Open-Source Scenarios: Group Hug in the Wind-Tunnel?

Jamais Cascio over at WorldChanging has a concise description of what scenarios are good for, along with a proposal for 'open-sourcing' them:

Rather than tying the organization to a set "official future," scenarios offer a range of possible outcomes used less as predictions and more as "wind tunnels" for plans. (How would our strategy work in this future? How about if things turn out this way?)

...there's no quantitative, logical process behind scenario creation--no combination of factors that always leads to a particular scenario result, no matter the author--but there is still a methodology that can be opened up. The pieces that go into the creation of the scenarios, even the pieces that don't end up in the final narratives, can be valuable in their own right. By making these pieces "free" (as in speech, not beer), the overall capacity of scenario-builders to come up with plausible and powerful outcomes can be improved.

Blogs, prediction markets and wikis are already forming up what he describes, albeit bottoms-up rather than top down. Each has become a hyper-open form (and forum) for vetting ideas and observations - fertile sources  though ones not yet easily harnessed to the discipline of high-stakes decision-making. Some of the best blogs do a reasonable job of painting mini-scenarios but they're hard to compare. The most carefully constructed prediction markets can also do a great job - when people are inclined to trust them, which isn't often... yet.

One thing that's lacking with blogs, prediction markets and wikis (admittedly different animals) is a scenario framework in which pieces can be re-arranged. Traditional scenario methodology makes this hard because those pieces (as Cascio points out) can come in all shapes and sizes:

...as broad as "global warming" or as narrowly focused as "next version of Windows delayed again." They can, unfortunately, also be quite silly...

Prediction markets impose a strict form but - so far anyway - have not made good use of open-source principles. (We're told this is changing.) The F/X (Foresight Exchange) has been effectively open source for over a decade but remains a messy experiment closer to group science-fiction writing than anything else. When anyone can float a prediction 'security' the conversation quickly degrades into chaos, or worse (thin trading).

The scenario approach we've used for years imposes a strict form on the pieces (aka, 'events'), trading off the advantages that truly open-ended brainstorming early in a scenario process against the clarity, modularity and comparability that are essential later. For decision-making, tracking and the accountability of the exercise, the idea pieces need to adhere to a common form even as they may still cover a wide range of issues and address them with varying degrees of granularity.

What actually happened? What did not happen? What path is actually unfolding? What else should we watch for? What do we do about it? Such questions are hard to answer when there's no common language for what's being tracked. When everyone can propose not only their own way-points on the map but the symbols and nomenclature of the map itself, the result is a Tower of Babel. As scenarios, prediction markets and blogs are pulled together into new forms, the result will be a powerful combination of vision, real-time collective intelligence and objective measurement. Open-sourcing alone won't necessarily accomplish that.