Learnings from role playing through future scenarios

One recent project with the World Health Organisation involved generating support for a “Call to Action”. This aims to keep key stakeholders focused on maintaining pandemic management capacities, on up-dating plans, and on strengthening relevant networks, even as memories of COVID-19 fade.

By 4Sing created Global WHO Scenarios:

  
This project was different to others in a couple of ways:

• The “surprise” already happened (COVID-19). The scenarios, however, explored how the experience COVID-19 may impact our ability to deal with a second pandemic. This could be positive (e.g. drawing on lessons learned) or negative (e.g. wild social media rumours).
• The logic is not “if” but “when” the next pandemic hits. Hence rather than developing scenarios to cover all plausible options (including no pandemic), the scenarios posited four different pandemics hitting – but at different dates (hence with different levels of memory post-COVID-19), and with the world differently set up to meet the challenge (e.g. different technological, legal and health sector structure innovations).
• The target group was not executives from one organisation, but a mixture key stakeholders (governments, scientists, NGOs) represented in a meeting of over 120 people in Geneva in April 2023. As can be imagined, the size of the group presented its own challenges – but also opportunities, as there was a true diversity views present.
• The nature of the event meant that the scenarios had to be prepared in advance. Whilst the WHO staff, and some national colleagues were intimately involved in this step, it meant (unlike in a normal project) the insights generated were not automatically appropriated by the target audience – we had to devise another way for that to happen.
• Hence the project allowed us to mix two of our favourite activities: developing scenarios, and role-playing participants through the future. We allocated 30 people to each scenario, and broke each group of 30, into five sub-groups. Each sub-group played a different type of actor in the scenario – for instance, the government of a lower-income country will have a very different take on the problems than an international NGO. By role-playing through the future, each sub-group could identify the challenges faced, and the options (during the pandemic, but also prior to it) that would limit its impact.
• When together, we had “commonality spotters” (who went from group to group) identify the similar threads they could see in groups across all scenarios (e.g. what did the four groups playing lower income countries come up with?). But we were also able to gather bottom-up input using electronic tools to generate word clouds and hold votes with all participants. The learnings were fed into the text of the “Call to Action” that then was discussed in the two subsequent days.

Looking back, I see two trends emerging that make this project a trend setter:

• There is increasing demand for large events to have a interactive future dimension. E.g. we just ran a session with 1000 people at the InCyber Forum on AI & cybersecurity.
• The advent of AI and time crunch of diaries means organisations do not want to spend time thinking about what future is possible, but rather to get straight into rehearsing what possible futures could mean for their strategy, their portfolio, or their innovation. We have three projects running where gaming plays a big role in order to equip participants with “memories of the future” which in turn will help them know how to react to upcoming challenges.