John L. Petersen

For almost a decade now, I have been traveling broadly speaking to groups of all sizes and  almost every discipline you can think of about the big change that appeared to be converging on the horizon.   

Often characterizing the coming shift in terms of breakdowns and breakthroughs, I’ve tried to build integrated mental pictures of the extraordinary nexus of driving forces – both conventional and unconventional – that seemed destined to reconfigure the way we live on this planet.  My book, Out of the Blue, introduced an approach for making sense out of big events that would otherwise be surprises, and my latest volume, A Vision for 2012: Planning for Extraordinary Change, uses the breakdown/breakthrough themes to propose a general approach for dealing with large scale change. 

So, I’ve been thinking about this possibility for quite some time.   (My wife would probably tell you that I think about it all of the time.)

I generally agree with the many thoughtful people who consider predicting the future to be a fool’s errand.   It is intrinsically fraught with so much complexity and uncertainty that the best one can do with integrity is to array potential alternatives – scenarios – across the horizon, and then try to think about what might be done if one of those worlds materializes.  

Scenario planning has certainly been an effective discipline, helping many organizations to imagine potentialities that probably otherwise wouldn’t have shown up in their field of view.  But as I facilitate organizations going through these exercises, the little, nagging voice in the back of my head is not asking, “What is the array of possible futures?” – it is always wondering, “What is the future really going to be?”.  It wants concreteness.  It wants predictions.       

I think that no one knows for sure what the future will bring, but after some time of being in this business one begins to be able to discriminate between what is substantive and structural and what is largely speculative.  For me, at least, some things have an intuitive sense of being real and important, and the rest of the possibilities lack just enough gravitas that I know that they’re only “ideas”.  That intuiti