Art of the Long View

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Peter Schwartz. The Art of the Long View: the path to strategic insight for yourself and your company. 3rrency (Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group) 3. 1991.

Along with Life in 2030, The Art of the Long View is a book that would have helped for my entire engineering career.

The first time I encountered scenario planning was reading through resources for improving non-profit boards in 2020. The 2020 Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia Conference session on leading through uncertainty deepened my understanding, which helped. (Anthony Taylor, SME Strategy, "Leading through uncertainty")

Finding support and time for using scenario planning in my practice as an engineer or volunteer in 2025 remains weak at best.

As an old book, I enjoyed learning about the undercurrents in my childhood and comparing what I remember happening with the anticipated scenario examples for 2005. The driving forces the author noted were interesting to review. Yet, my perspective as an engineer in training starting my career lacked the broad view the author explores.

The Global Business Network described in the book became part of Monitor in 2013 before Deloitte acquired Monitor.

Notes

  1. 1996 edition included a User Guide

  2. SME Strategy post on scenario planning for non-profit organizations

  3. Boardsource on scenario planning

Highlighted Table of Contents - abridged

  • Acknowledgements

  • The Pathfinder's Tale
    • The Explorations of Pierre Whack
    • The Personal Future
  • The Smith & Hawken Story: The Process of Scenario-Building
    • The Smith & Hawken Scenarios
    • The Results
    • The Process of Scenarios
  • The Scenario-Building Animal
    • Memories of the Future
    • Chains of Perception
    • Tell Me a Story: the Power of Narrative
    • Scenarios Are Myths of the Future
  • Uncovering the Decision
    • The Large Shadow of a Small Decision
    • Articulating Your Mind-set
    • Decision-Articulation on a Global Scale: Royal Dutch/Shell in the 1980s
    • Refining the Focus
  • Information-Hunting and -Gathering
    • Targets: What to Look For
      • Science and Technology
      • Perception-Shaping Events
      • Music
      • Fringes
    • Tactics: Where to Look
      • Remarkable People
      • Sources of Surprise
      • Filters
      • Immersion in Challenging Environments
      • Networked Sensibilities
    • The Global Business Network: Designing and Information-Hunting and -Gathering Company
  • Creating Scenario Building Blocks
    • Driving Forces: What We Know We Care About
      • society
      • technology
      • economics
      • politics
      • environment
    • Warning: Ambiguity Ahead
    • Predetermined Elements: What We Know We Know
      • slow-changing phenomena
      • constrained situations
      • in the pipeline
      • inevitable collisions
    • Critical Uncertainties: Dwelling-places of Our Hopes and Fears
  • Anatomy of a New Driving Force: The Global Teenager
    • The Nature of Adolescence
    • Technology
    • Economic Fears and Hopes
    • New Markets
    • Political Change
  • Composing a Plot
    • Questions to find a plot
      • What are the Driving Forces?
      • What do you feel is uncertain?
      • What is inevitable?
      • How about this or that scenario?
    • The Nature of Plots
    • Winners and Losers [plot type]
    • Challenge and Response [plot type]
    • Evolution [plot type]
    • Other Common Plots
      • Cycles
      • Infinite Possibility
      • The Lone Ranger
      • "My Generation"
    • How Plots Interact
      • The Unbroken Line
      • Training Yourself to Recognize Plots
  • The World in 2005: Three Scenarios
    • Driving Forces of the Next Two Decades
      • Shuffling Political Alignments
      • Technology Explosion
      • Global Pragmatism
      • Demographics
      • Energy
      • Environment
      • The Global Information Economy
    • New Empires
    • Market World
    • Change Without Progress
    • Why I Am Optimistic About the Future
  • Rehearsing the Future
    • The Suspension of Disbelief
    • Looking for Warning Signals
    • Creating a Shared Language
    • Did You Do the Right Thing?
  • Epilogue: To My Newborn Son
  • Appendix: Steps to Developing Scenarios
    • Step One: Identify Focal Issue or Decision
    • Step Two: Key Forces in the Local Environment
    • Step Three: Driving Forces
      • if only I had known...
      • research intensive step
    • Step Four: Rank by Importance and Uncertainty
      • finds the relevant axes of differences between scenarios
    • Step Five: Selecting Scenario Logics
      • sets the plot
      • best captures the situation dynamics
      • communicates the point effectively
    • Step Six: Fleshing Out the Scenarios [trends]
      • convert key factors and trends into a narrative
      • How would the world get from here to there?
      • What events might be needed to make the end point of the scenario plausible?
      • Are there known individuals whose ascendancy int the public view might help characterize a given scenario?
    • Step Seven: Implications
      • How does the decision look in each scenario?
      • What vulnerabilities have been revealed?
      • Which scenarios make the decision robust?
      • How could we adapt the strategy to make it more robust if the desired scenario shows it not happening?
    • Step Eight: Selection of Leading Indicators and Signposts
      • Important to know what to look for that would show that a scenario is proving correct
    • Additional Considerations for Creating Scenarios
      1. Beware of ending up with three scenarios.
      2. Avoid assigning probabilities to different scenarios.
      3. Name scenarios to telegraph the internal logics.
      4. Choose team members carefully for role in decision making, breadth of function, and open imagination.
      5. Good scenarios are both plausible and surprising.
      6. Scenario making is intensely participatory, or it fails.
  • End Notes