Is Collapse the Most Common Pathway to Transformation?

I promised more from our “Mapping Archetype Scenarios across the Three Horizons” research. Let’s geek out a little bit. I will answer the question if you’ll hang in there and let me explain.

Table 6 summarizes the results of where our 78 scenario set pathways “ended up.” What that means is for the 78 historical sets of scenarios that could be fitted to archetypes, we assessed how the domain the scenarios were describing actually was tracking along the three horizons.

Quick refreshers:

• If a domain was best described at projected timeframe by the Baseline archetype (B), we said it was in Horizon One (H1). So a if a scenario set done in 2000 had a 2020 timeframe, we assessed where the domain was at in 2020.
• If a domain was best described by either Collapse (C) or New Equilibrium (NE), we assessed it was in H2.
• If a domain was best described by Transformation (T), we assessed it was in H3.

One more set-up point. We hypothesize there would be two primary pathways for domains that made it all the way to H3 Transformation.

Baseline > Collapse > Transformation (B > C > T)  

Baseline > New Equilibrium > Transformation (B > NE > T).

The percentages/raw numbers for domains that ended up in the Baseline, Collapse, and New Equilibrium, which seems reasonable (we were a little surprised by how many were stuck in the Baseline). The team was initially concerned that only 9 % made it to Transformation. The simple explanation for that low percentage was that Transformation would be the archetype most affected by the fact that many of the scenario sets had not yet reached their time horizon. Since Transformation is the furthest in time from the present, it makes sense that it needs more time to materialize.

The exceptions are noted in the bullets in the table. For example, there were 26 domains that were still in the Baseline. Of these 26, three fit a combined Baseline/ Collapse archetype

A key finding is that of the seven domains that made it to Transformation, five were via the NE loop, one was judged to be in-between Collapse and New Equilibrium, and one went from Baseline straight to transformation. In short, Collapse is NOT the most common — or apparently even a common — pathway to Transformation. Interesting! (Of course, more work is to be done here.)

I’ll confess that I – and the team – had guessed beforehand that B > C > T would be the dominant pathway. The line of reasoning was that only in crisis do we gather up the will for real change. Oops. We noticed the NE pathway involved multiple loops. But what does happen after Collapse? A juicy question for further research! – Andy Hines