Large Group Scenario Planning

All organizations and communities are strongly influenced by factors and events that lie outside their boundaries. A shared understanding of these environmental influences—in the past and the present—has been an important aspect of popular large group interventions. Traditional scenario planning has long been a way of confronting uncertainty and complexity about the future of environmental influences. Large group scenario planning is an adaptation of traditional scenario planning. Meeting for 2 or 3 days, a critical mass of an organization or a community can use scenarios of the future environment to move beyond their natural tendency to think of the future as an extrapolation of the past. Ageneral method is described, and the use of large group scenario planning by the Boston University School of Dental Medicine is presented.