In January 2020, almost no analyst predicted that a global pandemic would halt the world for two years. Yet dozens of organisations — from the WHO to the Gates Foundation — had developed detailed scenarios about what would happen in case of a pandemic. The difference is crucial: a prediction says "this will happen"; a scenario says "if this happens, here is what might follow".
Predictions are seductive because they promise certainty. But the future is a complex, non-linear system full of surprises. Predictive models work well for repetitive phenomena (3-day weather forecasts, satellite trajectories), but fail miserably when it comes to social, technological and environmental systems where millions of variables interact unpredictably.
Scenarios, by contrast, do not claim to predict. They are structured narratives of plausible futures, built to explore the consequences of different combinations of factors. The classic method is the 2x2 matrix: you identify two critical uncertainties (e.g. "AI regulation: strong or weak?" and "international cooperation: high or low?") and explore the four resulting scenarios.
Peter Schwartz, one of the fathers of scenario planning, worked at Shell in the 1970s when he developed scenarios about the oil crisis. When the crisis came, Shell was the only company prepared — not because it had predicted the exact event, but because it had imagined a world where that event was possible and had planned accordingly.
The value of scenarios lies not in the accuracy of prediction, but in the quality of preparation they generate. A well-constructed scenario changes how an organisation, a community or an individual thinks and decides. It is a learning tool, not a prophecy.
NextHuman, our tool, works on exactly this principle: it doesn't tell you what will happen, but shows you what might happen and invites you to explore the connections between possible events.