Suspending Disbelief in Scenario Planning

Managers and administrators live in a top-heavy political world where they have to believe that there is only one real scenario of the future. This scenario is quite rosy and positive and upholds the party in power in their nation-state, even if the party in power is lying about many important things and even deliberately promoting the self-destruction of the economy and well-being of the people, as with the current rage of taxing the people instead of the rich, privatisation instead of promoting parallel business competition, increasing surveillance of the people to further a totalitarian police state, creating and utilising Islamic terrorism and threats of terrorism to intimidate and militarise their people, and pursuing anti-environmental policies that destroy the future of the earth and humanity. All of these negative and wrong policies being enacted by colluding nation-state governments are supposed to be ignored by all managers and administrators who must perform as lobotomised lackeys even if this will lead to the deterioration of their own organisation and eventually loss of work or having to work in a dehumanised and debilitating circumstance.

All lesser managers and administrators below the top in the giant corporations, monopolies and national institutions, such as the health service, must do their planning with the idea that there are no bad trends in the world with catastrophic consequences for the world, for themselves and their families, or for the organisations in which they labour. They must dwell in a meek cognitive oblivion where two plus two no longer equals four, but whatever current propaganda designates as the number of the day for the latest cover-up. Managers thus find it impossible to suspend disbelief in alternative scenarios of the future that contain plausible negative trends. If they are introduced to a scenario that includes, say, increased disastrous flooding in Europe from global warming, they will complain that such a scenario is “unrealistic” because they do not “believe” in environmental issues. What they do not understand is that it does not mean one “believes” in an alternative scenario when one is doing multiple scenario planning. The issue is to suspend disbelief. This suspension is a different action of the intellect than being converted to a new belief. It has to do with cognitive phenomenology, which once understood, allows the human brain to be released from all dogmatic beliefs and disbeliefs for the sake of flexible and therefore more effective organisational and strategic planning. Of course, it also awakens people intellectually and liberates their consciousness from government propaganda.

Realistic, wide-bandwidth scenario planning is an urgently important tool for organisation viability, but this tool cannot be utilised where lobotomised managers and administrators want to believe that any destructive trend being promoted by colluding nation-states and the super-wealthy are nothing but “crank conspiracy theories”. It is because of this deliberate self-blanking of consciousness that most big companies and national services have become ostrich farms where everyone are burying their heads in the sand. The consequence of this will be painful future shock learning rather that evolutionary present innovation learning.

Politically correct thinking in accord with the official singular scenario of positive prediction is the normal learning disability of managers caught in the cognitive trap of conservative professional judgment. Thoughtless action without valid multiple scenario planning is then called “practical action in the real world”, even though it is highly impractical for the future and constitutes deluded cognition living anywhere but the actual real world where governments and the super-rich are doing very bad and foolish things – things that constitute criminal insanity in places of secular power. Conformity to propaganda is just plain stupid and generates self-destruction for all.

For the liars in power who are abusing power, real and effective multiple scenarios planning for organisation viability is a subversive activity. They do not want their managers and administrators doing real thinking or questioning what is really going on, for they know that real thinking and questioning in the ranks would lead to their downfall. As Bertrand Russell once put it, “Those who want power want it too much”.

The government of your nation-state does not want you or anyone else engaged in effective thinking, planning or learning, whether individually or in teams. What they want is stupefaction, blind action and inability to suspend disbelief.

If we are going to plan (and surely we should and as realistically as possible), then we should do it right and not merely rubberstamp some useless official prediction of the future based on sheer manipulative bullshit from would-be world conquerors who want to control everybody to death. No organisation lives in a global vacuum isolated from what is happening to society, the nation or the world environment. In real planning, everything should be thoroughly scrutinised and questioned in order to establish the necessary factors of system viability.

Some of the big name consulting companies are now trying to offer “scenario planning” to their clients, but the big name consultancy companies are part of the problem. They write scenarios to cover-up the truth rather than to reveal it. Also, they do not really know how scenario planning should actually work. So they get paid vast sums of money to delude managers about the future. Their clients usually prefer to pay for respectable incompetence. Their clients can then feel that their linear left-brain decision processes are sort of “up-dated” by the latest “in” rubbish.

Genuine scenario planning, system planning and other salutary group decision disciplines cannot function in management brains that fear disillusionment about the world and the trends that affect the future of the world. It is this very fear with its cover-ups and defensive routines that undermines organisation viability. All corrupted and degenerative organisations are by-products of weak and wrong but politically correct planning processes.