Scenarios and Long-Term Thinking

By Gitte Larsen, Søren Steen Olsen, and Steen Svendsen, House of Futures

It is almost impossible to make any plausible direct extrapolations from historic trends a hundred years into the future. The present contains seeds of the future, but it is very unlikely to unfold in any straightforward manner.

That is why we need scenarios to get a better idea of the enormous transformations that will happen in the decades ahead, including how we might try to shape the future and create the ones we prefer.