So lets look at the arguments made. Mapping Strategy agrees that there is a danger in traditional scenario planning that a linear story will be told, and it will be easy for a strong person to game the outcome. We are fully in agreement on this and I like the examples and arguments used. However Art then makes the following arguments:

1. When scenarios are built in a more distributed fashion from modular piece-parts in the context of a highly interactive, participatory, fast-moving, tightly choreographed session however, any one person's ability to steer becomes minimal. Story telling is seen as only a part of such a process. not its main component.
2. Reverse-order storytelling, because of its "high cognitive load" (my brain hurts!), favors those with greater ability to bear such a load and/or greater experience using the technique. This in effect argues that such techniques can also be influenced and that its use can dampen team participation and inclusiveness.
3. The novelty-seeking open-endedness that narratives tend to produce can be just the opposite of what some organizations need. The argument here is that when the problem is completely unbounded narrative techniques may be appropriate but that When the problem is more about finding distinct points of divergence and convergence between several "schools of thought" (some data, numerous but not infinite possibilities, modest understanding) then scenarios tend to be more appropriate.

Now I have several issues with these which I can summarise as follows:

1. There is a misconception for a start. Future Backwards is not an alternative to Scenario Planning, is one of a body of techniques designed to handle the issue of managing uncertain complex environments, Gary Klein and I coined the phrase Anticipatory Awareness for this. These include These include Fitness Landscapes derived from narrative, Ritual Dissent, The Cynefin Framework and others. In complex environments any attempt to project the future, however done other than at high level of abstraction is likely to be a mistake. By creating options you constrain the collective cognitive capability of the organisation to those options. Minor deviations from those options will not be perceived until too late. What matters is the ability to scan the domain as a whole (Fitness Landscapes) and sense small deviations from patters early. Knowing what aspects of that domain are complicated and which are complex (the Cynefin Framework) is critical. For complicated areas scenario planning is appropriate and it looks like Mapping Strategy has some good techniques to overcome the deficiencies of 1970's/'Shell-style' scenario planning (here I quote).
2. Threats and opportunities in a complex domain are unlikely to be anticipated. The strength of a Fitness Landscape is that it reveals both the main attractor mechanisms in play in a market or economy, but also shows the aspects of the field which are starting to reveal threat or opportunity disguised by those attractors. This is achieved through visualisation and the ability of a senior decision maker to move directly from an abstract representation of the field, to the raw data of intelligence without the disinter-mediation of middle management or scenario type processes. In parallel with this boundary scanning (The Cynefin Framework) allows switching between scenario type approaches and the above mentioned techniques according to context. Different situations require different techniques. This is more fully described in The New Dynamics of Strategy in respect of Cynefin. Fitness Landscapes and their use are not yet published I am afraid, but we are starting to teach them in our Accreditation Programmes.
3. Discussion in groups, no matter how done, constrains possibilities to our imagined present and perceivable futures. That constraint prevents us detecting weak signals or sensing different potentialities. Workshop processes, especially if they are reductionist - modular piece parts implies this - will always tend the accept the dominant culture of the group, or that of the facilitation team. The field of strategy needs research and planning processes which minimise the footprint of the strategist; they also require minimising the influence of the facilitator. Focusing on participation and inclusiveness runs a very high danger of group think and consensus - exactly the opposite of what is needed under conditions of uncertainty. The role of the scenario planning consultant is not to make people comfortable, the opposite in fact. There is no point to going to great lengths to prevent the dominant Mr Smith to use Mapping Strategy's example, if the facilitator then orchestrates the assembly. Now I assume that s/he has a way of avoiding this, although I am not sure it can ever fully be escaped. In many of the scenario planning processes I have observed the facilitator in effect strongly influences the group direction.

The issue here is one of balance. There is a legitimate space for scenario planning, but it lies in the space of the "knowable" future, complicated, susceptible to analysis yes, but inherently a near equilibrium state. In a complex system boundary conditions and attractor mechanisms (the knowable aspects of a complex system) may benefit from such application. However to apply them to the system as a whole represents ontological (the nature of causality in the system), and therefore epistemological (the way we know things and make decisions) confusion and thereby lies danger. Anticipatory awareness is about creating resilient sense-making capability to handle high levels of uncertainty. Plotting scenarios, however done, in such domains restricts capability.

In the end, as the Soren Kierkegaard quote which heads this blog indicates, analysis is about the past, the future has to lived. Tools need to support the dynamic processing of living not the static process of analysis.