This scenario development process is based on the following principles:

• The highly prepared meeting.  We interviewed a wide variety of people including all the participants in the first workshop ahead of time in order to understand the issues facing the Park and to solicit ideas about important actions, investments, changes in law and regulation, etc. that would be necessary for “good futures” to transpire.  In this way, the participants were presented with a lot of ideas to work with and spent relatively little time getting started.
• Two-part definition of scenario.  In this approach a scenario is divided into the endstate or outcome statement at the planning horizon (in this case 25 years from now) and a series of events that must occur or must not occur that lead us from the present to that outcome.  For this project, we wrote six endstates and over 120 events based on the interviews and other research.  The endstates describe the Park in 2037, largely as a snapshot although in some there is some information on how it got that way.  The events each describe a single action or condition at some point in time between now and 2037.  Their timeframe is described as 5, 10, 15 or 20 years from now.
• Multiple, diverse but not necessarily divergent scenarios.  The six scenarios are not all about the same issues and they are not all mutually exclusive.  They take the tone, generally, of “this is the key to a great future”.  By dividing up the issues into different scenarios, each team is not working on the same thing and more work gets done.  Overall, the scenarios do frame important choices that we face here in the Park.

Scenario: series of evens that lead to an endstate
Back-casting:  if your endstate has happened, what events must have happened (or not)?