This singular future of one track then acts as a filter which accepts any information about emergent trends that reinforces it and rejects any information about emergent trends that contradicts it.

First future thus builds up a reinforcing pattern in the brain in accordance with the law of sequence of information, which means that the older the pattern, the more elements it will have included in the increased rigidity of itself.

This means that the older, heavier and more rigid a first scenario is, the more it will resist deconstruction, inclusion of apposite information, development of alternative scenarios, or the learning process itself.

Thinking, planning and decisions based wholly on first scenario are bound to become less realistic and competent over time as the real future arrives and increasingly attacks first scenario until it inevitably breaks it suddenly down as a "future shock". Learning is then more painful and difficult. The only way this pain and difficulty can be avoided is through undertaking voluntary learning from the start, which means deconstructing our first scenario into crucial elements that can be combined or reconstructed into alternative scenarios of the future by adding also new elements from previously rejected information. The new elements are those that have tended to always make us psychologically uncomfortable. We all tend to have certain subjects we do not like raised up to us by those who are enthusiastic about such subjects. These subjects are such that they have never seemed relevant or practicable within the world we inhabit and live in. Our cognitive limitations become emotional negatives within us so that psychologically we think to ourselves something like,

"Please, God, do not let it be true that the future could bring: oil price down to two(2) dollars a barrel due to rapid expansion of alternative energy/ a population of twenty billion with no starvation/ all nuclear waste being deposited on Mars/ people living until the age of 150 then being allowed dignified suicide/ most parents demanding genetically designed children/ drinking water available only through industrial production/ cross-continental air transport having to be supersonic due to extreme meteorological instability/ four magnetic poles soon emerging on Earth."

My point here is not to promote these elements as 'facts', but what I call 'factoids' which have phenomenological force, substance and validity as genuinely alternative possible emergent quasi-realities for building wider bandwidth scenarios and helping us to deconstruct the future.

The indispensable principle here is what Peter Schwarz, in his excellent book, 'The Art of the Long View' calls 'suspension of disbelief', which means no more automatic filtering out of unpleasant, challenging or mind-blowing factoids that could emerge as important elements or forces in the real future.

It should be perfectly clear from all this that the tendency to adhere to a 'politically correct' first scenario, or to an overly narrow and tight bandwidth of supposedly 'alternative' scenarios of the future with no meaningful but only a cosmetic difference between them, will lead inexorably into failed institutional thinking, planning and decision-making.

Of course, in any institution, organisation, department, think tank or other entity of shared, co-operative thinking, planning or decision-making, there will invariably be some degree of overt or covert propaganda pressure from 'on high'. This is due to those 'on high' being senior controllers, leaders or advisors who are themselves cognitive prisoners of first-scenario-simulation-heuristic and caught in the sequence-of-information-trap or learning disability.

On all levels of human authority, the problems of one-track thinking and short-sightedness have demonstrated themselves disastrously throughout human political, economic and societal history. Having control has never guaranteed the intelligence, ethics or harmoniousness of that control. In fact, learning disabilities and decision incompetence increase in harmfulness in direct proportion to the amount of power and authority wielded by the failed cognitive system.

What this translates to in terms of practical management is that the greater the authority, the more dire the urgency for genuine scenario planning of the greatest possible bandwidth.

No form of first scenario thinking or decision-making can save a planet, a government, a multinational company, a business, an institution, a community, a family or an individual from future shock of unexpected disaster and pain. This is a scientific truth rooted in the well-studied cognitive mechanism of the human brain and nervous system. Those who avoid this science and its implications do so at their own peril.

Over-confident one-track, one-dimensional thinking and planning has never been rewarded with enduring success and well-being of any group or society of people on earth.

"The Future is Not What it Used to Be". We must deconstruct the future while there is still time to salvage something good for whatever entity we represent. The pressures of time-acceleration, increasing complexity and unavoidable change require an improved cognitive decision-making process in responsible people who truly care about our world and our future.

Current trends of elimination of genuine business competition, constriction of individual choice and freedom, disintegration of education, destruction of the environment, international bullying with hi-tech warfare, genetically modified crops and abusive economic exploitation of underdeveloped nations and tribes is creating increased incompetence, failure and cruelly destructive solutions everywhere.

Those perpetrating such things are in fact harming themselves and undermining the foundations of their own success, wealth and authority. The system science of tektology teaches us that those who live by disorganising and degenerative elements will die by them. Global management requires generative thinking and generative plans. Global managers who do not understand this are indulging in bad systems thinking, which underlies and supports the first scenario simulation heuristic.

These two twin new, interdisciplinary sciences - cognitive science and system science - are being ignored by too many people in positions of great responsibility. Science is about 'finding out what is now unknown', which means it is about learning much more than it is about technology.

The right use or steering of technology can only come about when decisions about technology are in the hands of learning and not in the hands of dinosaur-brained linear thinkers operating under failed cognition in senior management default brain settings. This means we need whole new definitions of managerial and leadership competence.

Those of us who sincerely believe in the possibility of improving decision-making should realise that such improvements are urgently necessary. The least we can do is become actual phenomenologists who open our cognitive systems to unusual information and trends that routinely cause us mental discomfort of threats to our locked-in belief systems about our universe and our future. Without such a shift in our philosophy, we will remain unscientific and caught in an interwoven set of neuro-cognitive learning disabilities.

The dangers - both personally and organisationally - are there, but so are the opportunities. The factoids are out there, and some of them may be truth. We must remember in all our concerns and research that a "factoid", as I have called it, is not a belief, but a 'suspension of disbelief' that opens the way to multi-reality thinking and multi-scenario planning. Both belief and disbelief are cognitive barriers to the learning process. Neither 'folk psychology' (belief) nor 'eliminative materialism' (disbelief) is going to get the job done. The human cognitive system is working in both higher order and lower order 'ontological strata' (read Nicolai Hartmann).

The practical, pragmatic thrust of real thinking about all this should be obvious to anyone who can think and is not just drowning in the abyss of post-modernism that wants to deconstruct belief, but does not want to deconstruct disbelief. Such clever pseudo-thinking is just shallow, unscientific scepticism dressed up in hip new verbal clothing, which is a Wittgensteinian problem, not a real response to the thinking challenge of our era. As Heidegger said:

"Most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking."

Much of what tries to fob itself off on us as 'futures thinking' is just academic left-brained linear tripe, or, all-too-often, sheer propaganda to try to make some first scenario come true through mass hypnosis. So it is still not genuine thinking, but more like a wordy, brilliant and hopeful avoidance of thinking. Only scenario planning qualifies as 'futures thinking'.

If we are going to think with real cognitive ability, we will have to interface our active future with our passive future. This requires what is in essence the ancient stoic discrimination of the Roman philosopher Epictetus, which says we must carefully identify both the things we can control (our active future) and the things we cannot control (our passive future). In scenario planning we are testing our relevant set of decision-options, our active intentions, against a set of alternative futures, where in each intersection of an active decision with a future scenario we ask how the decision will most probably have to be modified in that particular future. And, furthermore, it will be important to describe such probable decision-to-future impact in various 'time-slices' or durations, such as how the given scenario will kick-in for, say, the immediate future, then the medium-range future and finally in some long-range future. This creates a thorough active-to-passive three-dimensional impacts matrix which in turn delivers three main thinking products:

The greater our investment in such thinking and planning, the greater the pay-off, both cognitively as organisation learning and pragmatically as organisational effectiveness through tactical implementation of our carefully articulated strategy.

When a team of decision-makers is brought through a facilitated exercise under a thoughtful, skilled facilitator with the use of appropriate visual displays of the team's thinking, the results are usually far more dramatic and decisive than anyone would have anticipated. Overall comprehension of the situation gets boosted, various critical junctures with the future get vivified, and team co-ordination in the implementation phase is greatly enhanced through greater consciousness of one another's thinking and learning.

These gains further translate into greater intellectual stimulation from one's management task and greater pleasure of the company of one's fellows as more meaningful and rewarding work relationships.

Deconstructing the future creates fresh, open cognitive space for restructuring a shared destiny. There is far more to gain from this and far less to lose from it than most people imagine. Most of the wagons circled as 'defensive routines' around any given first scenario shared by a group of decision-makers can and should be relaxed without paranoia.

Our own ignorance will always be a greater threat or loss of opportunity for us than the external future that will actually come to pass. Since our first scenario simulation fixation is not going to survive the future, there is no reason to not go ahead and dismantle it now when it is easier and more fruitful to do this. We must not forget that the most real aspects of the actual future will be unexpected and are unpredictable. The more we discount the unexpected and unpredictable, the more we think we already know what must happen and feel that we are in control of events, the greater will be our "future shock". A degree of humility and willingness to learn are necessary for genuine and enduring success, whether individually or collectively.

When the need for scenario planning is clear, we can begin to realise that the way our brain handles time is so far rather inefficient and incomplete. For instance, most people perceive time as moving from the past through the present and then into the future. The brain, our cognitive faculty, does not handle time in this way. In the cortex, the future is in the front of the brain as memories-of-the-future and the present is at the back of the brain as memories-of-the-present. We go through our past from the present to get at what we imagine as the future; also we go from the future through the past to get at what we imagine is the present.

The movement of time in cognition is always a movement through the established patterns in memory as the past. That is why we tend to get stuck in 'first scenario' in regard to the future and stuck in 'first reality' in regard to the present. Through over-confidence and lack of cognitive scientific insight, we only imagine we know the so-called 'real world' and the 'probable future'. No matter how many times we are shocked or go through some kind of crisis, we never lose our faith in the erroneous notion that we are moving through a known and understood present 'reality' into a known and controllable 'future'.

If we can somehow learn to disillusion ourselves from our wrong time-theory of our brain, our cognitive neuro-system, we can begin to do something better and more realistic; we can teach ourselves to think in multi-reality and multi-future so that the back-brain and fore-brain become learning zones. Then the past also becomes a learning zone and we begin to understand better what has been really happening to us, which is even therapeutic!

From the standpoint of cognitive neurobiology, as Dr David Ingvar of Sweden once pointed out, time is the flow of blood through the brain. When we are heavily focused on the 'future', there is a build-up of blood pressure in the forehead, and when we are heavily focused on the 'present', there is a build-up of blood pressure at the back of the head. If we can learn to see how this really works, our entire view as to what is present or future 'reality' comes into serious question. For instance, since the 'future' is actually memory of the future, we will want to learn more how prospective memory works, and there are some good scientific studies of this.

One of the most important findings about prospective memory, which is remembering to do something, is that it functions more successfully where there is an incentive and less successfully where there is a lack of incentive. This explains why bringing our most urgent decision-set to the scenarios we have built is so important for scenario planning. If we visit alternative worlds of the future with vagueness or woolliness about what we are trying to achieve we will not monitor the future for emergent scenarios and will forget to apply the necessary adjustments of our decisions in the critical time-slices. Our prospective memory will tend to fail and our ongoing decision-actions will just lurch forward blindly into increasing trouble, thus revealing our thoughtless, un-alert and incompetent management. And we don't want that, do we?

Multi-track thinking needs to take place in all the time-zones of the brain or cognitive faculty. We must train ourselves in all this and not just let it be a one-off event we had in some workshop last year. Only when multi-track thinking in ample bandwidth of both alternative realities and alternative futures has become natural and easy through repeated practice with live issues of genuine concern and incentive, can we call ourselves competent thinkers and decision-makers.

There can be no compromise on this point, regardless of who wants to argue against it, for we know why they argue and where it is leading them in their particular decision field. However good one's 'intuition' or remarkable one's 'clairvoyance', there is still a need for competent, extended, wide bandwidth thinking. Otherwise we cannot discriminate between emotional imagination and extraordinary intuition. It is only where there is a valid learning process that this discrimination can be made.

As for one-track linear brains who believe they do not need the development of either genuine thinking or heightened intuition or insight, the wreckage and stress they will chronically experience is my argument. Time teaches all things to those who live long enough. Learning the hard way has always been a common option on all levels of authority. There is nonetheless a growing number of people who like science, learning and human development. It is they who will have the most favourable outcomes in the long run.

Now, if we have come this far with serious attention, it should be very clear that neither emotional belief nor sceptical disbelief about any factor or group of factors as to the real nature of the present or the future can be anything but an inadequate one-dimensional construct, a mentally lazy projection of 'first reality simulation heuristic' or 'first scenario simulation heuristic' in the back or front time zones of the organic cognitive system that we presently see as a 'brain'.

We need to learn to deconstruct and multiply reconstruct our beliefs and disbeliefs in well-timed, periodic learning and planning cycles. In this way, we get ever closer to objective reality but never stupidly imagine that we have entered into it. Any view, model or rule of judgement is at best a quasi-homomorphism or match to objective reality and never an exact homomorphism. This is well known from research into the processes of induction. The learning cycle must never stop modifying our views, models and rules of judgement or we become locked into cognitive failure.

'Planning as Learning', as Arie de Geus has called it, is the only planning that works - and it must be done on a periodic basis. This fact is at least slightly, weakly understood in some companies, though, so far, there has been very little intelligent follow-up on obvious implications of all this. Nevertheless, research continues and is available.

Urgently important emergent realities are hidden within and behind time (present, past or future) with varying degrees of opaqueness. That is why our world - both immediate and personal, as well as distant and impersonal - is a learning situation. The degree of our recognition of this is itself embedded within it. We are either conscious or unconscious participants in the truth of what is going on, and that truth will always be an update-able 'proto-truth' as de Bono calls it, and never a final and permanent 'absolute' truth. The truth about 'truth' is that it can and must evolve. This phenomenological imperative is not merely philosophical, but deeply pragmatic for our human affairs on this planet. We cannot and will not solve our problems without it. The causal texture of the future is accessible only by prying it open with the lever of deconstruction.

Causal texture theory tells us that there are always four general causal types of alternative scenarios of the future:

Thinking in causal texture in building scenarios and interfacing our decision options with the causal texture of the future helps us to rid ourselves of gullibility about the future on the one hand and self-harming destructive intentions on the other. Senior Enron executives, for instance, deliberately reinforced a first scenario of a constructive and positive type in the brains of the shareholders while they themselves as manipulators were clinging to a first scenario of a destructive and negative successful cheating type. If the shareholders had done scenario planning and looked seriously at the alternative scenario that they could plausibly be cheated, they might have been able to protect themselves better. If the senior cheaters had done scenario planning as to what might be alternative futures other than "getting away with it", this might have acted as more of a deterrent, thus preventing them from experiencing stressful shame, humiliation, fear of prosecution or actual prosecution and punishment.

First scenario simulation heuristic is dangerous to all stakeholders in any organisational or politico-economic situation. Whether we are the gullible manipulated or the shrewd manipulators, the intended victims or the treacherous victimisers, the faithful believers or the cynical disbelievers, the future is filled with unpleasant surprises and uncontrollable events. As the philosopher J. Krishnamurti once said, "The leader destroys the followers and the followers destroy the leader".

Even after all this, there will be those who will try to claim that scenario planning does not work when they have never tried first-hand to do it for real. Similarly, there are those who like to believe it was some sort of 'management fad' that came and went, when for them, it failed to arrive - what did not arrive cannot leave; it simply waits there for a meaningful appraisal.

Another lame excuse for failure to undertake scenario planning is the silly idea that it is too time-consuming for 'busy people with full diaries'. Blind, potentially destructive activity does not have time, it seems, for a pause of intelligent recalibration of action.

The most ridiculous failure to do scenario planning is the 'there is no budget for it'. If we ask why (?) is there no budget for it, the answer, if one is even bothered to be given, is that "those who set the budgets do not see that it is necessary". If asked how something they have not investigated becomes 'unnecessary', the answer will be, "there is not enough time to investigate everything that might be useful". If asked if they would like to learn how to know what is worthy of investigation, the answer will be "We don't understand what you are on about. Besides, we are practical people with too much responsibility to be going into all this cognitive stuff about organisational learning".

Learning disabilities like to hide behind the 'attention economy'. The one-dimensional strategist likes to believe that multiple dimensional planning is nothing but an unreasonable demand for attention. This facile 'attention' theory is not even real attention theory, which is beyond the scope of this paper. It is enough here to simply state that attention is allocated according to the understanding of the allocator. Fixed brain patterns pay attention to what keeps them fixed and authoritative; flexible brain patterns pay attention to what increases flexibility. Like attracts like. Cognitive resonance holds for better or worse.

We have now come back to where we began. There is a mechanism about the future, which operates in the human brain or cognitive faculty. It is the 'first causal simulation heuristic'. It is well defended. It is also self-destructive. To voluntarily deconstruct it is the right thing to do.  

©2002-2007 Gary Chicoine