporal and not a static process (Czarniawska, 2004).
However, while the emplotment of narrative for strategic decision-making in
terms of predicted cause and effect, starting situation and end, is congruent with the BME
model, what is crucial is the process of narrative construction in strategy-making. In
particular, the necessary flexibility in the sensemaking feedback loop means that BME
structures cannot represent the final product (just as in the old military adage, plans never
survive first contact with the enemy). Rather the strategic narrative sensemaking must be
understood as components of ongoing feedback interaction with the environment and so
must be subject to constant possible reassembly. To assume that BME emplotment is the
ultimate product and the guiding template for narrative sensemaking would be the
equivalent of rigid rational planning and forecast modeling in strategy and management.
This is precisely what scenario planning is trying to overcome. Rather than crafting a
BME narrative as the final product of the strategizing process, the focus is on participants
brainstorming and recombining many different drivers, trends, events, factors and having
multiple scenario narratives around the same issue created from them. That is, this is an
active sensemaking process about their organization’s possible futures and their myriad
links with the various, contested narratives of the present.
It is important to understand however that such metanarratives and the mental
models that they circumscribe and animate are not static but must be flexible and evolve
as the knowledge communities within the organization that shape them generates new
knowledge or reconfigures existing knowledge. Sensemaking is an ongoing process even
when generally systematized in routines—and effective sensemaking must always take
! 153!
into account both the possibilities of the rupture of routines as well as the multiple, both
conflicting and overlapping, frames of sensemaking that are perennially present (Weick,
1995). Moreover, while a strong, cohesive linear metanarrative may be vital for such
purposes as defining organizational identity and hierarchical control, it can be very
counterproductive in strategic thinking—a classic failing of rational planning in
management theory (Mintzberg, 1994). Narrative processes in organizations are a
fundamental way of making sense of the flux and uncertainty both in the environment
and internally, but the linear metanarrative tends to lock this performance into what the
narrative theorist Bruner (1986) described as the “logico-scientific” mode of cognitive
functioning which presumes that there is an empirically discoverable logical objective
truth. However, this kind of sensemaking is ineffective at dealing with flux and
uncertainty if the organization cannot effectively exert dominant metanarrative control
and power over its environment/conditions and the local stories generated about them.
Even when partially effective, such control is subject to entropy. Furthermore, in the
current global historical era of heightened uncertainty and turbulence (Wilkinson &
Ramirez, 2010), increasing scope and velocity of the complexity in organizations’
internal and external environments and knowledge resources, underscores the need for
what Bruner championed—interpretative, highly flexible, narrative sensemaking which is
context-sensitive and bottom-up in its meaning-making, and more suited to dealing with
complexity (Tsoukas & Hatch, 2001).
The rapid flux and ongoing disruption in the media landscape suggests that
ICTs are a source for greater environmental complexity in the sensemaking process. The
transmedia storytelling paradigm, as understood through Lévy’s collective intelligence
! 154!
concept, shows how the conversational fount can be practically enhanced by adding new
media capabilities and the cultural practices of their users.

Transmedia Storytelling for Scenarios
Lévy’s idea of collective intelligence has been an important influence on the
development of Jenkins’ concepts of transmedia storytelling and “convergence culture”
(Jenkins, 2006). The latter term describes refers to cultural changes due to the
proliferation of new media technologies, platforms, and practices in the Internet era. This
proliferation has shattered the traditional broadcast audience landscape in highly
divergent ways, while the corporate technology dream of media convergence in a single
advanced living room electronic box has proven elusive. What it has actually led to is the
widespread and transformative emergence of consumer/citizen media practices by
fostering an expanded and deepened “participatory folk culture[s] [where] average people
[use new media] tools to archive, annotate, appropriate and recirculate content” (Jenkins
2006, p. 93). So this generates knowledge communities—collective intelligences—of
media users across the technologically fragmented digital landscape, and these
communities creatively reuse and redistribute content. It is this participatory culture that
creates media convergence by reusing, recombining and redistributing media content
fragments from across the landscape through hunter-gatherer behavior, and doing so in a
collective way. TS strategy is of course widely deployed for business and audience
growth purposes but, as Jenkins has argued, TS is also the “ideal aesthetic form for an era
of collective intelligence” (2007).
! 155!
Lévy has also identified the knowledge activities of online media fan
communities as described in Henry Jenkins’ work as exemplary of creative conversation
collective intelligence phenomena (2011, p. 92). Indeed, Jenkins (2002) has argued that
online fan communities driven by Web 2.0 era participatory culture practices represent
some of the best examples of Lévy’s (1997, p. 217) utopian ideal of an ICT-enhanced
knowledge community space, the “cosmopedia”, where “the members of a thinking
community can search, inscribe, connect, consult, explore… Not only does the
cosmopedia make available to the collective intellect all of the pertinent knowledge
available to it… but it also serves as a site of collective discussion, negotiation and
development.” The rise of the modern transmedia storytelling paradigm has been fuelled
by its effectiveness as a framework for understanding, designing, and leveraging this kind
of grassroots knowledge community for media narrative projects. This also resonates
with the ba vision of a knowledge community space that melds knowledge flows between
virtual and face-to-face interactions, a crucial consideration for the transition of
traditional scenario planning workshop practices to Foresight 2.0. Remember that a ba or
a cosmopedia knowledge community that includes various media and face-to-face
interaction is not automatically transmedia nor storytelling-based. Nor is it inherently a
site for playful technologies that spur liminal sensemaking. The TS paradigm is important
here because it suggests how an organization’s foresight cosmopedia or ba could
potentially drive knowledge generation and flows through narratives built and
experienced across multiple media. This process might be better able to challenge
established mental models about the present as well as the future.
! 156!
To recap, transmedia storytelling drew on Marsha Kinder’s 1991 concept of
transmedia (Jenkins, 2003)—the distribution of entertainment media content across
multiple platforms according to a commercial franchise-building and spreading logic.
Jenkins’ narrative-focused expansion of the concept describes a media aesthetic and
strategic paradigm that promotes a range of practices and philosophies for coordinating
storytelling across increasingly fragmented media consumer ecologies and
platform/channel landscapes in the post-broadcast era (2006). Transmedia storytelling
projects in this contemporary conception most notably found success in mainstream
media with Hollywood blockbuster movie franchises such as The Matrix and in the
independent arts and entertainment scene with, perhaps most notably, alternate reality
games (ARGs).
The transmedia storytelling concept has since been widely adopted for practice
and innovation in other fields including advertising and education.
9
Jenkins has
emphasized that many valid and useful expressions of transmedia logic besides
storytelling are possible (2009).
Jenkins explains that TS is “a process where integral elements of a fiction get
dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating an
unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes its own
contribution to the unfolding of the story” (2009). The characteristic type of media user
behavior in this system is that of the hunter-gatherer, searching out pieces of information
across the dispersed parts of the narrative and found in different parts of the media
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
9
As applications and experimentation with TS have proliferated across different sectors, new
concepts such as transmedia branding (Tenderich, 2014), transmedia learning (Herr-Stephenson
et al., 2013), transmedia activism (Constanza-Chock, 2014) have emerged. These are, to different
extents concerned with narrative communication, albeit in a less central way.
! 157!
ecology, and then making sense of them through assemblage, most effectively in a
knowledge community in which members pool their information, expertise, and goals.
This behavior is of course common on the Internet beyond TS projects. The point is that
the TS paradigm explicitly focuses on catalyzing and leveraging the process of widely
dispersed narrative engagement. Jenkins has noted that this behavior also can apply to
non-fictional narrative sensemaking--whether a deliberate TS storyworld exists or not.
For instance, learning about a political candidate such as Obama from multiple texts and
sources dispersed across a media ecosystem (Jenkins, 2011).
TS is not just an artistic strategy but one attuned to the need of media
franchises and creatives to capture audiences in an era of increased media fragmentation
and turbulence due particularly to the end of dominant broadcast culture as well as the
proliferation of internet-enabled platforms and channels (Albarran, 2013). Von
Stackelberg & Jones (2014) are among the first to promote the value of applying TS
practices to futures work. They argue that TS answers the need for foresight professionals
to be more persuasive storytellers and embrace new media participatory culture.
The combination of the strategic conversation and creative conversation
concepts with a focus on narrative sensemaking extended with the core principles of TS
will help foresight scenario theory-building connect with the latest thinking about
innovative practices for engaging participatory audiences in the new media arts.

Core Principles of Transmedia
The dimensions of practice through which TS achieves this knowledge
community generation and engagement are described by Henry Jenkins (2007, 2009,
! 158!
2010, 2011) in his account of 7 core principles of transmedia storytelling. These serve as
a highly influential starting point for scenario innovators new to transmedia storytelling
(do note that Jenkins emphasizes these concepts are not meant to be exhaustive and that
variations appropriate to fields beyond TS’s main domain of the storytelling arts can be
developed.). The principles offered are interrelated and overlapping, and require
explanation in order to explore their connections with the creative strategic conversation
concept. For the purposes of discussion here, I cluster the 7 principles into three groups:

1. Worldbuilding; Subjectivity; Performance
2. Seriality; Spreadability vs Drillability
3. Continuity vs. Multiplicity; Immersion vs. Extractability

Also important to these explorations are the concepts of multimodality, radical
textuality, and additive comprehension. Jenkins (2007) argues that these are crucial to
what makes a project truly transmedia and not merely one that takes place across various
media platforms or is multimedia in the sense of containing a variety of media
functionalities. Multimodality refers to the different communication capabilities and user
experiences of various media (and perhaps genres) that are used by the project (in the
hybrid SECI-influenced approach to foresight scenarios in this paper, face-to-face is a
crucial mode). Thus different media affordances can be designed to match the tastes and
capabilities of different subgroups in the audience. Radical intertextuality means the
writing and reading of multiple distinct texts within a medium or genre. So, for example,
scenario exercises can be understood as guiding participants to work through multiple
! 159!
scenarios—narrative texts about different futures within the same strategic conversation.
Additive comprehension refers to how additional texts—while each one is
comprehensible and meaningful in itself—cause us to revisit existing ones and changes
our perspective of the whole collection. With foresight scenarios in mind again, this can
be seen to occur for instance, in scenario exercises involving participatory scenario
generation—where a new scenario element or vignette describing an alternative future
possibility is created by a participant is circulated and causes other participants to
reconsider already existing scenario element/vignettes as well the overall future
narratives described by the scenario exercise prompt.
I would argue too that while a combination of these characteristics is needed
for a project to be transmedia, they do not mean that the project is focused on the
narrative experience. For instance, the Future of Facebook crowd-forecasting based
scenario generation exercise used as one of Raford’s (2014) case studies satisfied the
conditions of multimodality (communication and discussion was served across multiple
different online and social media platforms), radical intertextuality (myriad scenarios
with related elements were generated from an exercise questionnaire that promoted and
guided many threads of discussion on those elements in often radically different
directions to each other), and additive comprehension (additional threads of discussion in
any part of the media ecology were ideally meaningful arguments in themselves but also
holistically caused participants to reflect and rethink other parts of the discussion); so it
can be said that this exercise was truly an attempt at transmedia. However, the scenario
narratives ultimately produced by the project’s expert coordinators were created using
ideas they selected from the questionnaire and discussion data. This did not involve a
! 160!
substantial narrative reflection and creation experience during the scenario-building for
the participants (in fact less, it seems, than in the typical traditional scenario planning
workshop process).

Case Studies: Conceptual/Design Discussion and Practical Findings
In this section, each of the three clusters of TS principles will be addressed in
relation to a case study pilot experiment in TS-guided scenario process. Prefacing the
discussion for each cluster section will be a brief descriptive case study overview of the
pilot. Next the discussion of each cluster is focused on a conceptual exploration of how
explorations of the cluster’s TS principles shaped the design vision for the pilot; finally
practical findings—problems and potential—from the implementation and post-mortems
of the pilot cases are discussed.

1. Worldbuilding; Subjectivity; Performance
Pilot Concept: Creating a foresight scenario-building storyworld-based creative strategic
conversation stretching across existing multiple industry conference communities in
different locales and timeframes, so generating an ongoing foresight knowledge
community that connected the different conferences.
Method: The design envisioned connecting and combining scenario-generating
conversations from both off-line and various on-line conference-related contexts, and
pooling their knowledge content online to feed into other conferences.
! 161!
Operational Limitations: Beyond the conceptual design stage, the logistical, technical,
and social complexities of organizing and implementing a prototype of this process
proved to be unmanageable within the scope of this study.

Conceptual and Design Discussion
TS projects expand through different media genres, languages, and platforms
(Scolari, 2009). They create and elaborate “storyworlds” that cohere, consolidate, and
catalyze the intertextual relations between TS’s distributed stories within a shared
imagined world (Apler & Herr-Stephenson 2013). Instead of the closed-off and
completed plot arcs and character foci of classic story forms, storyworlds are persisting
(or at least long-term) shared universes of constitutive elements (plot arcs and segments,
characters, events, settings, themes, visual and symbolic representations etc.) that make
up many different related texts and narratives (perhaps organized around a master one)—
and are geared towards encouraging and deepening narratives and/or the creation of new,
related ones within the defined universe. The content of the storyworld also includes
elements that have not yet been embedded in a narrative but help fill out the detailed
reality of the world and could plausibly be used in a narrative relevant to the storyworld.
TS projects range from those where a higher degree of centralized authorial or
franchise control over content creation is exerted to those where open participation in the
creative process by active fans and grassroots “prosumers” (producer-consumers) is
emphasized (Sokolova, 2012). TS design, then, attempts in these less or more open ways
to embrace a participatory knowledge culture, which includes on the one hand, prosumer
! 162!
content contributions to the storyworld, and on the other, the meta-discourse that
discusses and reflects on the storyworld.
These contributions are what is meant by worldbuilding, with content
contributions to storyworlds ranging from straightforward information to artistic creation
as well as explicit narrative constructions and extensions. The storyworld might be
understood best as a total cultural domain or geography that multiple interrelated stories
of a TS project share as a setting; it in principle encompasses all the stated and
potential—that is yet to be written or even thought of—details of such a setting’s world
and society. A storyworld might be wholly imagined or based on the real world but it is
by its very nature never complete (Alexander, 2013). For example, the last canonical
Sherlock Holmes stories by their original author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, were published
in 1927 and Doyle died in 1930. However, this does not mean that the possible range of
Sherlock Holmes stories is complete. Many additional stories set in Holmes’ fictional
storyworld have been written, broadcast, filmed etc. since Doyle’s death—and moreover,
many more future new stories (or expansions of existing stories) could be imagined using
the conventions of that world.
Borrowing from Lévy, Jenkins (2006) uses the term “cultural attractors” to
describe phenomena and structures which draw people into participatory knowledge
communities such as those generated by TS storyworlds, and “cultural activators” which
motivate them to perform tasks and roles that enable them to co-create the community
and contribute to the storyworld. To relate this to the creative strategic conversation, what
drives this attraction and activation is the compelling narrative and the network of
conversations about that narrative in the community that creates occasions and reasons
! 163!
for the stages of the SECI spiral. Furthermore, with the entertainment, marketing, and
artistic roots of TS projects, participation in their storyworld is primarily driven by a
sense of communal playfulness.
Playful creativity is activated to foster an “encyclopedic impulse” (Murray,
1997; Jenkins, 2007) for audiences. They are motivated to find pleasure in filling in the
gaps of the reality depicted, perhaps making it more plausible or more varied, and also
building upon hinted extensions of the world, thus making the storyworld larger and
richer with more branches. Reflecting the intertextuality and multimodality of
transmedia, such creativity may be purely textual and conceptual or could involve other
kinds of arts. These kinds of efforts, notably common and long-standing in science fiction
(Jenkins, 2002, 2009), can foster knowledge communities around storyworlds and
involve (as in the commercial media franchise world) both primary authors and their
audiences as co-creators. These creative and organizing knowledge behaviors are at the
heart of the SECI dynamics, where storyworlds serve as attractors for knowledge
communities.
Subjectivity refers to the ways extensions and other new content for the
existing narratives in the storyworld allow participants to explore through the
perspectives of different or wholly new characters. This resonates with a common
fundamental function of scenario planning—to expose participating decision-makers to
others’ perspectives, which they normally do not consider, challenging their mental
models by immersing them in these alternative stories/viewpoints. Performance describes
participants in worldbuilding who are acting out imagined story roles for each other
and/or outsiders (e.g., through immersing themselves in story creation and/or through
! 164!
engaging in creative acts of media production). Identification with such narrative roles
can also translate into analogically spurring and guiding action in the real world, for
example, when media franchise storyworlds are used to promote social activism (Brough
& Shresthova, 2011). Similarly, the liminal space of scenario planning can help
participants imagine themselves in their own or others’ roles in future strategic decision-
making situations, and working through the consequences of acting in those roles can
provide a form of organizational memory that can be drawn upon for real action in future.
Indeed, an earlier pre-Web 2.0 phase of foresight methods innovation was substantially
influenced by roleplaying and theatre arts, so laying the groundwork for more recent
innovations in experiential futures and foresight ARGs in today’s foresight field (Brooks,
2004; Candy, 2010; McGonigal, 2011).
There are promising cross-pollinations to be made here. But bearing in mind
the often great difficulties that conventional scenario planners have, even when working
in face-to-face workshop contexts where scenario exercise attendance is required by an
employer, in encouraging participants to imagine, contribute or even comment on
participant-generated scenario content, we should proceed with a cautious optimism as
creating an effective storyworld may be trying under the best of circumstances. From a
creative strategic conversation perspective for foresight scenarios, the storyworld could
possibly act as a persisting source for new narrative ideas as well as a ba or cosmopedia
for ongoing knowledge community interaction. The use of online community tools also
suggests how scenario-building processes and the conversations they generate can be
maintained over the longer term, in contrast to the very tight timeframes of conventional
scenario planning workshops. Subjectivity and performance are ways that the SECI
! 165!
process can produce tangible outcomes for the transformation of participants’ mental
models. For instance, participants being motivated to recombine their understanding of
their organization’s future possibilities through different perspectives (e.g. by
understanding and absorbing the perspectives of workers in different organizational roles
or ranks, or even of different genders, ethnicities etc., to modify and reconfigure their
tacit mental model knowledge of the organizations’ futures) and socializing and
codifying that knowledge in organizational memory through performance (e.g. by talking
with others and passing on insights gained from their tacit mental model shifts, and
through communicating them in written reports or other explicit codified mediums).
The scope and variety of subjectivity that would be considered legitimate in a
strategic foresight organizational exercise is likely more limited than the case of an
entertainment franchise’s fan community. Although unauthorized, fan-created narratives
might be subject to copyright legal action and take-down notices, the risks in a strategic
exercise within an organization or even within a community or event space for multiple
organizations, are probably higher as participants’ jobs or reputations are much more
likely to be directly at stake). The “balanced” solution of designing a transmedia
storyworld that provides plenty of space for grassroots creativity while preserving overall
control by the owners might seem an ideal compromise preferable to both the typical
traditional scenario planning process and the radical openness of open source scenario
planning and foresight projects. In the former, domination by elite decision-makers and
hegemonic influences over the conditions of discussion are constant threats that might be
mitigated by the facilitators but still can stifle the scope of discussion (Wright, 2004).
And the latter, while laudable, is unattractive for most client organizations that want to
! 166!
guarantee some control, and can also pose problems for quality and participant guidance
in managing scenario-building. In practice, then, this balancing is likely difficult to attain.

Practical Findings
One of my experimental TS-based scenario planning exercise designs
originally sought to engage the participants of transmedia-related industry conferences.
(This idea of using transmedia storytelling influenced scenario exercises to help imagine
the futures of transmedia-related industry was inspired by what the design and futures
scholar and innovator Stuart Candy calls “recursive futures.” This references foresight
exercises that address the possible futures of foresight itself, an approach which I
interpret as aiming for “triple-loop learning” (Tosey, Visser & Saunders, 2012) that
considers how future trends and changes may impact the fundamental conception of the
field itself. This choice of industry is not meant to imply that TS scenario techniques are
only suitable for transmedia-related industry!).
In early stages of proposal design, this prototype idea was designed to catalyze
imagination and debate about possible futures for the transmedia industry using a variety
of online media channels and participatory scenario creation websites across multiple
conference events in the US, Canada, and Brazil. These events would be held at different
times of the year, with the scenario process engaging with participants both in-person and
as online communities during and in-between the events. In the final version of the
proposed scenario work, the scope of the study was limited to conferences in the US.
Participants would respond to a guiding scenario prompt framework [see Appendix for
the proposed instrument submitted with IRB application] that would be organized across
! 167!
multiple media contexts, including face-to-face discussion, social media, website forums,
and on-screen conference broadcast media. The vision was a creative strategic
conversation that united the conference communities in a narrative sensemaking
knowledge community for transmedia foresight.
In the envisioned process design, two contrasting storyworld frameworks for
prompting scenario creation were designed as scaffolding for this knowledge
community
10
. While the two storyworlds represent opposite 10 year futures for the
transmedia industry, they would share the pooling of scenario narrative elements
generated through the participatory scenario exercises. During and in-between
conferences, scenarios generated, along with supporting content, through the two
storyworlds by participants would be pooled online using a media platform hub that
facilitated community building, conversation, and transmedia participatory culture
behaviors. This narrative content would be drawn from both the conferences’ face-to-face
conversations (as well as through other media) and the online scenario world-building
interactions and discussions between conferences, and the elements could be remixed and
shared between the two storyworlds. Furthermore, it was proposed that participation in
the online storyworld-building be opened up to audiences beyond the conference
attendees to promote a greater diversity of ideas and reach, following the ideals of
participatory culture but still being managed and controlled by the scenario exercise
facilitators and conference organizers.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
10
This framework proposed two intentional scenario storyworld scaffoldings, dubbed Roots and
Footloose. The former suggested that TS work would become increasingly specialized and
narrowly codified in future. The latter suggested the opposite: that TS practices would spread
very widely and become increasingly loosely defined.
! 168!
However, the face-to-face conference events would remain the core nodes of
the scenario storyworlds. In TS parlance, they were the “motherships”—the central
narrative streams or storyworld areas in entertainment transmedia franchises and the
attractors for participatory knowledge communities that the conference exercise vision
depended on. This would be necessary too for cooperation from the conference runners.
There were a number of problems with this vision for creating a creative
strategic conversation, including the huge practical challenge of building compelling
enough storyworlds (and instilling in them a vital sense of playful creativity outside of an
entertainment context) as well as using them effectively with scenario planning prompt
frameworks to attract and motivate participation. For the theoretical scope of this paper,
however, of most interest here are the power balance problems that may emerge among
the different modes of media and their audiences, and the possibility that they might
undermine or fragment the SECI processes around the storyworlds. If the face-to-face
conference discussions are necessarily the “mothership” narrative experience, this
marginalizes the online and social media interactions, particularly in regards to those
participating only virtually. Furthermore, multimodality means that there are likely to be
power differentials among participants within and between different media platforms in
terms of the affordances and capabilities of the media. This power structure of the
transmedia ecology has more layers of complexity than the conventional face-to-face
scenario workshop setting and could be rigid and hegemonic in its inequalities—what
might result could be a stratified and compartmentalized ba, constraining the scope for
diverse subjectivity and performance play, with the transmedia aspect reduced to a
sideshow.
! 169!
2. Seriality; Spreadability vs Drillability
Pilot Concept: Creating a foresight knowledge community centred around the interactive
multimedia generation and remixing of scenario “building-blocks” online.
Method: Adapt an existing experimental transmedia learning platform developed by a
third party to use for remixing. Use narrative content analysis based on Dervin’s (2003)
multi-stage sense-making journey model to turn scenario narratives into “chunks” for
remixing.
Operational Limitations: Unfortunately, the experimental transmedia learning platform
was never brought to an usable operational status within the timeframe of this study. A
substitute, more conventional online survey-based exercise was used to test the content
analysis. 28 participants took part. But this exericse, in turn, ran into challenging content
analysis issues.

Conceptual and Design Discussion
Seriality refers to the dissemination of narrative experiences in the media
landscape, through “the meaningful chunking and dispersal of story-related information”
(Jenkins, 2010) for the purpose of economic viability and media consumer convenience.
Each “chunk” should be engaging on its own yet also motivate media consumers to return
for more (a classic example would be cliffhanger drama episodes). TS undertakes
chunking to a more extreme degree, dispersing story information across not just over time
but across different parts of media ecologies, with the expectation that media consumers
will actively seek such chunks out, and often collectively organize to do so. A TS project
might encourage experiencing the narrative sequencing of chunks linearly or non-linearly
! 170!
(for instance through participant co-creation of remixes, or open-ended branching
storylines), or both. TS chunking also characteristically takes place through the radical
intertextuality and multimodality of the dispersal of chunks across different whole text
constructs within the same medium (i.e., multiple different stories set in the same
storyworld created in the same medium) compared to stories that cut across different
media (with the different affordances of each medium contributing to the expanded scope
of the storyworld) (Jenkins 2011). Exploring and absorbing as many of these chunks as
possible appeals to the hunter-gatherer mindset that is a key factor underlying active
participation in TS storyworlds. Participant creation, remixing, redistribution, and re-
reading of these chunks generate the transmedia effect of additive comprehension.
The value of these chunks for participant creativity and worldbuilding also
motivates two characteristic types of participant behavior in TS knowledge communities.
Spreadability was introduced as an alternative to the prevailing viral and memetic models
of how ideas are disseminated across new and old media; spreadability in contrast
emphasizes the agency of media users who actively interpret, create, remix and/or
repurpose content, ideas and stories, often without official authorization, in their
communities (Jenkins, Ford & Green, 2013). As knowledge behavior, this involves
“scanning across the media landscape in search of meaningful bits of data” for such
activities, rather than just passing on viral memes from official media channels (Jenkins,
2010). Spreadability is orientated to engaging as wide a media landscape as possible in
order to expand a transmedia storyworld’s narrative scope, engagement and influence.
Drillability (Mittel, 2009), however, refers to the desire of some storyworld community
participants to engage themselves in an in-depth exploration of a specific narrative or
! 171!
content focus in the storyworld, which spurs them to become experts and/or to deepen the
narrative and content of that focus for others. For instance, fans of a science fiction
franchise may be motivated to describe and explain the futuristic technologies to depths
not thought of by the official creators, perhaps even learning new knowledge about real
world science to do so.
Seriality’s chunking mechanism maps well on to the idea of building blocks of
scenario planning narrative elements. Spreadability and drillability also describe how the
SECI activities of the creative strategic conversation knowledge community could
expand its discourse space, assuming that a foresight scenario storyworld has a longer-
term, persistent duration as an active online community, beyond the typical workshop day
or weekend duration of conventional scenario planning exercises. Drillability could
describe the deepening of codified knowledge, enriching the specificity and
sophistication regarding organizational memory of strategic foresight scripts.
Spreadability could describe the distribution of activities across an organization, multiple
organizations, or the public generally, depending on the communication goals of the
foresight initiative. Vital to this notion is the repeated recycling of the combination phase
of the SECI cycle, in which the chunks—the building blocks of narrative elements—are
remixed and reinterpreted by members of the community, and then reintroduced as
potential new narratives about the future. This would avoid the monolinearity and closed-
BME narrative biases of conventional scenario planning.

! 172!
Practical Findings
I attempted to elaborate a design for the adaptation of an experimental online
transmedia learning community platform with the goal of realizing the conference-to-
conference transmedia scenario planning vision described above, as well as to test other
experimental variations to implement the creative strategic conversation idea, This
platform, developed by a team from another research lab, was designed to support
participatory culture activities, centring on the creation and remixing of interactive
educational modules comprised of user-created building blocks of hyperlinked or original
text, images, audio, and video—and embodying the transmedia concepts of
multimodality, intertextuality, and additive comprehension [see screenshots in the
Appendix].
For example, a user could create various individual discrete blocks that
contained one piece of original media and/or hyperlinks to content on the wider web;
annotate the blocks, and challenge other users to a knowledge task, then designate
multilinear pathways between them (and/or blocks created by other users) so other users
could follow a storyline or learning journey. Participants could also experience, connect
with, remix and adapt storylines/media blocks created by other users.
While I was not involved with the coding of the transmedia learning platform, I
worked on ways that its interactive capabilities could be reconfigured, with appropriate
content and frameworks, for strategic foresight scenario use. The platform, as it was
imagined/designed, could provide the online transmedia hub for the ba of transmedia
scenario planning efforts (with the creation, addition, and remixing of multimedia chunks
by the participant community) which would enable the filling out and intermingling of
! 173!
the two storyworlds that were offered, whether that involved drilling down on certain
aspects of the storyworld or creating new narratives. The built-in hyperlinking and social
media promotion functions would also facilitate spreadability.
Unfortunately technical problems meant the underlying transmedia platform
never achieved usable status. However, I did explore how the narrative building block
remixing might conceptually work by adapting sensemaking theory. This adaptation was
then used in a prototype scenario generation exercise that was implemented using an
ordinary online survey tool. The intention of this exercise was to collect participant-
generated scenarios which could then be analyzed in terms of constituent narrative
building blocks—according to the sensemaking framework. These might then be loaded
for remixing on a future working version the transmedia learning platform. As the
working version of the platform never came to be within the timeframe of this study, the
exercise was regarded as a stand-alone substitute instead. The participants in this
exercise were members of a local transmedia professional association (13 participants) as
well as students of local university classes (15 participants) on transmedia themes were
asked to imagine the future of transmedia over the next 10 years from the perspective of a
leader of a transmedia-related industry firm, real or fictional.
These stories were then analyzed using Dervin’s “sense-making” theory
(Dervin et al., 2003). Brenda Dervin’s “sense-making” was seen as especially apt for
addressing the practical question of the granularity and content of the creative strategic
conversation building blocks, as one of its primary uses has been for information and
communication platform user experience and knowledge development design. Dervin’s
framework was first developed in the 1960s (Cheuk & Dervin, 1999) as an alternative to
! 174!
transmission models of communication. It proposed viewing information as products of
situated human cognition that enables us to engage with a partly orderly, partly chaotic
world full of gaps. These gaps give us pause and confusion but also drive us to create
new knowledge (while also drawing on old knowledge), to imagine what we really wish
for, and to take steps toward those goals by attempting to bridge the gap with knowledge
and action (Dervin, 1998; Foreman-Wernet, 2003; Dervin, 2003). This is understood as a
never-ending process since the core assumption of sense-making is that discontinuity is a
fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of reality (Dervin, 2003). Dervin has integrated her
framework with knowledge management theories and practice, notably championing its
applicability to new media technologies and disciplines that enable greater collaboration
in organizational knowledge activities. Dervin argues that knowledge must be
understood as an active verb (a “verbing”—“knowledging”— which represents the
generation of knowledge through ongoing sense-making and un-sensemaking by human
individuals of their understanding of reality, in the context of their knowledge community
relations, by individuals grappling with discontinuities (Dervin, 1998, 2003). This
“knowledging” can be understood as describing SECI efforts that are aimed at dealing
with uncertainty and the unknown in order to enable action through translating between
tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge sensemaking modes. Web 2.0 knowledge
community design that actually applies this understanding, Dervin believes, would
prioritize creating counter-hierarchical creative spaces for dialogue in knowledge
management systems. This resonates with the aspirations of SECI/ba model
implementation--to transcend the limitations of command-and-control, hierarchical and
top-down models of organizational knowledge for strategic planning (Tseng, 2011).
! 175!
Moreover, Dervin would encourage strategic dialogue by drawing on participants’ sense-
making via a wider range of modes and sources than traditional hierarchical knowledge
structures, which also resonates with the transmedia paradigm. Her sense-making
framework has already been combined with narrative theory in the design of a
collaborative hypermedia environment for corporate contingency planning (Selvin &
Buckingham-Shum, 2002)

Figure 1. Brenda Dervin’s original diagram of her sense-making journey metaphor (Source:
Wikipedia. Released to public domain by creator.)

At the heart of the Dervin sense-making framework is the metaphor (see Figure
1) of a sense-making human’s journeying through time and space. It is described so that
its stages can be used for any sense-making knowledge challenge: the starting situation,
the gap, the bridge, and the end outcome (Dervin, 2008). Situations represent the existing
knowledge state and context of the sense-maker—comprising the history, experience,
structures, habits and skills. Gaps are the discontinuities, confusions, or problems that
! 176!
interrupt the flow of routine living and they demand sensemaking. Without going through
sensemaking (which might be rational or irrational, and more or less effective),
individuals, groups, or organizational actors may feel paralyzed or without agency and
control. Bridges are the knowledge solutions or at least work-arounds that sense-making
produces to get people cognitively past the gap. Outcomes are the positive and negative
consequences of that bridging.
Dervin’s step-by-step journey metaphor provides a modular scheme that can be
transposed onto the building blocks identified by Schoemaker while at the same time
providing a sensemaking metaphor that parallels both influential structuralist models of
narrative (Propp, 1958; Greimas, 1971) which also base their model of story on the idea
of a protagonist undertaking a journey with a goal and overcoming (or not) obstacles,
with or without help on the way. It is reminiscent of the BME narrative template too but
differs in that the journey-as-narrative sensemaking is a never-ending process that is
continually about reconfiguring itself when encountering new gaps in its knowledge. As
Dervin emphasizes, the “communicative aim [of her sense-making approach] is not the
typical presentation of one linear coherent narrative, but rather an analogic exploration of
sense-making potentials” (Dervin 1998, p. 43).
Dervin’s “analogical exploration of sense-making potentials” also matches the
operation of liminality in the creative strategic conversation. Alexander’s (2013) work on
the centrality of narrative world-building in society supports this. She views storytelling
not just as an innate human cognitive capability but also as the inherent dynamic behind
how the templates for multiple alternate future paths (and world visions) used by
society’s complex adaptive systems are generated in a stepwise fashion. These steps are
! 177!
the constituent and re-combinable unit elements of stories that are analogously or directly
representative of future possible links in sensemaking, decision-making and action
sequences. The composition and recomposition of these story elements is an engine for
constructing knowledge communities and communicating problems to collectively solve
them. This activity is analogous to traditional symbolic ritual performances that are
classic spaces of liminal experience and transformation that mediates between established
and emergent or tentative knowledge formation (Turner et al., 1983). Or in other words,
occasions for sensemaking (Weick, 1995).
I adapted Dervin’s phases and carried out a content analysis of the scenarios
generated by the surveyed participants, attempting to assign segments of their narratives
to each of the phases—chunking according to a narrative sensemaking schema. For
example: the parts of the scenario narrative in which a participant reflected upon the
present moment from which their story about the future began was coded as the starting
situation; where they talked about strategic challenges along the way to their future end-
point, that was coded as gaps; where they suggested solutions to those challenges, that
was coded as bridges; and the parts that included imagining of the final (within the set
time horizon of the exercise) culmination of the future path imagined for their
organization were coded as ends. Such coding of narrative segments could, of course,
overlap. The scenario prompts used suggested a minimum 1 paragraph length and also
set the theme of the story but otherwise the participants were allowed to write as much as
they liked in any way—an approach intended to promote engagement and free thinking in
a voluntary exercise. In addition, participants were asked to provide hyperlinks to other
analogous narrative and information resources online, including audio and video, to
! 178!
support their storytelling, in order to help seed the planned storyworlds with examples of
multimodality and intertextuality.
This method had challenges however; parts of the scenario narratives could
frequently be reasonably assigned to multiple stages in Dervin’s model and the coding
process was not clear enough to develop a sufficiently high inter-rater reliability. Also,
sometimes stages were missing altogether or at least difficult to discern in many of the
scenarios so the data were quite incomplete. Furthermore, the narrative segments
identified often were not compelling or even coherent narratives on their own, contrary to
what TS chunks ideally should be—and thus the scenarios presented a problem for
engaging future hypothetical participants who would be asked to immerse themselves in
the narrative chunks to interpret and remix them. There were also vast differences in the
level of effort and skill as well as style in the different scenarios the participants
created—this could possibly be reduced in future experiments with greater guidance and
oversight from the facilitator and more detailed prompts. In addition, very few
participants provided useful hyperlinks.
For future creative strategic conversation and TS scenario exercise design
purposes, this experience suggests that a stronger, mandatory template for scenario
writing should be deployed to channel and motivate the scenario generation and
storyworld seeding—combined with an emphasis on producing remixable chunks of
narrative which are coherent and engaging in themselves, and sensibly connected with
other online narratives and resources. A further design challenge here would be the
question of how greater intervention and demands from scenario exercise coordinators
would affect the intrinsic motivation of participants and the vitality of the knowledge
! 179!
community being built—or is extrinsic motivation vital to effective TS scenario
planning? (It is also possible that more onerous design could radically reduce
participation in the experiment since all research participation is voluntary.)
A related strand of future research may be expanding Dervin’s conception of
encountering gaps in our understanding of reality as the main provocation for
sensemaking. Dervin’s idea of “gap” resonates with Jenkins’ identification of different
ways that texts invite, with the author’s intent or not, readers to imagine and create
additions to their story through “kernels” (hints of a larger world that are not elaborated
upon in the original text), “holes” (information crucial for the text’s story which is
missing), “contradictions” (suggestions of alternative possible details, turns, and
outcomes in the text), “silences” (aspects that are missing from the text due to systematic,
often ideological, exclusion) and “potentials” (possible narrative events and effects
outside the text’s story) (2013, p. 141-145). Deeper understanding and testing of intrinsic
and extrinsic motivations for narrative sensemaking could do well to adopt a more
sophisticated typology of sensemaking prompts generated by narratives along the lines of
Jenkins’ scheme here.

3. Continuity vs. Multiplicity; Immersion vs. Extractability
Pilot Concept: An online scenario tool could build upon and enhance the existing
strategic conversation and knowledge community of an industry conference setting with
multiple live media channels alongside the face-to-face interactions.
Method: A custom-made scenario element input and community review/discussion
website.
! 180!
Operational Limitations: Very low participation levels. Over a two day major conference,
only 22 submissions were received with only 5 clearly following the prompts addressed.
Only 8 attendees participated. Possible explanations include poor website design and
competition/noise from other media channels.

Conceptual and Design Discussion
The creative tension between continuity and multiplicity in TS resonates very
well with what is perhaps the most central principle of futures and scenario work: that
there is more than one, indeed many, possible futures that we should imagine and reflect
on—a challenge to the dominant future narrative that we are used to. In TS, multiplicity
refers to encouraging alternative narrative generation—whether by official creators or
amateur participants—from various perspectives about the same events or parts of the
storyworld. This impulse, depending on the level of need for coherence and plausibility
in the media franchise, must sometimes be balanced against ensuring the logical
continuity of events, characters and other narrative elements shared by different stories in
the storyworlds. Similarly, it is crucial in scenario planning for participants to be exposed
to multiple narratives about different possible futures while at the same time the future
conditions and the causes and effects, strategic challenges and opportunities described in
them are plausible, even if the scenario is intended to be provocatively improbable
(Ramirez & Selin, 2014).
Immersion relates to the ways TS experiences mesh with the wider experience
of real life. Immersion refers to the sensory and mental engagement of TS participants in
the liminal realm of the storyworld. This is, of course, a common cultural “magic circle”
! 181!
or “suspension of disbelief” effect of narrative media designed effectively to be
absorbing, and to be found in the liminal experiences of various media practices such as
novel reading or exploring Virtual Reality worlds (Murray, 1997). This resonates with the
work of those foresight innovators working on combining role-play activity with new
media in ARG and experiential futures projects that aim to change participants’ mental
models though visceral immersive and emotional experiences (Candy, 2010).
Extractability refers to the extraction of elements—which could be a concept
or artifact or any other form of explicit knowledge—from the TS storyworld as a
knowledge resource in the real world beyond. For instance—fans of entertainment
storyworlds actively use lessons and stories from that world as analogies to guide how
they make sense of and resolve problems in the real world. Extractability is in tension
with immersion because it necessarily involves breaking or suspending the magic circle
of narrative immersion. The parallel in scenario planning is the extraction of the scenario
elements and insights from workshop exercises for use elsewhere in an organizational
knowledge community’s life and discourse through SECI processes.
These two tensions are useful for helping describe the dimensions of the
creative strategic conversation we might design for a TS scenario project, particularly
with the client organization context in mind. We hope to create a knowledge community
ba that allows a creative flourishing of a playful SECI cycle for ongoing generation and
recombination of scenario narrative elements—one which emphasizes multiplicity and
immersion. In other words, this is liminal sensemaking that encourages the deep
engagement of participants in wider and wider varieties of perspectives about possible
futures. At the same time, if the scenarios that are generated and discussed are to be
! 182!
spread through an organization and change its strategic mental models effectively, then
the extractability and portability of insights and narrative elements is crucial. Also vital is
maintaining as much continuity as is needed with existing narratives, knowledge bases,
organizational memories and power structures. Entire radical transformations of
organizational mental models and narratives are of course possible, but much more
difficult, may be unnecessarily risky and disruptive, and are not often required.

Practical Findings
The continuity vs. multiplicity and immersion vs. extractability tensions relate
not just to the creative strategic conversation concept in its new media dimension but also
in terms of the hybrid interfacing between face-to-face conversation and new media
functions within the SECI model of knowledge community. I experimented with these
ideas at an industry conference (futures-of-entertainment-and-media themed and with
strong ties with the transmedia professional and academic community) using a custom-
made scenario narrative element collection website. Rather than simply being a survey
tool, this website was designed to show the conference audience the scenario ideas
created by participants happening in real-time, while also allowed community reflections
on the scenario ideas.
What was envisioned was that the customized online survey website would
engage both audience members and conference community members who were not
physically present but were following the conference discussions online. These
participants could contribute through the website a stream of imagined snapshot scenario
ideas—brief little vignettes or story elements—and questions about how the future of
! 183!
transmedia-related industry over the next 10 years might be affected by the ideas
presented or discussed by conference panelists and presenters. Such imaginings might
also arise from side conversations. The website used prompts to pool responses to each
conference session separately, and also offered users the ability to review, comment on,
and rate each others’ scenario ideas for their uncertainty/probability and impact (both in
relation to the specific topic of the session and the industry more widely).
The overall idea of the platform I created was to generate an online knowledge
community that drew upon the SECI activities of the officially established components of
the conference, which included official social media channels and an online discussion
board on the conference stage as well as the main events of live in-person panel
discussions in front of the audience, all focused on various aspects of the futures of media
and entertainment. Tacit ideas about the future provoked by the conference discussions
that would normally be confined to audience self-reflection and face-to-face
conversations could be externalized and recombined through the guided social
interactions of the scenario platform. My vision was to treat the conversations online and
offline at the conference as a pre-existing non-fictional emergent storyworld (in the same
sense as Jenkins’ Obama example discussed previously), and my online site [see redacted
screenshots in Appendix]. This would be a way of extracting scenario elements and
insights about the futures of transmedia from this storyworld (itself transmedia,
considering the various official media channels used) while also encouraging both
continuity and multiplicity—a deepening of the conference storyworld—through guiding
narrative discussion and creation about those futures online.
! 184!
I thought of the conference discussion environment as itself a narrative
sensemaking context that subverts and transcends the idea of the rigid organization
premised on self-contained beginning-middle-end linear hegemonic narratives. It
reminded me of David Boje’s (1994, 1995, 2010) application of the analogy of an real
experimental play, Tamara to post-hierarchical organizations. Tamara’s story is
experienced by an audience that wanders unguided and fluidly in a chaotic manner
around the multiple rooms of a multi-level space, having to choose to follow some actors
and scenes and not others. Boje uses the play as shorthand for his vision of how
knowledge behavior in organizations should best be understood and designed to
effectively handle the increasing complexities of their environments and decision-
making. This analogy is a key point in Boje’s theoretical model of organizations as
storytelling environments, which promotes the idea that subversion and transcendence of
hierarchical, rigid, mono-linear sensemaking through fluctuating, non-linear, plurivocal
narrative forms better reflect complex conditions and our cognition of them. Industry
conferences are ideally places where professional communities can come together to
engage in this kind of narrative and conversation in order to better deal strategically with
complexity and the uncertainties facing them all—and also to find and share resources
that challenge dominant narratives in their home organizations.
There also seem to be significant parallels between the hunter-gatherer
behavior typical of active TS participants and the organizational member/audience
behavior in Boje’s analogy. The collective stories the Tamara audience participants piece
together from their fragments of experience about the play’s events gained from
wandering of their own accord around the play’s space will necessarily be plurivocal and
! 185!
emergent, reflecting a multiplicity of sensemaking journeys that might unify with each
other and become a greater community pool of knowledge when the participants talk
about their play experiences with each other. This postmodern model of organizational
narrative knowledge generation is seen as offering diversity, flexibility, and constantly
regenerating qualities in contrast to linear, top-down controlled hierarchies that are
dominant in traditional modern organizational knowledge archetypes, but which lack
resilience and adaptability in the face of complex uncertain conditions, as typified by
their monolithic linear metanarratives.
Furthermore, the storyworld dynamics of a Tamara-style organizational space
are composed of two kinds of stories. On the one hand, there are fixed, complete schema
narratives reflecting the priorities of controlled and established knowledge. On the other,
there are what Boje (2001) calls “antenarratives”, These are tentative stories or story
components that are like many bets on emergent, uncertain knowledge about reality. That
is, they are ongoing, flexible sensemaking attempts that are constructed stepwise through
sensemakers’ selective sequencing of story elements (Weick, 1995; Boje, 2001; Tietze,
Cohen & Musson, 2003) in myriad ways but always open to revision and rapidly
evolving, perhaps becoming schema narratives. This resonates with the application of
Dervin’s sense-making model to chunking scenarios in narrative building blocks. It is
also akin to the transmedia idea of the storyworld in which a scaffolding structure for
established stories also generates provocations to new stories, story extensions, and
alternative versions of stories within the same domain. What is also attractive about the
Tamara model may be that it offers a less bounded, less orderly (and so more flexible)
framework for the SECI model. The flows of the ba space can still operate healthily in a
! 186!
Tamara organizational vision, but there is a freer, more chaotic exploration of myriad
pathways for the spiraling of the community’s knowledge, a more suitable internal
sensemaking dynamic for dealing with uncertainty in the organizational environment.
We can think of the industry conference setting, then, as a narrative
sensemaking space that to some extent resonates with the Tamara mode—while the on-
stage panels are the main event, audience members are free to (and often do) pursue their
own narrative sensemaking through following alternative conversation threads across
various online channels or start side-conversations, in or outside of the auditorium. They
can dip in or out of the “main official narrative” of the panel discussion as they like, and
in dialogue with other audience members, they each piece together their own meaningful
narrative about the significance of the conference for their strategic thinking.
I believed that an online scenario-building community site deployed at this
conference would help surface and enhance these Tamara-like aspects of the transmedia
storyworld of the conference, and provide narrative chunk/building blocks that could spur
future-of-transmedia worldbuilding, and create strategic conversation in further, larger
online experiments. Unfortunately, there was almost no participation from the audience
in my experimental site for reasons ranging from technical design (the website interface
was amateurish and cumbersome; too little thought was give to user experience design
principles, let alone how to engage the attention of a busy conference audience) to the
difficulty of promoting and sustaining engagement, to competition for audience attention
with the main stage panel discussions and the other conference media channels. Out of
well over a hundred conference attendees over two conference days, with specific online
scenario submission pages for each of the 12 conference sessions, only 22 submissions
! 187!
total (all of approximately one sentence length, and only 5 (22.7%) submissions clearly
addressed the future as prompted) were received from 8 attendees (2 attendees, with 5
and 7 submissions each, together accounted for 54.6% of the submissions).
This experience underlined the difficulties of building a creative strategic
conversation framework on top of an existing organizational conversation or knowledge
community. In addition, offering greater incentives to participate may have been a vital
corrective. Research by MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence has suggested that some
combination of love, money (or economic interest), and/or glory are the fundamental
motivating incentives at work in collective intelligence endeavours (Malone, Laubacher,
& Dellarocas, 2009). While optimistic assumptions were made about the enthusiasm of
the conference audience and wider community to engage energetically in the exercise, far
too little was done to understand and encourage their intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.
For future research and development, one question to explore would be
whether participatory scenario process models with much less emphasis on maintaining
overall strategic creative conversation control and boundary-policing authority by the
scenario exercise creators and managers could more reliably foster participants’ energy
and enthusiasm while still achieving an organization’s aim of using foresight scenarios.
The parallel in the entertainment transmedia world is the ongoing debate over whether
media franchise creators and owners should embrace “fan fiction” (Hellekson & Busse,
2014)—grassroots writing by media franchise fans that tell stories that often radically
rethink and escape the boundaries of the official storyworld. In more general narrative
cognitive psychology terms, this phenomena arises from the inherent quality of story
experiences that calls for us “to go beyond the information given” (Bruner, 1957, p. 41).
! 188!
Fan fiction, which is very difficult for official franchise owners/creators to control
beyond policing the boundaries of official channels for storytelling, most commonly is
assigned the status of unauthorized content. But official legitimation and even material
support of fan fiction as part of storyworld-building could spur large increases in
storyworld content production, particularly maximizing the range of multiplicity, as well
as likely encouraging greater participatory engagement in other storyworld knowledge
community activities. But would such an unleashing undermine the coherency and
authority of the storyworld? An important concern to many franchise owners and
professional authors, this question is arguably even more fundamental in a scenario
storyworlds context, given that scenario processes are meant to guide real world
organizational decision-making. Perhaps the answer would be to introduce collective
intelligence-based quality controls into the process. This area is a particularly intriguing
area for future experimentation efforts between the transmedia and foresight fields.
Another possibility that was not explored in the design was tailoring
multimodality to a range of different participant types. TS project creators ideally should
try to understand the different subgroups—each with different sets of motivations,
abilities, attention spans, maximum effort levels, tastes etc.—in the audience they are
reaching out to and consider how to engage each deeply with a media channel or
narrative fragment that best suits their tolerances and interests.
An alternative way of tailoring the transmedia scenario experience to more
effectively leverage different subgroups in audiences would be if participants could have
been prompted to take up specialist roles in a division of labour within the envisioned
knowledge community. As seen in Lévy’s creative conversation model, and in real-world
! 189!
examples of fan communities, motivated knowledge contributors do not all carry out the
same kind of activity but gravitate to particular areas of specialization (Jenkins, 2006;
Lévy, 2013).
Even with a Tamara-like organizational case, which would seem highly
compatible with a transmedia scenario-building design, the targeted participants may be
too immersed in their established storyworld experience to give attention to helping
extract their knowledge to other contexts until their immersive experience is over.
Furthermore, if the addition of multiplicity and complexity from the scenario generation
effort being overlaid on their existing narrative sensemaking experiences disrupts their
sense of continuity, then that effort will lose out badly to competition for attention.

Conclusion
While my attempts at transmedia scenario planning innovation prototypes were
never successfully implemented for a variety of reasons, useful lessons can be learned
from how they envisioned promoting narrative sensemaking about the future through
participatory scenario work while aspiring to core TS concepts and principles. This paper
has sought to explore new directions for the collective innovation in Foresight 2.0
scenario method development by combining the concepts of strategic and creative
conversation and proposing the transmedia storytelling paradigm as means of
experimenting with this creative strategic conversation theory-building direction in
practice. (As illustration, Figures 2 & 3 below offer a contrast between the SECI
processes of the strategic conversation of a conventional face-to-face workshop based
! 190!
scenario planning process (Fig. 2) with that of the SECI process as envisioned for a
multi-conference transmedia scenario process (Fig. 3).

Figure 2. The SECI processes at work in a conventional face-to-face workshop based scenario
planning strategic conversation

Figure 3. The SECI processes in a Creative Strategic Conversation as envisioned for a multi-
conference online transmedia scenario storyworld system
! 191!
In support of these explorations, selected insights about challenges and lessons
learned from a series of transmedia scenario planning attempts by the author were
examined. Such challenges included the increased complexity of power relations in a
transmedia environment particularly between face-to-face interactions and online
participation; the difficulty of ensuring quality scenario-building in an open participatory
strategic foresight context where the motivations and attractor effects found in TS
entertainment fan communities may be absent; and the problems of translating the
creative continuity vs. multiplicity and immersion vs. extractability tensions out of an
existing face-to-face community with its own storyworld into an online knowledge
community format.
The most exciting aspects of the application of TS principles and concepts to
scenario planning innovation as seen in the pilot studies were the possible uses of radical
intertextuality and world-building as ways of designing, understanding, and improving
online collective intelligence communities for scenario processes so that they may attract
and facilitate longer-running, deeper, more imaginative, and more diverse narrative
sensemaking engagement.
The importance of the multimodality aspect here is more uncertain. There is an
unsettled debate in the transmedia field about how transmedia storytelling projects tend to
overemphasize or even fetishize the importance of using different media channels and
platforms for narrative power. Future research based on this paper’s concepts should
more deeply explore multimodality and the question of whether of a strategic creative
conversation would do just as well using primarily or even solely a single medium or
platform. Another issue to be addressed and debated in future transmedia scenario
! 192!
process development is that having a focus on using multiple types of online media or
social media channel may not strictly count as truly transmedia—the types can be
understood as all working in the same online medium. However, I believe multimodality
remains a useful concept for this paper’s concern for integrating traditional face-to-face
strategic conversation with various forms of scenario exercise interactions across new
media.
This paper has very much been exploratory in form but it is hoped that some of
the suggestions and insights from both the assemblage of theories as well as preliminary
tests of practices will help lead to rigorous concept and framework development and
more practically successful methodological experimentation in future. In particular, it is
hoped that the successes and lessons of the transmedia storytelling field, framed as
narrative sensemaking in support of creative strategic conversation, will spur Foresight
2.0 innovators to create participatory scenario methods which can better take advantage
of the capabilities and cultures of today’s networked media landscape and not just pursue
higher participation or greater data harvesting, but richer and more transformatively
meaningful narrative experiences for strategic decision-makers. Moreover, successful
creative alliances between the foresight and transmedia storytelling communities (as
championed by Von Stackelberg & Jones, 2014) can overcome uneasiness about popular
culture among traditional foresight professionals (Godet & Roubalet, 1996; Slaughter,
2010) and so help the field effectively connect with and influence much wider audiences.
Furthermore, one of the major challenges found in developing and implementing the pilot
designs was the question of whether the transmedia storytelling community has enough
knowledge and interests in common with the foresight field. Given the future-focussed
! 193!
connections between science fiction and foresight, and the prominent usage of transmedia
strategies in today’s science fiction scene, the sci-fi community could be looked at in
future research and development as an important possible bridge between transmedia and
foresight; indeed, the motivation of scifi fan communities might also prove a useful
resource for fostering a lively creative strategic conversation.

References

Acar, W., Anokhin, S., & Troutt, M. (2010). Using decision sciences to enhance
entrepreneurial foresight: The comprehensive situation mapping approach. International
Journal of Strategic Decision Sciences (IJSDS), 1(1), 81-100.

Albarran, A. (Ed.). (2013). Media Management and Economics Research in a
Transmedia Environment. Routledge.

Alexander, L. (2013). Fictional Worlds: Traditions in Narrative and the Age of Visual
Culture. CreateSpace.

Alper, M., & Herr-Stephenson, R. (2013). Transmedia play: Literacy across media.
Journal of Media Literacy Education, 5(2), 2.

Argyris, C., & Schön, D. (1978). Organizational learning. Reading, MA: Addison-
Wesley.

Ashcraft, K., Kuhn, T., & Cooren, F. (2009). Constitutional Amendments:
“Materializing” Organizational Communication. The Academy of Management Annals,
3(1), 1-64.

Barry, D., & Elmes, M. (1997). Strategy retold: Toward a narrative view of strategic
discourse. Academy of management review, 22(2), 429-452.

Bell, W. (2011). Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era: Values,
Objectivity, and the Good Society. Transaction.

Benkler, Y. (2009). Technology policy, cooperation and human systems design. In D.
Foray (Ed), The New Economics of Technology Policy, 337-357.

Boje, D. (1991). The storytelling organization: A study of story performance in an office-
supply firm. Administrative Science Quarterly, 106-126.

! 194!
Boje, D. (1994). Organizational Storytelling The Struggles of Pre-modern, Modern and
Postmodern Organizational Learning Discourses. Management Learning, 25(3), 433-461.

Boje, D. (1995). Stories of the storytelling organization: A postmodern analysis of
Disney as “Tamara-Land”. Academy of Management Journal, 38(4), 997-1035.

Boje, D. (2001). Narrative methods for organizational & communication research. Sage.

Boje, D., Rosile, G., & Gardner, C. (2004). Antenarratives, narratives and anaemic
stories. New Orleans: Academy of Management.

Boje, D. (2010). Tamara Manifesto. Tamara Journal for Critical Organization Inquiry,
1(1).

Boje, D. (Ed.). (2011). Storytelling and the future of organizations: An antenarrative
handbook. Routledge.

Bowman, G., MacKay, R., Masrani, S., & McKiernan, P. (2013). Storytelling and the
scenario process: Understanding success and failure. Technological Forecasting and
Social Change, 80(4), 735-748.

Brooks, L., & Bowker, G. (2002). Playing at work: Understanding the future of work
practices at the institute for the future. Information, Communication & Society, 5(1), 109-
136.

Brooks, L. (2004). Working in the Future Tense: Materializing Stories of Emerging
Technologies and Cyberculture at the Institute for the Future. Ph.D. dissertation,
University of California, San Diego.

Brough, M., & Shresthova, S. (2011). Fandom meets activism: Rethinking civic and
political participation. Transformative works and cultures, 10.

Brown, A. (2004). Authoritative sensemaking in a public inquiry report. Organization
Studies, 25(1), 95-112.

Brown, A., Stacey, P., & Nandhakumar, J. (2008). Making sense of sensemaking
narratives. Human relations, 61(8), 1035-1062.

Bruner, J. (1957). Going beyond the information given. In H. Gruber, K. Hammond & R.
Jessor (Eds.), Contemporary Approaches to Cognition, p. 41-69. Cambridge, MA,
Harvard University Press.

Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.

Bruner, J. (1991). The narrative construction of reality. Critical Inquiry, 1-21.
! 195!

Bryant, B., & Lempert, R. (2010). Thinking inside the box: A participatory, computer-
assisted approach to scenario discovery. Technological Forecasting and Social Change,
77(1), 34-49.

Cachia, R., Compañó, R., Da Costa, O. (2007). Grasping the potential of online social
networks for foresight. Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 74:1179–1203

Candy, S. (2010). The Futures of Everyday Life. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Hawaii.

Cascio, J. (2006). Open Source Scenario Planning.
http://www.openthefuture.com/2006/08/otf_core_open_source_scenario.html Retrieved
September 20, 2014.

Chatti, M., Klamma, R., Jarke, M., & Naeve, A. (2007, July). The Web 2.0 driven SECI
model based learning process. In Proceedings of the Seventh IEEE International
Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies,780-782. IEEE.

Chermack, T., & Lynham, S. (2002). Definitions and Outcome Variables of Scenario
Planning. Human Resource Development Review, 1(3), 366-383

Chermack, T. (2003). The Role of Scenarios in Altering Mental Models and Building
Organizational Knowledge. Futures Research Quarterly, Spring 2003.

Chermack, T. (2004). Improving decision-making with scenario planning. Futures, 36(3),
295-309.

Chermack, T. (2007). Disciplined imagination: building scenarios and building theories.
Futures, 39(1), 1-15.

Chermack, T., Van der Merwe, L., & Lynham, S (20.07). Exploring the relationship
between scenario planning and perceptions of strategic conversation quality.
Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 74(3), 379-390.

Cheuk, W. & Dervin, B. (1999). A qualitative sense-making study of the information
seeking situation: professionals in three workplace contexts. Electronic Journal of
Communication, 9, 2-4.

Costanza-Chock, S. (2014). Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets!: Transmedia
Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement. MIT Press.

Converse, S. (1993). Shared mental models in expert team decision making. Individual
and group decision making: Current issues, 221.

Cooper, R. (1990) Organization/Disorganization. In J. Hassard and D. Pym (Eds.), The
theory and philosophy of organizations, 167-97. London: Routledge.
! 196!

Cooren, F., Taylor, J. & Van Every, E. (2006). Communication as organizing. Routledge.

Czarniawska, B. (2000). The uses of narrative in organization research. GRI Reports.

Czarniawska, B., (2004) Narratives in social science research. London: Sage.

Davis, P., Bankes, S., Egner, M. (2007). Enhancing Strategic Planning with Massive
Scenario Generation Theory and Experiments. RAND National Security Research
Division.

De Geus, A. (1998). Planning as learning. Harvard Business Review, 66(2), 70-74.

Dervin, B. (1998). Sense-making theory and practice: an overview of user interests in
knowledge seeking and use. Journal of Knowledge >anagement, 2(2), 36-46.

Dervin, B. (2003). Sense-Making’s journey from metatheory to methodology to method:
An example using information seeking and use as research focus. Sense-making
methodology reader: selected writings of Brenda Dervin, 133-163.

Dervin, B., Foreman-Wernet, L., & Lauterbach, E. (2003). Sense-making methodology
reader: Selected writings of Brenda Dervin. Hampton Press.

Dodgson, M., Gann D. & Salter, A. (2005) Think, Play, Do: Technology, Innovation, and
Organization, Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.

Dunagan, J. (2010). A Quartet of Archetypes: Four Alternative Views Give Glimpses of
the Future. Generations, 34(3), 14-15.

Eisenberg, E., & Riley, P. (1988). Organizational symbols and sense-making. In G.
Goldhaber & G. Barnett (Eds.), Handbook of organizational communication, 131-150.
Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Eisenberg, E., & Riley, P. (2000). Organizational Culture. The New Handbook of
Organizational Communication: Advances in Theory, Research, and Methods, 291.

Eden, C. & Ackermann, F. (1998). The Journey of Strategy Making. London: Sage.

Ertel, C. & Solomon, L. (2014). Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic
Conversations that Accelerate Change. Simon and Schuster.

Fahey, L., & Randall, R. (Eds.). (1998). Learning from the future: competitive foresight
scenarios. John Wiley & Sons.

Fisher, W. (1984). Narration as a human communication paradigm: The case of public
moral argument. Communications Monographs, 51(1), 1-22.
! 197!

Ford, J. & Ford, L. (1995). The role of conversations in producing intentional change in
organizations. The Academy of Management Review, Vol. 20, 541-70.

Foreman-Wernet, L. (2003). Rethinking communication: Introducing the sense-making
methodology. Sense-making methodology reader: Selected writings of Brenda Dervin, 3-
16.

Freedman, L. (2013). Strategy: A History. Oxford University Press.

Gabriel, Y. (2000). Storytelling in Organizations: Facts, Fictions, and Fantasies. Oxford
University Press.

Ganzin, M., Gephart Jr., R. & Suddaby, R. (2014). In Cooren, F., Vaara, E., Langley, A.,
Tsoukas, H. (Eds.), Narrative and the Construction of Myths in Organizations, 219.
Oxford University Press.

Giovagnoli, M. (2011). Transmedia Storytelling: Images, Shapes and Techniques.
Lulu.com.

Godet, M., & Roubelat, F. (1996). Creating the future: the use and misuse of scenarios.
Long range planning, 29(2), 164-171.

Greimas, A. (1971). Narrative grammar: units and levels. Modern Language Notes
(MLN), 86, 793-806.

Haegeman, K., Cagnin, C., Könnölä, T., & Collins, D. (2012). Web 2.0 foresight for
innovation policy: A case of strategic agenda setting in European innovation. Innovation:
Management, Policy & Practice, 14(3), 446-466.

Healey, P. (1997). Collaborative planning: shaping places in fragmented societies. UBC
Press.

Hellekson, K. & Busse, K. (2014). The Fan Fiction Studies Reader. University of Iowa
Press.

Herr-Stephenson, B., Alper, M., Reilly, E., & Jenkins, H. (2013). T is for Transmedia:
Learning through Transmedia Play. Los Angeles and New York: USC Annenberg
Innovation Lab and The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop.

Hoon, C. (2007). Committees as strategic practice: The role of strategic conversation in a
public administration. Human Relations, 60(6), 921-952.

Innes, J., & Booher, D. (2004). Reframing public participation: strategies for the 21st
century. Planning Theory & Practice, 5(4), 419-436.

! 198!
Jacobs, C., & Statler, M. (2006). Toward a technology of foolishness: Developing
scenarios through serious play. International Studies of Management and Organization,
36(3), 77-92.

Jarzabkowski, P., & Balogun, J. (2009). The practice and process of delivering
integration through strategic planning. Journal of Management Studies, 46(8), 1255-
1288.

Jenkins, H. (2002). Interactive audiences? The collective intelligence of media fans. The
New Media Book, 157-170.

Jenkins, H. (2004). The cultural logic of media convergence. International journal of
cultural studies, 7(1), 33-43.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. NYU Press.

Jenkins, H. (2007). Transmedia Storytelling 101.
http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html Retrieved September
21, 2014.

Jenkins, H. (2007a). Transmedia Storytelling 202: Further Reflections.
http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html Retrieved
September 21, 2014.

Jenkins, H. (2009). The revenge of the origami unicorn: seven principles of transmedia
storytelling. http://henryjenkins.org/2009/12/the_revenge_of_the_origami_uni.html
Retrieved September 20, 2014.

Jenkins, H. (2010). Transmedia Education: the 7 Principles Revisited
http://henryjenkins.org/2009/12/the_revenge_of_the_origami_uni.html
Retrieved September 21, 2014.

Jenkins, H. (2011). Transmedia 202: Further Reflections.
http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html Retrieved
September 21, 2014.

Jenkins, H. (2013). Reading Critically and Reading Creatively. In Jenkins, H., Kelly, W.,
Clinton, K., McWilliams, J., Pitts-Wiley, R. & Reilly, E. (Eds.), Reading in a
Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick in the English Classroom. Teachers’
College, Columbia University.

Jenkins, H., Ford, S., & Green, J. (2013). Spreadable media: Creating value and meaning
in a networked culture. NYU Press.

! 199!
Johansson, C., & Heide, M. (2008). Speaking of change: three communication
approaches in studies of organizational change. Corporate Communications: An
International Journal, 13(3), 288-305.

Johnson, D. (2013). A History of Transmedia Entertainment. Spreadable Media Web
Exclusive Essay. http://spreadablemedia.org/essays/johnson/#.VB4ZBhZ4Xy8.
Retrieved September 20, 2014.

Johnson-Laird, P. (1983). Mental models: Towards a cognitive science of language,
inference, and consciousness (No. 6). Harvard University Press.

Kahane, A. (2004). Solving tough problems: An open way of talking, listening, and
creating new realities. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Keller, J., & Von der Gracht, H. (2014). The influence of information and
communication technology (ICT) on future foresight processes—Results from a Delphi
survey. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 85, 81-92.

Kinder, M. (1991). Playing with power in movies, television, and video games: from
Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. University of California Press.

Kleiner, A. (2008). The age of heretics: A history of the radical thinkers who reinvented
corporate management. John Wiley & Sons.

Konno, N., Nonaka, I., & Ogilvy, J. (2014). Introduction to the Special Issue on Strategy,
Story, and Emergence: Essays on Scenario Planning. World Futures, 70(1), 2-4.

Lafley, A., & Martin, R. (2013). Playing to win: How strategy really works. Harvard
Business Press.

Lempert, R., Bryant, B., & Bankes, S. (2008). Comparing algorithms for scenario
discovery. Santa Monica: RAND.

Lévy, P. (1997). Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace.
Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books.

Lévy, P. (2011). The Semantic Sphere. London: Wiley.

Lévy, P. (2013). The creative conversation of collective intelligence. Delwiche, A. A. &
Henderson, J. J. (eds), The Participatory Cultures Handbook, 99.

Li, Z. (2013). A Canticle for Mary Sue: What Transmedia Aesthetics might do for
Futures Communication. Journal of Futures Studies, 17(3), 137-140.

Lindgren, M., & Bandhold, H. (2002). Scenario planning: The link between future and
strategy. Palgrave Macmillan.
! 200!

Malone, T., Laubacher, R., & Dellarocas, C. (2009). Harnessing crowds: Mapping the
genome of collective intelligence. MIT Sloan School Working Paper 4732-09.

Manning, T. (2002). Strategic conversation as a tool for change. Strategy Leadership
35(5), 35-38.

March, J. (2006). Rationality, foolishness, and adaptive intelligence. Strategic
Management Journal, 27(3), 201-214.

Markmann, C., Von der Gracht, H., Keller, J., & Kroehl, R. (2012). Collaborative
foresight as a means to face future risks—an innovative platform conception. In
Proceedings of the 9th international ISCRAM conference.

Martin, J. (1992) Cultures in organizations: Three perspectives. New York: Oxford
University Press.

McGonigal, J. (2011). Reality is broken: Why games make us better and how they can
change the world. Penguin.

McWhorter, R., & Lynham, S. (2014). An initial conceptualization of virtual scenario
planning. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 16(3), 335-355

Medina, A. (1979). Reflection, time, and the novel: Toward a communicative theory of
literature. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Mintzberg, H. (1994). Rise and fall of strategic planning. Simon and Schuster.

Mittel, J. (2009). To Spread or to Drill? http://justtv.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/to-
spread-or-to-drill. Retrieved September 21, 2014.

Murray, J. H. (1997). Hamlet on the Holodeck: The future of narrative in cyberspace.
Simon and Schuster.
Nishida, K. (1970). Fundamental Problems of Philosophy: The World of Action and the
Dialectical World. Tokyo: Sophia University
Nonaka, I., & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The Knowledge-creating Company: How Japanese
companies create the dynamics of innovation. Oxford University Press.

Nonaka, I. & Konno, N. (1998), The Concept of "Ba’: Building a Foundation for
Knowledge Creation. California Management Review, 40(3), 40-54.

Nonaka, I., Toyama, R., & Konno, N. (2000). SECI, Ba and Leadership: a Unified Model
of Dynamic Knowledge Creation. Long Range Planning, 33(1), 5-34.

! 201!
Ogilvy, J. (2012). Facing the Fold: Essays on Scenario Planning. Triarchy Press.

Ogilvy, J., Nonaka, I., & Konno, N. (2014). Toward Narrative Strategy. World Futures,
70(1), 5-18.

O'Reilly, T., & Battelle, J. (2009). Web squared: Web 2.0 five years on. O'Reilly Media.

Pacanowsky, M. & Trujillo, N. (1983). Organizational communication as cultural
performance. Communication Monographs, 50, 126-148.

Paliokaitė, A., Pačėsa, N., & Sarpong, D. (2014). Conceptualizing Strategic Foresight:
An Integrated Framework. Strategic Change, 23, 161-169.

Palomino, M. A., Bardsley, S., Bown, K., De Lurio, J., Ellwood, P., Holland-Smith, D.,
Huggins, B., Vincenti, A., Woodroof, H. & Owen, R. (2012). Web-based horizon
scanning: concepts and practice. Foresight, 14, 355-373.

Phillips, A. (2012). A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling: How to Captivate and
Engage Audiences across Multiple Platforms. McGraw-Hill.

Polkinghorne, D. (1988). Narrative knowing and the human sciences. SUNY Press.

Priday, G., Mansfield, T. & Ramos, J. (2014). The Open Futures Library: One Step
Toward a Global Foresight Commons. Journal of Futures Studies, 18(4), 131-142.

Propp, V. I. (1958). Morphology of the Folktale (Vol. 9). American Folklore Society.

Provo, J., Ruona, W., Lynham, S., & Miller, R. (1998). Scenario building: An integral
methodology for learning, decision-making, and human resource development. Human
Resource Development International, 1(3), 327-340.

Raford, N. (2011). Large scale participatory futures systems: a comparative study of
online scenario planning approaches. Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.

Raford, N. (2014). Online foresight platforms: Evidence for their impact on scenario
planning & strategic foresight. Technological Forecasting and Social Change.

Ramírez, R., & Selin, C. (2014). Plausibility and probability in scenario planning.
Foresight, 16(1), 54-74.

Ramírez, R., Selsky, J. W., & Van der Heijden, K. (Eds.). (2010). Business planning for
turbulent times: New methods for applying scenarios. Taylor & Francis.

Ramos, J., Mansfield, T., & Priday, G. (2012). Foresight in a network era: peer-producing
alternative futures. Journal of Futures Studies, 17(2).
! 202!

Rasmussen, L. (2008). The narrative aspect of scenario building-How story telling may
give people a memory of the future. Cognition, Communication and Interaction:
Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Interactive Technology, 174-194. Springer London.

Ratcliffe, J. (2002). Scenario planning: strategic interviews and conversations. Foresight,
4(1), 19-30.

Rhodes, C., & Brown, A. (2005). Narrative, organizations and research. International
Journal of Management Reviews, 7(3), 167-188.

Riley, P. (1983). A structurationist account of political culture. Administrative Science
Quarterly. 414-437.

Ringland, G. & Schwartz, P. (2006). Scenario planning: Managing for the future. John
Wiley & Sons.

Robichaud, D., Giroux, H., & Taylor, J. (2004). The metaconversation: The recursive
property of language as a key to organizing. Academy of Management Review, 29(4),
617-634.

Roos, J., Victor, B., & Statler, M. (2004). Playing seriously with strategy. Long Range
Planning, 37(6), 549-568.

Rose, F. (2012). The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking
Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories. W.W. Norton & Company.

Rouse, W. & Morris, N. (1986). On looking into the black box: Prospects and limits in
the search for mental models. Psychological Bulletin, 100, 349-363

Sarpong, D., & O'Regan, N. (2014). The Organizing Dimensions of Strategic Foresight in
High-Velocity Environments. Strategic Change, 23(3-4), 125-132.

Scearce, D. & Fulton, K. (2004). The Art of Scenario Thinking for Non-profits. Global
Business Network.

Schwartz, P. (1991). The Art of the Long View. New York: Currency.

Schatzmann, J., Schäfer, R., & Eichelbaum, F. (2013). Foresight 2.0-Definition, overview
& evaluation. European Journal of Futures Research, 1(1), 1-15.

Schoemaker, P. (1995). Scenario planning: a tool for strategic thinking. Sloan
Management Review, 36, 25-25.

Schrage, M. (2013). Serious play: How the world's best companies simulate to innovate.
Harvard Business Press.
! 203!

Schroeder, K. (2011). Fiction as Foresight: Presenting Foresight Findings as Fiction.
Ontario College of Art & Design University Major Research Paper.

Selvin, A., & Buckingham-Shum, S. (2002). Rapid knowledge construction: a case study
in corporate contingency planning using collaborative hypermedia. Knowledge and
Process Management, 9(2), 119-128.

Shimizu, H. (1995). "Ba-Principle: New Logic for the Real-time Emergence of
Information," Holonics, 5, 67-69.

Shotter, J. (1993). Conversational realities: Constructing life through language (Vol.
11). Sage.

Skulimowski, A., & Pukocz, P. (2012). On-line technological roadmapping as a tool to
implement foresight results in IT enterprises. In Internet-Technical Developments and
Applications 2, 95-111. Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Slaughter, R. A. (2010). The biggest wake up call in history. Brisbane: Foresight
International.

Sokolova, N. (2012). Co-opting Transmedia Consumers: User Content as Entertainment
or ‘Free Labour’? The Cases of STALKER and Metro 2033. Europe-Asia Studies, 64(8),
1565-1583.

Surowiecki, J. (2005). The Wisdom of Crowds. Random House.

Swanson, R., & Chermack, T. (2013). Theory Building in Applied Disciplines. Berrett-
Koehler Publishers.

Tenderich, B. (2014). Transmedia Branding. European Institute for Media Optimization
(EIMO).

Tietze, S., Cohen, L., & Musson, G. (2003). Understanding organizations through
language. Sage.

Tosey, P., Visser, M., & Saunders, M. (2011). The origins and conceptualizations of
‘triple-loop’learning: A critical review. Management Learning.

Tseng, S. (2011). The effects of hierarchical culture on knowledge management
processes. Management Research Review, 34(5), 595-608.

Tsoukas, H., & Hatch, M. (2001). Complex thinking, complex practice: The case for a
narrative approach to organizational complexity. Human Relations, 54(8), 979-1013.

! 204!
Turner, V., Harris, J., & Park, R. (1983). Liminal to liminoid, in play, flow, and ritual: an
essay in comparative symbology. In J. Harris (Ed.), Play, games and sports in cultural
contexts, 123-164.

Van der Heijden, K. (2005). Scenarios: the art of strategic conversation. John Wiley &
Sons.

Van der Heijden, K., Bradfield, R., Burt, G., Cairns, G., & Wright, G. (2009). The sixth
sense: Accelerating organizational learning with scenarios. John Wiley & Sons.

Van Notten, P. W., Rotmans, J., van Asselt, M., & Rothman, D. S. (2003). An updated
scenario typology. Futures, 35(5), 423-443.

Von Stackelberg, P., & Jones, R. E. (2014). Tales of Our Tomorrows: Transmedia
Storytelling and Communicating About the Future. Journal of Futures Studies, 18(3), 57-
76.

Weick, K. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage.

Wilkinson, A. (2009). Scenarios Practices: In Search of Theory. Journal of Futures
Studies, 13(3), 107–114.

Wilkinson, A., & Ramirez, R. (2010). Canaries in the Mind: Exploring how the financial
crisis impacts 21st century future-mindfulness. Journal of Futures Studies, 14(3), 45-60.

Wright, A. (2004). A social constructionist’s deconstruction of Royal Dutch Shell's
scenario planning process, University of Wolverhampton Business School Working
Paper Series, WP004/04.

! 205!
CONCLUSION: Future Directions for Foresight Scenario Research

This concluding chapter of the dissertation considers future theory-building,
research, and practical innovations for foresight scenarios based on the conclusions of the
three papers in this project. First, the suggestions for further development from each of
the papers will be summarized. Finally, the possibility of pursuing integrated agendas for
innovation & research drawing on all three papers will be considered.
The three essays in this dissertation make separate contributions to scenario
theory and practice that help fill the gaps in the foresight discourse’s understanding of
how narratives, sensemaking, and networks support the communication, mental model
and organizational change goals of scenarios. Besides the suggested research agendas
indicated by the individual papers, together they offer useful lessons learned and fruitful
points of departure for the pursuit of an integrated, networked narrative sensemaking
paradigm. Such a pursuit would ideally build its experimentation and theory-building
around a proven set of transmedia processes, platforms, and systems.
The following first summarizes the future research agenda possibilities of each of
the papers individually, and then considers possibilities based on the integration of the
future directions they suggest.

! 206!
Summary of Papers’ Future Research Agenda Possibilities
Study 1: Narrative Rhetorics in Scenario Work: Sensemaking and Translation
This paper’s contributions to foresight scenario theory are based on its
convergence of Actor-Network Theory’s concept of translation (2005) and Weickian
sensemaking (1995). This addresses the undertheorization of the role of narrative in
scenario work’s functioning in organizations—helping to fill a vital gap in the scenario
field’s efforts to evolve beyond its methodological weaknesses and discursive
idiosyncrasies. Translation and sensemaking complement each other. Translation is a
focal concept in ANT’s socio-materialist account of networked power. The first study
explains how rhetorical claims regarding possible interpretations of the future and the
present are assembled through the recruitment or ‘translation’ of allied actors and
supporting materials. In this way it provides a materially grounded and strategically-
geared approach to understanding scenarios that Weickian sensemaking on its own lacks.
This is not just a way of reflecting on strategy, but a way of strategizing—of making
strategy that informs decisions and enables action. On the other hand, sensemaking
provides translation with a micro-level social cognition and interaction framework that
describes ongoing, never-settled, and multidimensional processes that can investigate
how people create, interpret, and communicate accounts of reality in the face of
uncertainties such as alternative possible futures. In addition, sensemaking is understood
as rooted in human capabilities, thus correcting the problematic tendency of ANT to
dismiss human agency.
Translation and sensemaking together provide a framework for understanding
scenario narratives as multivalent rhetorical assemblages of allies in play in the
! 207!
sensemaking networks of organizations. This provides a strategic social (or socio-
material) constructionist basis for analyzing why scenario exercises are effective, or not,
at creating organizational and mental model changes across different kinds of
organizations (or other knowledge communities). Such rhetorical analysis should also
help people understand how effectiveness criteria are constructed in different
organizational contexts.
Furthermore, a multi-level ecological model of scenario sensemaking in organizations
was proposed to support this framework: this outlined the different levels at which
narrative rhetorics are translated/assembled in the sensemaking processes of scenario
exercises. At the micro-level, the scenarios themselves are worked on by individual and
group sensemaking processes; at the meso-level, scenario narratives and processes must
compete or collaborate within organizations with other strategizing or related
communicative, collaborative, and knowledge practices; at the macro-level, the scenarios
are deployed as persuasive or provocative communication vehicles internally or
externally for sensegiving cultural alignment around strategic issues in the organization
or outside communities.
The overall framework including the ecological model could be improved through
conceptual deepening, crucially supported by empirical case studies, for instance through
methods such as organizational ethnographies and network analysis of scenario exercises.
To be valuable to practitioners, future research agendas should identify what it means to
be successful or failing in rhetorical translation across the micro-meso-macro levels and
across a range of scenario exercise case studies in different organizational contexts.
Based on the framework, best practices and typologies for translation can be developed
! 208!
for analyzing the rhetorical/power dynamics of the sensemaking networks in
organizations and how scenario narrative efforts can most effectively intervene in them.
This kind of modeling can also help foresight practitioners make the power dynamics in
and around scenario exercises more transparent to participants and other stakeholders,
allowing for a more open and democratic foresight process.

Study 2: A Cynefin-based Foresight Scenario Content Analysis Assessment of the
Relationship between Deductive, Inductive, and Abductive Strategizing Styles and the
Centre-Periphery Positioning of Scenario Participants
The two main contributions of this study to the scenario planning discourse are
highlighted here for future research agenda discussion. First, the study described by the
paper investigated, using two scenario exercise case studies, a set of research questions
based on Wright (2004) and Regnér’s (2003) argument that inductive reasoning in
strategizing is the norm at the power peripheries of organizations and industries while
deductive strategizing is the norm at organizational/industrial power centres. These
norms are said to reflect how bricolage sensemaking is more effective for organizational
strategizing at the periphery while top-down sensemaking and sensegiving processes are
more effective at the centre. As previously noted, these arguments also have implications
for the inductive vs. deductive logic debate in scenario planning methods. Furthermore,
additional studies of the contrast in strategizing styles between organizational centres and
peripheries should examine the relationship between the centre-periphery power
imbalance and wider social inequalities suffered by marginalized demographics that are
more often found at the periphery (thus more likely to rely on non-deductive/bricolage
! 209!
type reasoning because of the tendency to exclude marginalized groups from hegemonic
deduction-based knowledge structures). Incorporating this understanding in future
scenario exercise design processes would help support equality of participation and
promote diversity, which is important for both social justice and for widening epistemic
diversity, and thereby improving the collective cognitive base of foresight exercises.
The research questions analysis utilized the content of participant-generated
scenarios from the two case study scenario exercises with groups representing industrial
and organizational centres and peripheries. The scenarios were coded for evidence of
reasoning styles in the strategic topics they discussed.
The analysis indicated that the Wright-Regnér perspective was not supported by
the data, however, future research using a much large number of scenario exercise case
studies with fewer methodological limitations (for instance, making the scenario exercise
methods uniform across cases studies, which was not possible here) if we are to come to
stronger conclusions about their arguments. Future research in this vein should also take
place across a range of other industries with different levels of uncertainty. It is possible
that this lack of support for Wright-Regnér’s arguments can be explained by the VUCA
conditions of the media industry groups involved in the scenario exercises.
Moreover, the relationship between inductive and deductive reasoning styles with
the abductive must be explored more deeply. Wright and Regnér’s perspective overlooks
the distinctiveness of the abductive style of reasoning and apparently subsumes it into the
inductive. Future scenario research should incorporate my argument that the inductive vs.
deductive logic debate in scenario planning must be extended to consider seriously the
abductive mode, particularly in the light of heightened importance of dealing with VUCA
! 210!
conditions (for which abductive reasoning is especially suited) in strategic management,
as well as the rise of design thinking (a school of thought premised on abductive
reasoning) in the foresight field.
It was understood too, that scenario exercises should not be seen as only a means
of supporting inductive, deductive, or abductive modes of strategizing within
organizations but also as a way of gathering scenario narrative-based data about the
inclination of organizational constituents towards the various strategic reasoning styles.
To this end, a novel scenario narrative coding approach derived from Snowden’s Cynefin
model (Kurtz & Snowden, 2003; Snowden & Boone, 2007) was created, mapping the 5
different ontological types of knowledge inquiry/sensemaking described in Cynefin to the
inductive, deductive, and abductive modes of strategic reasoning. This coding approach
worked quite well. The Cynefin model is deep enough to satisfy academics yet easy to
use for practitioners. Thus a versatile and useful innovation would be to deploy the
Cynefin coding approach in both the design and the impact assessment of scenario
exercises. Mapping an organization’s pooled sensemaking and reasoning styles as
surfaced by foresight narrative generation and discussion could support better targeting of
further scenario efforts and other strategic foresight tools.
Another major example of applying this coding approach to future scenario
endeavours would be the assessment of different narrative features of scenario
processes—including the language and writing style used, whether other media were
deployed, the comparison of conventional scenario planning methods with participatory
forms—to see if they resulted in significant shifts in Cynefin-categorized reasoning and
sensemaking as extracted through analysis of the exercise participants’ stories, workshop
! 211!
conversations, pre- and post-exercise self-assessments etc. Such shifts would be way of
recording and evaluating scenario exercise impacts on organizational and participant
mental models in strategic decision-making.

Study 3: Towards a Creative Strategic Conversation Concept for Scenario Planning with
Transmedia Storytelling Characteristics
This paper proposed a new hybrid concept of the creative strategic conversation,
combining the strategic conversation concept common in the scenario planning literature
(Van der Heijden, 2005) with that of Pierre Lévy’s (2013) creative conversation concept,
which emerged in part from his bringing a knowledge management perspective to
collective intelligence. The study combines the focus on strategic mental model change in
organizations through scenario planning discourse with the goal of creating knowledge
communities enhanced by ICTs and understood in terms of the SECI model borrowed
from knowledge management (Nonaka, Toyama & Konno, 2000), as described in Lévy’s
work. Further research and theory-building is of course needed to deepen and extend the
creative strategic conversation concept.
This hybrid concept suggests a way to bridge foresight scenario theory-building
with transmedia storytelling, which offers an alternative to the crowdsourcing and data-
harvesting focus favoured in Foresight 2.0 innovations so far. Moreover, when applying
transmedia principles to generate scenario storyworlds and remixing scenario story
elements, the creative strategic conversation concept suggests how best to leverage new
media to enhance the power of scenario planning to transform mental models about the
future.
! 212!
Given the logistical concerns when implementing transmedia designs, a future
research and innovation agenda should first attempt to create or adapt transmedia
storytelling projects with active storyworld communities that will allow testing and real-
world experimentation. Of particular interest would be an ongoing, online transmedia
storyworld community that could connect multiple in-person scenario exercises at
different times and locations—and thus support an existing creative strategic
conversation. Further experiments should also try to cover a greater range of
permutations of collective intelligence and Foresight 2.0 capabilities and features
(Malone, Laubacher & Dellarocas, 2009).
Successfully operating a real-world transmedia scenario process or platform is
crucial not just to discover how scenarists might best ally with transmedia storytellers to
find out what works in a practical sense, but also to further theoretical development of the
creative strategic conversation concept. Particular challenges identified in the paper that
should be addressed include how scenarists should deal with the more complex
multimodal power ecology of transmedia scenario planning; how to best create foresight
storyworlds that attract and motivate participants—in part through appreciating their
diversity of skills, interests, and drives, without overly compromising control and focus
of the exercise. One question is to what extent multimodality is a key ingredient in
applying transmedia principles to scenario processes? Another is how to effectively
engage face-to-face strategic conversation audiences with online and other media
channels in a transmedia scenario storyworld while managing and balancing all the
different claims by channels on the audiences’ limited bandwidth for sensemaking? And
what are the trade-offs between upholding scenario planning quality and focus with the
! 213!
possibility of much more voluminous and wide-ranging participant content contribution
by limiting top-down authority and entry controls?

Combining and integrating future research agendas
Fruitful research efforts could arise from combining elements and insights
between the studies. It will help to unify the scenario discourse in part by focusing on the
universal relevance of narrative sensemaking and in part through supporting more
quantitatively orientated research programs such as Chermack’s (2002).
Possibilities for future research I would like to highlight include:
• Using the ANT-based micro-meso-macro ecology model from the first study to
analyze the complex power relationships that presented a challenge to transmedia
scenario storyworld experimentation in the third study. Once the model is adapted
to account for the flows of creative strategic conversations across the different
mediums in play, its ANT-based power analysis could help interrogate/correct
counterproductive power imbalances in the transmedia scenario planning process.
This could expose processes/actions and actors inhibiting the attraction,
participation or creation of a more open, liminal space for freer sensemaking
about the future. It could also help foresight practitioners understand how to best
use transmedia scenario systems to intervene effectively through organizational
mental model changes, by comparing the power ecology of the online foresight
storyworld exercise with the ANT-based analysis of a client organization’s power
network as a whole. What local allies and translations must be sought/developed
! 214!
for transmedia scenario narratives to have the most impact in a targeted
organization?
• The ANT-based framework could also be enmeshed with an adaptation of the
Cynefin sensemaking model from the second study as a narrative and strategic
reasoning analytic tool. Future studies of scenario exercises that develop and
refine this combination may use it to understand, for instance, how different parts
of organizations with different strategic sensemaking/reasoning styles that are
catalyzed by scenario exercise participation may deploy particular kinds of
rhetorical assemblages in their strategizing work and in the stories that they tell
about possible futures. And there is also the question of how inductive, deductive,
and abductive approaches to scenario methods might attract different kinds of
knowledge/power network rhetoric in the narrative sensemaking provoked in
participants, and how much this differs across the levels of an organization’s
micro-meso-macro ecology as described in the second study.
• The Cynefin typology used in Study 2 could also be melded with the scenario
narrative building block/chunk remixing described in Study 3’s exploration of
transmedia storytelling principles. Narrative chunks derived from the content
analysis of participant-generated scenarios could be assessed in terms of both
Dervin’s sense-making journey model and the Cynefin typology. This could be
done both for analytical purposes (e.g., what are the preferred
strategizing/sensemaking styles, if any, associated with different stages of
Dervin’s model?). This could also provide a framework that can guide participant
remixing in an ongoing creative strategic conversation process (e.g., harnessing
! 215!
the encyclopedia impulse of knowledge community participants to address gaps
and deficiencies such as sensemaking blind spots or narrative plot holes that can
be identified through applying Cynefin/Dervin frameworks. Another possible
intersection would explore ways to improve the diversity and power balance of
participation in transmedia scenario processes. This would entail a more
sophisticated analysis of the relationship between inequalities in wider society (as
reflected in the demographics of scenario exercise participants) and those that
exist between the organizational centres and peripheries within a transmedia
storytelling ecology.

The integration of elements from all three papers that an advanced future research
agenda might undertake could address both theoretical and practical development:
• From a theoretical perspective, these papers collectively make contributions
particularly in addressing the undertheorized narrative dimension in foresight
scenarios. They also connect this to an analysis of networks and power that is
intended to be particularly apt and flexible for engaging with an increasing
turbulent world with greater connected ICT capabilities than ever before.
Beyond the foresight field, and in considering contributions to organization
and communication studies more generally, each of the papers uses a
sensemaking framework by a different leading theorist (Weick, Snowden, and
Dervin), and ideally these should be integrated. Unfortunately, no integration
efforts combining all three have been found in the existing academic
organizational and communication studies literature (there has been a little
! 216!
discussion of parallels between the work of Weick and Snowden (Browning &
Boudès, 2005), although Snowden himself has written that he is more
sympathetic towards Dervin’s work (Snowden, 2008)), and this is of course a
task larger than the question of applying sensemaking to foresight. However,
perhaps the use of sensemaking in understanding narrative in scenario
processes would be a useful launching point for initial steps towards such an
integration, particularly given that all three bodies of sensemaking work have
strong resonances with organizational narrative theory but do rather little to
address those resonances.
• Finally, from a practical point of view, it is hoped that elements from all three
papers could be integrated for future development of transmedia scenario
planning processes that not only are created and executed successfully in
partnership with seasoned transmedia storytelling practitioners, but also
incorporate the kinds of narrative content and rhetorical network analysis
suggested in the first two studies. If a robust and user-friendly online
community platform for building, remixing, and communicating transmedia
scenario storyworlds could realize the innovation ambitions explored in the
third study, then this could also be adapted to support the analytical
techniques promoted in the other papers.
Such analyses need not be limited to academic studies. Practitioners could
build the analytical techniques as reflexive systems into the sensemaking and
narrative generation SECI cycles of the ongoing creative strategic
conversations of real-world client organizations. For instance, reflexive
! 217!
consideration of issues regarding underlying power relations and strategic
reasoning differences revealed by scenario exercises’ participant narrative
data pool could be fed back into a transmedia scenario storyworld in the form
of new building blocks or story prompts for constructing futures narratives
about the participants’ organization. Future exercise participants in the
organization’s ongoing foresight process could create extensions and remixes
of the storyworld in response to the patterns, opportunities, and challenges
identified in the analyses, helping to fulfill scenario planning’s aim of
promoting lasting, ongoing mental model change through the medium of
telling stories about the future.

Conclusion
In my original conception of my dissertation, I envisioned the development of an
integrated “networked narrative sensemaking paradigm” for theory-building and practical
innovation in the foresight scenario field. This would involve one or more working
prototypes of a transmedia scenario planning process, platform or system. Ultimately, the
pilot tests reported in this project did not develop into working prototypes. Yet, as
Jenkins (2012) argues in the foreword of The More We Know—an account of the value
gained and lessons learned from the failed attempt by a MIT-NBC partnership to create
an interactive learning tool—there is no such thing as a “perfect failure.” There are
always localized successes along the way that result in other good consequences. In a line
which resonates with the key themes of this thesis and reminds us of this work’s own
aims in narrative sensemaking, Jenkins emphasizes “it is rather a story about imperfect
! 218!
failures and imperfect successes, and about unintended consequences, unreached goals,
and unanticipated results” (loc. 63-64).
Without these experiences, I would not have had my thinking stretched, in other
generative and rich directions for theory-building, analysis, and practice innovation that
culminated in this dissertation. While the three studies are not fully integrated into a
paradigm, their narrative, sensemaking, and networks-based contributions to foresight
scenario theory-building and practical innovation suggest that future research can
profitably build upon these efforts in order to pursue deepening knowledge of one of the
more interesting communicative activities in organizations and society—conversations
about our future.

References
Browning, L., & Boudès, T. (2005). The use of narrative to understand and respond to
complexity: A comparative analysis of the Cynefin and Weickian models. E: CO, 7(3-4),
32-39.

Chermack, T. (2002). The mandate for theory in scenario planning. Futures Research
Quarterly, 18(2), 25-28.

Jenkins, H. (2012). Foreword. In Klopfer, E. & Haas, J. The More We Know: NBC News,
Educational Innovation, and Learning from Failure. Kindle edition, location 63-64. MIT
Press.

Kurtz C. & Snowden, D. (2003). The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a
complex and complicated world. IBM Systems Journal 42(3).

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: an introduction to actor-network-theory.
Oxford University Press.

Malone, T., Laubacher, R., & Dellarocas, C. (2009). Harnessing crowds: Mapping the
genome of collective intelligence. MIT Sloan School Working Paper 4732-09.

Nonaka, I., Toyama, R., & Konno, N. (2000). SECI, Ba and Leadership: a Unified Model
of Dynamic Knowledge Creation. Long Range Planning, 33(1), 5-34.
! 219!

Regnér, P. (2003). Strategy creation in the periphery: inductive versus deductive strategy
making. Journal of Management Studies 40(1), 57-82.

Snowden, D. & Boone, M. (2007). A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making. Harvard
Business Review, November 2007.

Snowden, D. (2008). What is Sensemaking? Cognitive Edge blog post. June 7, 2008.
http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/entry/3840/what-is-sense-making/ Retrieved September
30
th
, 2014.

Van der Heijden, K. (2005). Scenarios: the art of strategic conversation. John Wiley &
Sons.

Weick, K. (1995). Sensemaking in Organizations. Sage.

Wright, A. (2004). Enhancing inductive strategizing through sensemaking and scenario
thinking. University of Wolverhampton Business School Working Paper Series,
WP002/04.

! 220!
APPENDIX

This dissertation appendix contains the following items:

1) IRB Review documents, including a sample question set walkthrough, for the
author’s own research studies as described in Study 2 and 3’s papers. Note that
the original IRB submission describes a sequence of interconnected studies that
were together components of a larger vision. The actual research work carried
out ultimately broke up these same components (with a variety being ultimately
discarded in the analysis stage) into separate studies as reflected in the papers for
Study 2 and Study 3 and discussion in the Introduction and Conclusion.
2) The scenario-building and sensemaking survey question set which was used for
the Grassroots case in Study 2 as well as for the remixing content analysis case in
Study 3. Some of the questions in the survey reflect discarded components. The
participants were drawn from the Transmedia LA community and from graduate
classes at the University of Southern California.
3) Sample screenshots of the experimental transmedia learning platform
(Playground, developed by USC Annenberg Innovation Lab under Erin Reilly)
described in the second case of Study 3. This platform project was not completed
to a usable level for the purposes of my studies in the timeframe of this
dissertation’s research work.
4) Sample screenshots (with names redacted) of the live scenario element creation
and discussion website used at the industry conference as described in the third
case of Study 3. The industry conference was the Futures of Entertainment 6
conference held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, November 9-10,
2012.

! 221!
1) IRB Review documents

! 222!

! 223!

! 224!
[Original draft questions submitted with IRB application as “Futures of Transmedia SP
Walkthrough 2”, 10/12/2012]

Futures of Transmedia Questions Walkthrough [Draft]
Zhan Li

Stage 1: FoE conference, November 9-10 + 1 or 2 week run-up pre-conference
Participants: FoE conference attendees, speakers, fellows
Platform: Conventional Online Survey input

Prompt and Questions (with example answers):

During the Futures of Entertainment Conference, the speakers as well as you and
your fellow attendees will think and talk about many different trends and factors that may
shape – help or hinder or even transform – the future of the media and entertainment
sector. You can think of these as “driving forces” or “drivers” which deeply influence
the underlying system or ecology of the media and entertainment sector. Drivers might
arise inside or outside the sector. They can range from very certain, well-established
trends that almost everyone agrees upon to uncertain, emerging trends that are much
more obscure and unexpected. Both kinds, as well as all those in-between, are as
important as other for this exercise. These drivers may be social, technological,
economic, political/policy, values-driven or even ecological.

We would like you to think about insights about drivers from the FoE conference
panel sessions that you have attended in terms of the next 10 years. If you were planning
for the future of the media and entertainment sector over the next 10 years, which of
these drivers do you think it important that others know about? Try to list as many as you
can. You can simply write them out as an imagined news headline. Your description can
be as short as a Twitter message.

FoE Panel: e.g. The Future of Media Piracy

Driver Headline:
e.g. Hollywood Studios Adopt Global Single Release Window as Standard

How certain is this driver?
(On a scale of 1 to 10, at least _ and at most _ )

How important is the potential impact of this driver for the particular area of the
media & entertainment industry focused on in this panel?
(On a scale of 1 to 10, at least _ and at most _)

How important is the potential impact of this driver for the North American media
& entertainment industry in general?
(On a scale of 1 to 10, at least _ and at most _)

! 225!

Stage 2: post-FoE conference, late November or early-mid December

a) Participants will fill in brief online survey regarding their background (basic
biographical details, job/organization role) and level of experience/familiarity &
area of interest in relation to transmedia.

b) They are asked to write and submit online a scenario set about how either a
hypothetical version of their organization, or alternatively, a wholly fictional one
in the transmedia sector, would respond to the future trends described in a
timeframe of the next 10 years.:

Scenario Prompt 1: “Roots”

As a starting point for thinking about the stories you might write for your
exercise, we suggest that you explore the insights about possible future trends and
issues impacting the media & entertainment industry that were discussed at the
Futures of Entertainment conference, which you can access on an exclusive
website accompanying this exercise. These are only possible suggestions and you
don’t have to limit yourself at all to the issues discussed at the conference.
Remember that this exercise is not about prediction, but about imagination.

You don’t have to be an expert in the transmedia field to provide good answers in
this exercise – just use your own knowledge and perspectives, even if you’re a
newcomer to the field, and that will be great.

In this exercise you are asked to tell a story from the perspective of an
organization. You should focus on the organization’s strategic perspective rather
than discuss what you personally might do. The organization might be a
hypothetical future version of the organization that you belong to today or it
might be a wholly fictional one. In either case, the phrase “your organization” is
used below.

Imagine that you are a key member of a transmedia industry organization 10
years in the future in 2022. Imagine that your organization has spent the decade
up to 2022 operating in the sector while it has undergone all its ups, down and
changes. On behalf of your organization, you have been asked by a university
conference to give a frank presentation about the state of the modern transmedia
field, and how crucial innovation challenges in knowledge have shaped your
organization’s engagement with the field since 2012. The talk’s audience will be a
! 226!
real mix, including many newcomers, so you’ll have to assume that many people
in the audience who won’t know much about the transmedia field. To help
encourage understanding by people unfamiliar with your field, the use of
analogies will be important in your presentation.

The story about the modern transmedia field that you will tell in 2022 is the story
of a field that has, over the last decade since 2012, increasingly evolved towards
becoming a very specialized discipline defined predominantly by its ‘original’
roots as a creative arts and entertainment sector storytelling practice, and by
innovation that deepens those roots.

The story may be positive, negative, or mixed. Transmedia may have become an
everyday word or it may have almost disappeared from use by 2022 – or
something in-between. The story may be global and/or local. There are lots of
possibilities for your story so long as it’s reasonably plausible – and “plausible”
can include things that happen in the story that might have been almost
unimaginable or thought highly unlikely back in 2012.

Please follow the steps below – you may write as much or as little as you like, but
try to write at least the minimum asked.

1) From your organization’s perspective, how would you frankly describe the
state of the transmedia field in 2022? What are its characteristic strengths
and weaknesses? How has the increased specialized focus of the field on its
“roots” most changed the field from how it was in 2012? Which media &
entertainment industry trends or driving forces were most important to the
changes that you describe? (Please write at least 1 substantial paragraph
with at least 1 trend or driver, but feel free to write as much as you like)

2) Looking back from your imagined perspective in 2022, think about the
differences between the transmedia fields of 2012 and your imagined future
present. Whether the differences are generally positive, negative, or mixed in
your story, consider what were the key challenges for professional knowledge
development – whether that means technical R&D, skills training, theory-
building, business model development etc. - in the field during this decade,
from the strategic perspective of your organization. Think of these challenges
as “gaps” in the collective knowledge development of the transmedia field in
2012 that called for us to try and bridge them with innovation by 2022.

You have to prioritize one gap in the history of transmedia 2012-22 that you
are presenting. In retrospect, which gap was the most significant, from your
organization’s perspective, in shaping the field’s trajectory to the future that
you imagine – whether the challenge it represents was resolved successfully
or not? (Try to describe the gap in one or two sentences, indicating whether
! 227!
the challenge was resolved successfully or not. You can do this in the style of
an industry magazine headline.)

3) From your organization’s perspective, which groups or kinds of stakeholders
(generalize, don’t name specific organizations or individuals) in the field
would be most interested in prioritizing addressing the gap you have selected?
You can name more than one.

4) Think about both what the transmedia field knows about the organizational
knowledge gap you describe and the process through which it know about it in
2012. Think about how that might change (or not) by 2022.

Using the Cynefin sensemaking framework, which of these 5 choices best
describe the way the transmedia field thinks about the gap in 2012? You can
choose more than 1 option.

[Participants choose out of a simple 5-point survey scale]

And in 2022? You can choose more than 1 option.

[as above]

5) Which widely known analogy from outside of the transmedia professional field
– it can be a story or metaphor from fact (such as from the key events of
another industry) or fiction (for instance, a scene from a famous movie or
fable), so long as it’s potentially recognizable by many who are newcomers to
transmedia – would you use to help explain the crucial organizational
knowledge gap and how it shaped the development of transmedia 2012-22?
(This doesn’t have to be a perfect analogy but it should have some striking
resonance with the gap.) Choose one analogy and briefly explain why you
chose it.

e.g. The knowledge challenge gap of how the transmedia field should
encourage the emergence of passionate genius creators despite a future
scenario depicting an industry dominated by stifling and unimaginative
corporate bureaucracy might be described
- (through fact) with the analogy of the struggle between Steve Jobs’
Apple Computer and the likes of IBM and Microsoft.
- (through fiction) with the analogy of the scene from Star Wars where
Luke trusts The Force and sets aside his computer targeting system when
attacking The Death Star.

! 228!

Scenario Prompt 2: “Footloose”

[same as above but with the replacement of the focus on transmedia becoming more
specialized and closely identified with its original “roots” in the arts & entertainment
with wording reflecting a shift of the transmedia field to a more “footloose” orientation
where transmedia concepts become popular (successfully or otherwise) in many areas
beyond the arts & entertainment)

Stage 3: Playground & Transmedia Hollywood, early 2013

The walkthrough for this stage is in development but it will task participants with
the same exercises about the futures of the transmedia sector as in Stage 1 and Stage 2
except the activities will also involve the remixing and expansion of content from Stages
1 and 2 (which will be broken down in to modular storytelling form) on an online
transmedia learning platform. Participants from Stages 1 and 2 will be invited to join.

! 229!

! 230!
2) “Grassroots”/Remixing Scenario & Sensemaking Survey Questions

! 231!

! 232!

! 233!

! 234!

! 235!

! 236!

! 237!

! 238!

! 239!

! 240!
3) Sample Screenshots of Experimental Transmedia Learning Platform
(Credit: Playground, USC Annenberg Innovation Lab)

! 241!
4) Redacted Sample Screenshots of Live Conference Website Scenario Exercise

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Collectively, the papers in this dissertation constitute foresight scenario theory as communication processes and practices, and contribute novel insights to the relevant literatures. These contributions focus on new innovative directions for scenario theory-building, methods, and analytics, intertwined with organizational communication related theories and frameworks of narrative and sensemaking. The latter two areas have been given relatively little attention so far in the scenario and foresight fields. The overarching goal is to help expand, integrate, and strengthen the foundations of the foresight scenario discourse and improve its potential to assist strategic decision-making and organizational change.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Staying ahead of the digital tsunami: strategy, innovation and change in public media organizations

PDF

Cosmopolitan logics and limits: networked discourse, affect, and identity in responses to the Syrian refugee crisis

PDF

Hobbyist inter-networking and the popular Internet imaginary: forgotten histories of networked personal computing, 1978-1998

PDF

Ecology and network evolution in online innovation contest crowdsourcing

PDF

The new news: vision, structure, and the digital myth in online journalism

PDF

Building a unicorn: management of innovation, collaboration, and change in a Silicon Valley start-up

PDF

A seat at the table: navigating identity, power, and safety in work meetings

PDF

Towards 21st century learning: culture, process, and skills

PDF

Communicating organizational knowledge in a sociomaterial network: the influences of communication load, legitimacy, and credibility on health care best-practice communication

PDF

A critical assessment of the uses and effectiveness of social media in investor communications

PDF

Principles of transmedia branding

PDF

Collaborative care capacity: developing culture, power relationships and leadership support for team care in a hospital

PDF

Language and identity in critical sensegiving: journeys of higher education equity agents

PDF

Centering impact, not intent: reframing everyday racism through storytelling, participatory politics, and media literacy

PDF

Media reinvented: the transformation of news in a networked society

PDF

From victim to subject: dramatization as research in Thailand's anti-trafficking movement

PDF

Social media best practices for Hollywood films and their applications in China

PDF

Tacit anticipation among film students: an ethnography of making movies in film school

PDF

Community structure as collective identity construction and resource search

PDF

Intermedia agenda setting in an era of fragmentation: applications of network science in the study of mass communication

Asset Metadata

Creator Li, Zhan (author)

Core Title New theoretical and research directions for foresight scenario work: narratives, sensemaking, and networks

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 12/01/2016

Defense Date 10/22/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag actor network theory,communication,Cynefin,foresight,futures,narrative,OAI-PMH Harvest,organizational communication,scenario planning,scenarios,sensemaking,strategic,strategic foresight,strategic narrative,strategy,Transmedia

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Riley, Patricia (committee chair), Jenkins, Henry (committee member), Rajagopalan, Nandini (committee member)

Creator Email zhan@alum.mit.edu,zhanli@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-521104

Unique identifier UC11298678

Identifier etd-LiZhan-3103.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-521104 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-LiZhan-3103.pdf

Dmrecord 521104

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Li, Zhan

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA