ABSTRACT
The question ‘How do experts assess the future?’ could be reframed as ‘How do futurists construct scenarios?’ In the previous chapter, we reported on how futurists struggled with dealing with policy in their scenarios. Neither the policy-free principle endorsed in textbooks nor the no (significant) policy change principle that practitioners themselves proposed as a kind of compromise provided adequate guidance. As a consequence, the story on struggling with policy offered only limited insight into how futurists actually construct scenarios. The aim of the current chapter is to better understand how scenarios are constructed. To that end, we attend in detail to a particular device – namely, the scenario matrix (see Figure 4.1).
