Futures, scenarios and strategic conversations - Transport Climate Change and the City - page 65

2 Futures, scenarios and strategic

conversations

Goldberg : Is the number 846 possible or necessary?
Stanley : Neither.
Goldberg : Wrong! Is the number 846 possible or necessary?
Stanley : Both.
Goldberg : Wrong! It's necessary but not possible.
Stanley : Both.
Goldberg : Wrong! Why do you think the number 846 is necessarily possible?
Stanley : Must be.
Goldberg : Wrong! It's only necessarily necessary! We admit possibility only after we grant necessity.
It is possible because necessary but by no means necessary through possibility. The
possibility can only be assumed after the proof of necessity.

McCann : Right!

(Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party , 1960, p. 50)

Futures thinking
We are all naturally interested in our futures, including how our own lifestyles may pan out,
and how the world might develop over time. The examination of possible futures, and eventually
leading to the development of a literature field in futures studies, has a lengthy and fascinating
history. Perhaps the earliest and well-known accounts are from the Oracle at Delphi, 1 from
580-570 BC onwards (Chappell, 2006). For example, in 547 BC , King Croesus of Lydia
famously consulted the Oracle, anxious to know the likely outcome of his war with Cyrus the
Great. He was told that if he crossed the river between his army and his enemy a great empire
would fall. Overjoyed, he attacked the Persians, only to discover that his was the empire to
fall (Robinson, 1990; West, 2003). This is a problem for all futures studies: the difficulty in
understanding what might happen.
From the social science domain, Popper (1957, Preface, xii-xiii) helps us understand the
central problematic in futures analysis; he critiques historicism in that interpreting the past
cannot always help predict the future:

If there is such a thing as growing human knowledge, then we cannot anticipate today
what we shall know only tomorrow [. . .] no scientific predictor - whether a human
scientist or a calculating machine - can possibly predict, by scientific methods, its own
future results.

Hence there are fundamental difficulties in projecting the future course of history. Over the
years various related perspectives on societal change have evolved to tackle these issues;