Developing Real Scenarios For Responsible Planning

As oil prices continue to rise, the spectre of Peak Oil continues to haunt the Global Economy, yet the Major Oil Companies and Major Oil Producers continue to dissemble in regard to the amount of oil reserves we have on the planet. As a result of this, Governments and Multinational Corporations are not doing serious, honest and responsible scenario planning. Political and business propaganda and disinformation continue to rule decision-making and planning circles. Unfortunately, the pushing of all these short-sighted, bad decisions and on-going plans are going to result in Global Economic and Societal Catastrophe. It is not too late to undertake some intelligent damage-control, but those with the decision-power to affect improvements for the future are locked into their arrogance, greed and stupidity.

Scenario Planning could help immensely, but it has to be done right and done now.

The first step is to build realistic scenarios rather than politically and economically misleading scenarios. Who will actually agree to do this is a far more significant issue than how it can be done. How is still important and that will mean bringing in the kind of facilitator consultants who can bring it all out comprehensively and effectively for genuine understanding and right action of planners and decision-makers who could potentially make a difference in the unfolding Crisis of Global Management. So, again, who will agree to do this? The best techniques of intelligent and harmonious planning and action are useless if the people in positions of decision-power refuse to use such techniques or insist on diluting and distorting the techniques when they do experiment with them. And it is because of this that Scenario Planning tends to fall at the first hurdle of building realistic scenarios.

We recommend that Stafford Beer’s Syntegrity method be utilized in Scenario Building. This means that a group of thirty (30) intelligent planners will assume ownership of twelve (12) basic global problems that affect the economic, societal and environmental future of mankind. This necessitates that the twelve (12) selected problem-elements will be expressed in four (4) causal texture scenarios. Each decision-entity, whether a government or a multinational company, should then run its core strategic initiatives through each scenario through three different projected time-junctures, which are to be scanned and monitored for emergent realities or feedback from total global existence of the total global system, which can be modelled with soft-system-modelling and simulated with system-dynamics. We have to at least do all this if we are serious, honest and responsible about our planning, decision-making and world-affecting activities.

In a world of aggressive Western governments and abusive multinational companies, it is difficult to envision many takers in the field of harmonious long-range planning. There are a great many intelligent, good-willed senior consultants and semi-retired planners who are able to help out, facilitate and give good counsel to overcome many of the on-going bad decisions and wrong actions that are currently fuelling coming multiple catastrophes, but those with current decision-power have to respect these harmonious senior people and follow some useful recommendations. As things stand right now, this is just not happening to the necessary degree.

America, Europe and Asia are going to need a lot more oil, such as from Iraq, for instance, and torturing Iraqis along with possible false planting of WMD’s is hardly the way to ease the situation and get the necessary level of cooperation of natural Iraqi leaders. Torture, physical disinformation and military enforced puppet government are an obviously wrong-headed plan for developing Mid-East oil reserves. There is also the further challenge of developing alternative energy sources, such as nuclear fusion in particular, which is woefully under-funded and under-developed, probably because Big Oil lobby wants to perform a huge rip-off of the public before Big Oil tubes on the downhill collapse after Peak Oil. Governments and multinationals involved in rotten aggression, falsehood and corruption are not really helping themselves or their publics. There needs to be self-reform through facing the facts, developing real scenarios and taking better decisions. If we do not get a turn-around and change-of-heart in the highest levels of decision-power on our planet, we will see nothing but massive shock-learning through horrible suffering everywhere. All this can still be avoided through right scenario planning and other decision-thinking techniques that are readily available.

The intelligent and wise senior people I have mentioned above need to have significant new discussions with one another across their networks, think tanks and gatherings if we are to get better decision-making on our planet. This implies a new kind of organizing principle and effort beyond anything so far attempted. This in itself needs to bring in facilitators and consultants with the know-how to make it all work. This needs accelerated learning in senior brains and minds that are themselves still in continuous adult learning, discovery and motivations of unprejudiced goodwill on behalf of suffering humanity. If all this is left to remain fragmented and sporadic idealism, then we are in for a rough ride.

I really do not know who will receive the urgent message in this article. I, like so many other senior people, am giving all this my best shot. There are many good people speaking up here and there to try to help humanity through the crisis that wrong-headed decision-makers are promoting with both abusive plans and lack of coherent, ethical planning. So, I must insist that it is the way we who care are disorganized right now that is the most crucial factor of all. We are still clinging to outdated and ineffectual institutions that are easily perverted or neutralized by the bad decision-makers who have too much power and too little wisdom. Fragmentary, mutually isolated wailing and complaining about the state of the world are not going to get the job done. We need some new planning clubs and networks working together on a grand scale. If this new super-network of better global planning does not emerge, then mutual intellectual arrogance and Hegelian clash will render us perpetually ineffectual to the bitter end. People like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds are certainly not the way forward, just as the Neo-conservatives in America and New Labour in Britain are obviously on the wrong path. We need those Iraqi oil reserves, but not the lying and ugly way we are currently going about it. All of our corrupt old power structures have to be gently but firmly set aside. It is time to put Kissinger Associates out-to-grass. It is also high time to scrap those economically corrupt privatizations, mega-mergers and monopoly programs and replace them with healthy parallel business competition within a humane and environmentally sound world agreement that helps third world countries instead of enslaving them.

The world can get better if the right people will wake-up and make it happen. It really is a global management problem here more than anything else.