As companies sign up to ambitious sustainability targets, scenario planning might give them an innovation edge
It’s easy to mock futurologists. Talk of space-age tomorrows grates with the stubborn realities of today. At best, it feels fictitious. At worst, it sounds phony or even fatuous. Who cares if we’ll be holidaying on the moon by 2067 if we’re all bankrupt this Christmas?
Consumer Futures 2020 treads this perilous path. The result of an 18-month collaboration between Sainsbury’s, Unilever and environmental thinktank Forum for the Future, the report maps out four consumer-based scenarios for the end of the decade.
At face value, the visions of the future are a satirist’s dream. Take the first, My Way. It’s premised on a prosperous economy and a hands-off government. The general citizenry is “optimistic” and keen on home-grown, locally produced products. Characteristic of such a world is the “underground veg market” – a movement led by homeless people, who grow low-sunlight vegetables in formerly derelict basements.
Not all the scenarios are so utopian. The fourth – I’m in Your Hands – predicts a 2020 in which the UK’s four main supermarkets control 90% of all grocery sales (up from today’s share of 76%). Sustainability, essentially, becomes an issue for “big and dominant” business and heavy-handed government to do on our behalf.
As well as enjoying the comic value, detractors are quick to question the academic robustness of the Consumer Futures project. The four scenarios all proliferate with statistics and timelines. None has any real basis in fact. As Timothy Devinney, a consumer trends expert at the University of Technology in Sydney, puts it, they are “sort of made-up really”.
Yet criticising the imaginative conceptions of futurologists as possibly erroneous is to miss the point. Scenarios are not intended to work as predictions. They should be seen instead, insists Unilever’s Paul Matthews, as “provocations”.
Provocations for what? Well, for “triggering” ideas and realigning companies’ thinking. When it comes to sustainability, companies all too often find themselves on the back foot. To quote the proclaimed futurologist Alvin Toffler, “the future always arrives too fast … and in the wrong order”.
Hence business finds itself reacting to an issue such as climate change, not pre-empting it. Scenario planning can help turn that around.
Or so its advocates maintain. Forum for the Future, as the name suggests, leads the pack. It uses scenario planning in two distinct ways: to help companies develop sustainability strategies, and to test out existing ones. It counts major players in the tourism, retail, fashion, financial and development sectors as clients (or “partners”).
Thinking long term
Of course, scenario planning is not new. Shell famously used it to anticipate the 1973 oil crisis. But sustainability is particularly well suited to the approach. Why? Because it “breaks our short-term cycle” and forces companies to look longer term, according to Forum’s principal sustainability adviser, Fiona Bennie.
The tendency of companies to make incremental improvements to business-as-usual models won’t cut it, she says. The problems of sustainability are too big and the changes facing business too fast. Scenarios, in contrast, can help companies “think more radically” about long-term sustainability challenges by removing the “constraints of today”.
Jack Cunningham, Sainsbury’s head of climate change and environment, says: “It’s about [considering] the future and making sure your business is prepared for any sustainability challenge that might arise over the coming years.”
To work, the scenarios must be informed by experts and therefore credible (or “plausible”, to use Forum’s phrase). In addition, there must be more than one. The future is inherently uncertain. Successful sustainability strategies must anticipate multiple possibilities.
2020 remains some way off. Perhaps we’ll all be wearing solar-powered backpacks and using fuel-cell-powered refrigerated packaging as some of Forum’s scenarios suggest. Perhaps not. Either way, it’s worth thinking about.
“Consumer Futures 2020” was published by Forum for the Future on 12 October. It is accompanied by a scenario-planning toolkit, available for download here