Course Description
This course exposes learners to the strategic storytelling techniques that businesses, governments and non not-for-profits use to explore possible futures.
Scenarios provide organizations the tools they need to anticipate and navigate the future by developing multiple paths along which the future might unfold. Rather than looking at the world through the lens of what we know, scenario planning starts with uncertainties: Social, technological, economic, environmental and political forces that will evolve over the next several years in unknowable ways. This helps organizations prepare for many eventualities (some which they may not like) because they will be able to see opportunities, mitigate risks, and work toward enabling futures that align with their missions and values.
The course will teach learners how to develop scenarios, how to use them within organizations for strategy and storytelling. Each student will choose an area of interest as an overlay atop a generalized set of futures so they personally understand the power of starting a story with “I don’t know” and using that as a lever to co-create plausible futures that could be. Students will leave the course as scenario planning practitioners, a valuable skill for any leader in an uncertain world.
For more information: Scenario Planning and Communications: How Does Scenario Planning Apply to Communications Jobs?
I went into Scenario Planning as a marketer and left as a strategic storyteller. Dan taught us to look into the future and fashion a whole story out of it, in scenarios and contexts I otherwise wouldn’t have imagined. It also trains you to think of the future beyond just a linear eventuality to help prepare for it in the best way possible. Personally, the application of what I learned was beyond a business context, and I can say this – it helped all of us look at everything in a more multi-dimensional manner.—Matthew Joseph, MCDM cohort ‘22 alumni
University of Washington
Department of Communication