Creativity Software: Alternative Growth 2.0

Creativity Software, Alternative Growth (Creativity, Innovation);

Scenarios are qualitatively different descriptions of plausible futures. They can give you a deeper understanding of potential environments in which you might have to operate and what you may need to do in the present. Scenario analysis helps you to identify what environmental factors to monitor over time, so that when the environment shifts, you can recognize where it may be headed.

Thinking through scenarios, while it may seem an exercise in speculation to some, is a less risky, more conservative approach to planning than relying on standard business forecasts and trend analyses. The latter have their place, but often do not employ sufficient imagination to discover how circumstances will change. Good scenario thinking helps management to take more innovative actions, and prevent undesirable outcomes. Scenarios can explore general alternative futures and specific problems or strategies.

To develop Alternative Factors Scenarios (AFS) [see element(s)]:


ALTERNATIVE GROWTH SCENARIOS

Beginning in the mid-1970's, after analyzing images of the future in many cultures, Jim Dator of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, proposed that all futures stories can be categorized into "Four Futures", or Generic Alternative Scenarios (GAS)[1]:

a) Continuation (usually "continued economic growth")

b) Collapse (from one or more of a variety of different reasons)

c) Disciplined Society (in which society in the future is seen as organized around some set of overarching values, ancient, traditional, natural, ideologically-correct, or God-given)

d) Transformational Society (usually either "high tech" or "high spirit," or both, with the end of some current patterns/values, and emergence of new ones, rather than the return to older traditional patterns/values)

John Smart of the Acceleration Studies Foundation proposes that Dator's Four Futures can also be interpreted as four

Requirements: 16mb RAM 10Mb HD space