6 Tips to Map an Uncertain Future

By Uri Avin, FAICP, and Robert Goodspeed, AICP

Faced with the uncertainties and demands created by the U.S.'s concurrent crises, planners are asking if longstanding planning tools and approaches like forecasting and visioning make sense in today's context.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of planning that considers a range of unknowns and trends, from potential economic downturns to broader economic and social change. Protests on racial injustice have sparked renewed conversations about how planning can address equity. Meanwhile, the march of new technologies, such as autonomous vehicles, threatens to upend traditional planning assumptions. And many cities are already experiencing the still-uncertain effects of climate change.

Exploratory scenario planning — different than the traditional scenario practice many planners are familiar with — provides a tool that addresses uncertainty and fosters consideration of the interconnections between issues. This shift has resulted in a variety of approaches for where and how to create exploratory scenarios in planning practice.

In a recent Journal of the American Planning Association article, we outlined multiple approaches for using exploratory scenarios through five diverse case studies. We hope it will give planning practitioners a clearer understanding of how exploratory scenarios relate to specific plans that provide decision makers concrete advice and recommendations.

Image by Miss Tuni, iStock/Getty Images Plus.

Not the 'normative'

Using scenarios to define a land-use/transportation plan, often at the regional scale, is well established in the U.S. Most projects have aimed to define a preferred, or "normative," scenario and typically contain scenarios illustrating competing visions for the future, or futures, resulting from current trends. This approach tends to assume a large degree of control and influence to realize the desired plan, and often does not fully address uncertainties about how the future will unfold.

More recently, however, practitioners have begun to use scenarios to explore a wider range of uncertain futures, regardless of desirability. Exploratory scenarios can be a powerful and effective methodology for considering uncertainty and better incorporating external social, economic, and technological trends, as well as climate change impacts, into long-range planning. This allows practitioners to create plans that identify decisions that are robust (meaning they perform well under different scenarios) or contingent (only perform well under some scenarios).

Based on our case study analysis, we offer six tips to effectively implement exploratory scenarios.

1. CULTIVATE A SCENARIO-ORIENTED MINDSET but engage in the full-blown process selectively. In other words, develop the habit of scanning planning challenges from the perspective of seven key scenario approach factors: influence over future; consensus on problems; population makeup; urbanization; economic climate; time horizon; pace of growth.

Embarking on a full exploratory process will take more time and effort than a more conventional approach, so it should be applied only in certain cases with appropriate empirical conditions, project resources, and stakeholder buy-in.

2. GAIN THE SUPPORT OF TOP LEADERSHIP for this kind of process and for eventual multiagency implementation. Also brief them throughout the process. Many elected officials (and some planners) are initially averse to considering plausible but less desirable futures. Buying into the value of an exploratory mindset is essential to success.

3. DO NOT SIMPLY EXTRAPOLATE current trends to create a baseline scenario. In your analysis of driving forces, givens (assumptions shared among all scenarios) should also influence the trends scenario. Is such a business-as-usual future merely an extrapolation of current land-use patterns? Of current policies? Of current driving forces? The analysis of givens in your analysis of factors driving change should be incorporated into a trends future, which means, in effect, that the baseline is a constructed scenario rather than a mere extrapolation. It requires the same level of disaggregation and synthesis as the other scenarios.

4. THOROUGHLY TEST THE LOGIC and consistency of the scenarios. The more complex the scenarios, the more necessary it is to run them by informed outsiders. The devil is in the details; many efforts are undermined by internal inconsistencies. Stories should exhibit no arbitrary assumptions, nor should they incorporate too many intermediate events, to yield the final outcomes assumed.

5. AVOID OVERLY COMPLEX SCENARIO STRUCTURES. The standard exploratory scenario design suggests a four-cell matrix along two primary axes representing the key drivers of the scenarios. Though this methodology runs the risk of oversimplification, it has the advantage of being very comprehensible. Extending the structure to three axes or to multiple drivers (as in the Freight Futures case study) can produce richer, more complete stories but can be difficult to explain and make it harder to analyze cause-and-effect relationships through quantitative analysis.

6. CHOOSE A SET OF ACTIONS that lead you toward a preferred scenario rather than choosing a specific scenario. If exploratory scenarios stress uncertainty, then the very notion of choosing one long-term scenario is contradictory. If the future is a moving target, the best one can do is to select a set of complementary actions that point in the direction of desired outcomes or are effective under different futures. Where single jurisdictions sometimes have significant control over implementation (as in our Gwinnett County case study), it becomes more feasible to try to implement a given scenario. But in other projects, such as the Freight Futures case, the scenarios consider trends outside the control of any U.S. region.

Final thoughts

The effective use of exploratory scenarios depends on project goals, context, and resources available. We hope our case studies inspire practitioners to eschew a one-size-fits-all mentality and reflect on the most appropriate approach for each project. Exploratory scenarios must also incorporate stakeholder values and not only rely on expert judgment and technical analysis. In many cases, key project stakeholders have the power to influence which scenario is more or less likely. Even in cases that focus on external trends, values guide decisions about what topics, indicators, and issues will be explored. As a result, scenario planning methods from management and business must be adapted to accommodate the collaboration and participation required to explore the question of values.

By serving as a bridge between the analysis of external trends with debates about values, exploratory scenarios can help planners empower communities to better understand and shape their future.

Uri Avin is a research professor at the National Center for Smart Growth and teaches in the urban planning program at the School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation at the University of Maryland. His experience also includes work in the public sector and as a consultant.

Robert Goodspeed is an assistant professor at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, and the author of Scenario Planning for Cities and Regions: Managing and Envisioning Uncertain Futures.

"Using Exploratory Scenarios in Planning Practice: A Spectrum of Approaches" (May 2020) was originally published in JAPA.