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For several years I’ve been challenging audiences to take up the dissertation-worthy question of whether there is a typical pattern in how archetype scenarios unfold. In my work, I am increasingly persuaded it is the case, but of course those pesky clients seem to prefer evidence over my intuition (the nerve!). So, I’ve enlisted a crack team of two grad students – Heather Benoit, Lavonne Leong — and an alum Denise Worrell from the Houston Foresight program to help me tackle it.
Oh my, this is a rich topic. It’s made us think about a lot of things. At the most basic level it’s made us rethinking our version of the archetype technique. We have been using a customized version of Jim Dator’s Archetype technique that I first used with the help of Mark Justman of the Foresight Alliance back in 2007. We have been continuously tweaking and updating it – see Evolution of Framework Foresight. And we’re at it again!
The sneak preview of the HAT (Houston Archetype Technique) in the sketch below shows the hypothesized flow of a typical domain through the Three Horizons. We believe the most “typical” pattern is that we start with the Baseline, them move to either Collapse or New Equilibrium, and then to Transformation.
One thing we are clearly changing once and for all. Jim’s technique begins with a Continuation scenario. Our begins with the Baseline. For years we have been hyphenating, going back and forth, and generally confusing people by using both terms. Henceforth, we will just use Baseline!
Simple, right? We’ll see. Stay tuned. – Andy Hines
[…] new, but updated … as promised in a previous post. To recap, for several years we and our audiences at the Houston Foresight program thought we […]