Events are the other part of this scenario development methodology.  They represent specific actions or situations at some point in the future.  The key idea is that you should be able to easily tell if an event has happened or not at some point in the future.  Events should describe a single issue or topic.  The set of 114 events we used in the final two-day workshop can be downloaded here.

In our approach you must construct a series of events that lead to an endstate in order to build a scenario.  Based on our reading and interviews we have written a large number of events.  We use about 120 of them in a typical workshop, and during the course of the workshop, the participants write additional events of their own.

During a workshop, we create six different event paths to the six different endstates.  Then we can compare the event paths and see where there are common events or divergent events.

We also use events to guage participants’ expectations about the future by asking them to vote as to whether each event is highly likely to happen, highly unlikely to happen, or simply uncertain right now.

We have published results of event selection and voting in each workshop report.

The events cover the following categories:

• Demographics
• Economic Development
• Promotion
• Agriculture
• Recreation
• Arts/Culture
• The Forest
• Environment
• Climate Change
• Energy
• Transportation
• Technology
• Education
• Housing
• Healthcare
• Community Development
• Government
• Regulation