Polyscene automates scenario planning by generating diverse future narratives
Polyscene: Scenario Planning as Diversity Planning
Artificial Intelligence
Summary
Planning for future uncertainties usually means experts manually write a few possible stories about what might happen. The authors present Polyscene, a tool that automatically creates many different future scenarios by imagining various events unfolding within given limits. It uses real-world data like geopolitical news and shipping information to start these stories realistically. This helps organizations explore a wider range of possible futures without the usual biases and time limits.
What this means in practice
- •For risk management teams: Create diverse geopolitical conflict scenarios to evaluate risk and prepare strategic responses based on current international relationships.
- •For supply chain planners: Generate scenarios of shipping route disruptions affecting parts inventory to anticipate supply shortages and plan contingencies.
Authors
Mustafa F. Abdelwahed, Joan Espasa, Felipe Meneguzzi
Abstract
Scenario planning is a foresight practice in which analysts construct a small set of plausible futures and prepare an organisation for each. Each scenario is a narrative that must be plausible, internally consistent, relevant and challenging, and the set as a whole must be differentiated. The practice remains manual: a workshop (i.e., a facilitated meeting in which a small group of experts writes the narratives) considers only the factors it has time for, carries the biases of the experts who run it, and cannot be redone whenever conditions change. In this paper, we automate scenario planning by casting it as a diversity planning problem, in which two scenarios differ when they end in different narratives on the analyst's drivers. The result is a set of scenarios, one for each narrative that the topic can reach within a budget. Our implementation, Polyscene, is a generic engine that generates scenarios from a topic. We use geopolitical conflicts and shipping-route disruptions as case studies. For the first, we build the planning problem's initial state from the GDELT Project so it reflects current relationships among the countries involved. Polyscene then generates scenarios showing how relationships among those countries change. With a board of six countries as of 1 January 2021 and a budget of five events, the conflict set puts five of the 15 country pairs at war, and each of the three wars that break out among these countries by 1 January 2026 ends a scenario. For the second, we build the initial state from ship traffic, a supply-pressure index, and the news, and Polyscene generates scenarios showing what a closed or diverted route could do to a manufacturer's parts stock. With four routes per board and the same date and budget, each set includes three outcomes, and the Suez Canal set includes the March 2021 blockage and the December 2023 Red Sea container diversion.