A group of analysts generate scenario planning simulation games for policy makers. The games combine known facts about the future, such as in environmental, demographics, geography, military, political, social, and science issues, industrial information, and limiting resources such as mineral reserves, with plausible alternative trends which are key driving forces of the games. It is make-believe, pretend.
Scenarios are a way of understanding the dynamics shaping the future. It can be likened to doing katas in martial arts: people are removed from "reality", placed in some "future" as if it is real, and then brainstorm and practice possible responses to potential threats and challenges and explore possible deviating paths.
So it is not so much a predictive tool and more like a training in decision making, threat modeling and risk management. We increase our self-confidence, an essential ingredient for being action-able if and when needed. If scenario planning is done with collectives for the individuals in the collective as "policy makers" and we also pass on the choreography itself, we can distribute a way to distribute power.
Now to find a way to make it a more informal and fun experience that includes all senses and common sense. These fall roughly into four categories: social, economic, political and technological issues. Of course, categories are only parts of a mindset, and you can set it up completely different. Real issues entail a bit of all forces, and have reflections in the other categories. The point of listing the driving forces is to look past the everyday crises that typically occupy our minds and to explore long-term forces that ordinarily work well outside our concerns.
It is these powerful forces that will usually catch us unaware. Once these forces are enumerated, we can see that from our perspective, some forces can be called "predetermined" meaning they are completely outside our control and will play out in any story we tell about the future. Predetermined elements are those that can be predicted accurately because they change very slowly.
