Gameplay as a guide to complex decision-making has historically been dominated by military applications, but it has much broader potential as a tool. After participating in some RAND-sponsored war games simulating the conflict in East Asia, then attorney general Robert Kennedy inquired if a comparable game could be developed to help understand the Kennedy administration’s options in promoting civil rights gains in the American South. (The project, sadly, was dropped after his brother’s assassination.) Shortly thereafter, Buckminster Fuller proposed the development of a kind of mirror-image version of the Pentagon war games: a “world peace game” that anticipated subsequent video games like Civilization or SimCity. The game was designed to be played on a special map that could track everything from ocean currents to trade routes. The rules were explicitly non–zero-sum in nature, designed to encourage collaboration, not conflict. “The objective of the game would be to explore for ways to make it possible for anybody and everybody in the human family to enjoy the total earth without any human interfering with any other human and without any human gaining advantage at the expense of another,” Fuller wrote. “To win the World Game everybody must be made physically successful. Everybody must win.” Fuller saw the game as a kind of alternative to the indirect decision-making mechanisms of the democratic process. Instead of electing leaders to make decisions, ordinary people would simulate through gameplay the challenges they faced. “Winning” strategies—in other words, strategies that led to positive outcomes for all—would then be translated into real-life programs.
There does seem to be genuine merit in using games to trigger new ideas and explore the possibility space of a particularly challenging decision. It seems harder to imagine applying the gameplay approach to one’s personal decisions—designing a game, for instance, to rehearse that potential move to the suburbs. But almost every decision can be productively rehearsed with another, even more ancient form of escapism: storytelling.
SCENARIO PLANS
In the mid-1970s, the environmental activist and occasional entrepreneur Paul Hawken was working with a nonprofit in Palo Alto that taught “intensive gardening” techniques to developing countries as a way of combating nutritional and vitamin A deficiencies. Hawken had lived in the UK for a while and had seen how English gardeners tended to use higher quality tools than most Americans did. “Wealthy Americans were buying cheap tools,” Hawken would later recall, “and poor people there were buying what we call expensive tools, but which were cheaper over the life of the tool.” Hawken figured the tools might be helpful for the nonprofit’s initiatives, so he ordered an entire container of them from a British company called Bulldog Tools, but by the time they arrived, the head of the nonprofit had had a change of heart and Hawken found himself in possession of a container full of upscale garden tools with no obvious way to get rid of them. Ultimately, he partnered with a friend named Dave Smith to create a company called Fundamental Tools to sell the British imports to Bay Area gardeners. Before long, they changed the name to Smith and Hawken, because “it sounded so English, old, and solid.”
As the company began to grow, they started to contemplate whether they could break out to a larger audience. The challenge was that the tools were significantly more expensive—as much as three times the cost—than what American consumers were accustomed to paying. Would there be a large enough market of people willing to shell out thirty dollars for a shovel when they’d spent their entire gardening life paying only ten? One of the investors they approached during the period was a fellow Bay Area resident named Peter Schwartz, who would later go on to write a number of influential books and cofound organizations like the Global Business Network and the Long Now Foundation. Schwartz was an experienced practitioner of a technique known as scenario planning, a decision-making tool that had been developed at Royal Dutch Shell in the late sixties by Pierre Wack and Ted Newland. (Schwartz would go on to replace Wack at Shell after Wack retired in the mid-eighties.) Scenario planning is a narrative art, first and foremost. It homes in on the uncertainties that inevitably haunt a complex decision and forces the participants to imagine multiple versions of how that uncertain future might actually play out. Wack had famously used scenario planning at Shell to anticipate the oil crisis of the mid-seventies. Schwartz would later use the same technique to evaluate the prospects for Smith and Hawken’s garden tool business. Building those scenarios required full-spectrum mapping. He analyzed urban-versus-suburban migration patterns that might affect the market size for gardeners; he looked at an emerging trend in US consumer behavior where there appeared to be a new appetite for more expensive European brands, like BMW or Bang & Olufsen; he contemplated macroeconomic possibilities; and he surveyed then-fringe movements like organic farming and environmental activism. But he combined all that research into three distinct stories, imagining three distinct futures: a high-growth model, a depression model, and what he called the transformative model: “a shift in values that would amount to a profound transformation of Western culture. Ideas had begun to circulate about living more simply and environmentally benignly, about holistic medicine and natural foods, about pursuing inner growth rather than material possessions, and about striving for some kind of planetary consciousness.” The three-part structure turns out to be a common refrain in scenario planning: you build one model where things get better, one where they get worse, and one where they get weird.
Schwartz ultimately decided that the company’s future was promising, no matter which scenario came to pass, and he made a small investment in the company, which was soon selling millions of dollars of fancy trowels to American gardeners. Hawken and Schwartz began thinking about the scenario-planning technique as a tool for making broader social decisions: environmental stewardship, tax and wealth distribution policies, trade agreements. With a third author named Jay Ogilvy, they published a book in the early 1980s called Seven Tomorrows that sketched out seven distinct scenarios for the next two decades. In the introduction, they explained their approach: “Among the many methods for probing the future—from elaborate computer models to simple extrapolations of history—we chose the scenario method because it allows for the inclusion of realism and imagination, comprehensiveness and uncertainty, and, most of all, because the scenario method permits a genuine plurality of options.” What differentiated the scenario-planning approach from most flavors of futurism was its unwillingness to fixate on a single forecast. By forcing themselves to imagine alternatives, scenario planners avoided the trap of Tetlock’s hedgehogs, settled in their one big idea. Like Schelling’s war games, the scenario plan was a tool to help you think of something you would never otherwise think of.
In corporate culture, scenario planning built its reputation on the mythologies of these famously accurate forecasts, like Pierre Wack “calling” the oil crisis three years before OPEC suddenly jacked up its prices. But the emphasis on successful prophecies misses the point. Most scenarios end up failing to predict future outcomes, but the very act of trying to imagine alternatives to the conventional view helps you perceive your options more clearly. Scenario planning is genuinely not intended to be consulted for an accurate forecast of future events. Instead, it primes you to resist the “fallacy of extrapolation.” Wack described this property in terms of the defining chaos of the modern business environment, but the principle applies to the chaos of one’s private life as well:
[T]he way to solve this problem is not to look for better forecasts by perfecting techniques or hiring more or better forecasters. Too many forces work against the possibility of getting the right forecast. The future is no longer stable; it has become a moving target. No single “right” projection can be deduced from past behavior. The better approach, I believe, is to accept uncertainty, try to understand it, and make it part of our reasoning. Uncertainty today is not just an occasional, temporary deviation from a reasonable predictability; it is a basic structural feature of the business environment.
Every decisi
on relies on predictions with varying degrees of certainty. If you are contemplating a move to a suburban house that abuts a public park with extensive hiking trails, you can predict with some certainty that access to natural space will be part of the house’s appeal if you do choose to buy it. If you’re contemplating a fixed-rate thirty-year mortgage, you can project out the monthly payments you’ll be required to pay with even more conviction. If you know something about the overall reputation of the neighborhood school, you can be reasonably confident that those general academic standards will persist over the coming years, though it is harder to know exactly how your children will adapt to the new school. A scenario-based exploration of a potential move to the suburbs would take the elements that are most uncertain, and imagine different outcomes for each of them. It is, at heart, a kind of informed storytelling, and of course storytelling is something we instinctively do anytime we are contemplating a big decision. If we’re leaning toward life in the suburbs, we tell a story of family hikes through the trails behind our house, and better public schools, and a garden that we can tend with high-priced imported tools. The difference with the storytelling of scenario planning is twofold: first, we rarely take the time to do a full-spectrum analysis of all the forces that shape that story; and second, we rarely bother to construct multiple stories. How does the story unfold if the kids don’t like their classmates, or if one part of the family loves the new lifestyle but the other is homesick for the vitality and old friends of city life?
As Wack suggests, that uncertainty can’t simply be analyzed out of existence. It is, on some fundamental level, an irreducible property of complex systems. What scenario planning—and simulations in general—offer us is a way of rehearsing for that uncertainty. That doesn’t always give you a definite path, but it does prepare you for the many ways that the future might unexpectedly veer from its current trajectory. “A sustained scenario practice can make leaders comfortable with the ambiguity of an open future,” Wack writes. “It can counter hubris, expose assumptions that would otherwise remain implicit, contribute to shared and systemic sense-making, and foster quick adaptation in times of crisis.”
Much of the decision process that led up to the bin Laden operation had focused on simulating the minute-by-minute execution of the raid itself: Would the helicopters need refueling? Could the SEAL Team 6 unit be successfully deployed on the roof of the compound? In the months and years that followed the raid, most of the coverage focused on those perilous minutes in Pakistan, and the courage and quick thinking of the men who brought bin Laden to justice. But behind the scenes, the Obama administration was not just running simulations of the raid itself. They were also exploring long-term scenarios—the downstream effects of each option on the table. In this, Obama and his team were also learning from the mistakes of the Bush administration, which had notoriously failed to scenario-plan for a long and combative occupation of Iraq, preferring instead to work under Dick Cheney’s assumption that we would be “greeted as liberators” by the Iraqi population.
For Obama and his advisors, one of the key scenarios involved the crucial question of what to do with bin Laden himself, assuming he was discovered on the premises. Should the Special Ops forces try to capture him alive? If so, what would the plan be from there? The president believed there was an opportunity to undo many of the questionable decisions his predecessor had made, with the detention programs at Guantánamo and other extradition sites, by putting bin Laden on trial in a public court in the United States. “My belief was if we had captured him,” Obama later explained, “that I would be in a pretty strong position, politically, here, to argue that displaying due process and rule of law would be our best weapon against al-Qaeda, in preventing him from appearing as a martyr.” That scenario, of course, would rule out the drone strike and the B-2 bombing, both of which were operations with a single objective: killing Osama bin Laden. The troubling long-term consequences of those two operations were of a different nature: if you wiped the compound off the map with a bomb strike, there would be no direct evidence that bin Laden had, in fact, been killed. Even if the United States intercepted internal conversations within al-Qaeda suggesting their leader had died, rumors and conspiracy theories about his continued existence might proliferate over the years. To make the right choice, it wasn’t sufficient to simulate the raid or the bombing strike on the scale of minutes and hours, because the consequences of those actions would inevitably reverberate for years. They had to imagine a much longer narrative. The present tense of the attack on the compound was shadowed by its possible futures.
PREMORTEMS AND RED TEAMS
So much of scenario planning is ultimately a narrative art. You take the unpredictable haze of future events and turn it into some coherent picture: the market for high-end gardening tools will expand as materialism takes over the culture; the Pakistanis will kick us out of their airspace after they discover our betrayal. The problem, of course, is that storytellers suffer from confirmation bias and overconfidence just like the rest of us. Our brains naturally project outcomes that conform to the way we think the world works. To avoid those pitfalls, you need to trick your mind into entertaining alternative narratives, plot lines that might undermine your assumptions, not confirm them.
In his own practice advising decision-makers, Gary Klein—the originator of the famous fire-in-the-basement case study—has developed a compelling variation on the scenario-planning model, one that requires much less research and deliberation. He calls it a “premortem.” As the name suggests, the approach is a twist on the medical procedure of postmortem analysis. In a postmortem, the subject is dead, and the coroner’s job is to figure out the cause of death. In a premortem, the sequence is reversed: the coroner is told to imagine that the subject is going to die, and asked to imagine the causes that will be responsible for that future death. “Our exercise,” Klein explains, “is to ask planners to imagine that it is months into the future and that their plan has been carried out. And it has failed. That is all they know; they have to explain why they think it failed.”
Klein’s approach draws on some intriguing psychological research that found that people come up with richer and subtler explanations when they are given a potential future event and asked to explain the event as if it has actually happened. In other words, if you simply ask people what’s going to happen—and why—their explanatory models are less nuanced and imaginative than if you tell people that X is definitely going to happen and ask them to explain why. In Klein’s experience, the premortem has proven to be a much more effective way to tease out the potential flaws in a decision. A whole range of cognitive habits—from the fallacy of extrapolation to overconfidence to confirmation bias—tends to blind us to the potential pitfalls of a decision once we have committed to it. It isn’t enough to simply ask yourself, “Are there any flaws here in this plan that I’m missing?” By forcing yourself to imagine scenarios where the decision turned out to be a disastrous one, you can think your way around those blind spots and that false sense of confidence.
As in the mapping stage, the predictions of scenario planning work best when they draw on diverse forms of expertise and values. But there are some inevitable limits on the kind of outsider viewpoints you can incorporate into these deliberative sessions. No doubt the internal discussions leading up to the bin Laden raid would have been well served by including an actual Pakistani official in the decision process. His or her imagined narrative might have been quite different from the one being spun by the analysts at the CIA. As you contemplate a new product launch, it might theoretically be helpful to have a product manager from your direct competitor help scenario-plan the next five years of market evolution, but in practice, you’re not going to be able to get him or her in the room with you.
But those outside perspectives can themselves be simulated. The military has a long history of deploying what are conventionally called red teams: a kind of systematic version of devil’s advocacy wh
ere a group inside the organization is assigned the role of emulating an enemy’s behavior. Red-teaming dates back to the original war games like Fleet Problem XIII, but it has taken on new life in the military since a Defense Science Board Task Force report in 2003 recommended that the practice be more widely utilized in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. You can think of a red team as a kind of hybrid of war games and scenario plans: You sketch out a few decision paths with imagined outcomes and invite some of your colleagues to put themselves in the shoes of your enemies or your competitors in the market and dream up imagined responses.
Red teams were an integral part of the hunt for bin Laden. Officials deliberately invoked them as a way to ward off the blind spots and confirmation biases that undermined decisions like the Iraq WMD investigation. Mike Leiter, head of the National Counterterrorism Center, had, in fact, written much of the official report on the WMD fiasco and its root causes, and so was particularly eager not to repeat the same mistakes. In late April, even as SEAL Team 6 was rehearsing the Abbottabad raid in the Nevada desert, Leiter commissioned a red team exercise to explore alternative narratives that could explain the mysterious compound without bin Laden actually living there. At one point, Leiter told John Brennan, “You don’t want to have a WMD commission come back and say, ‘You didn’t red-team this one.’ I wrote that chapter, John.”
The red team Leiter assembled included two new analysts who had not been involved in the investigation at all, to give the project fresh eyes. He gave them forty-eight hours to come up with alternative interpretations that could fit the facts on the ground. They came up with three scenarios: bin Laden had been in the house, but was no longer living there; it was an active al-Qaeda safe house, but it was occupied by a different al-Qaeda leader; or it belonged to a criminal, unconnected to terrorism, for whom al-Kuwaiti now worked. At the end of the exercise, the team was asked to rate the odds of each scenario, including the fourth scenario that bin Laden was, in fact, in the building. The average of the red team’s ratings had it at less than fifty-fifty odds that bin Laden was there—but they also concluded the bin Laden scenario was more likely than any of the other individual scenarios.
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