The conversation is great, but we need to talk more about theory, emotions, and ‘gut’ feelings: Commentary on Rowland and Spaniol (2021)

Abstract

Kees van der Heijden's Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation has assuredly earned a place as a true classic in the reflective-practitioner literature pertaining to futures and foresight science. Rowland and Spaniol's (2021) extensive review of it, a quarter of a century after its initial publication, demonstrates in abundance why it has risen so deservedly to this stature. Their review documents the many powerful features of the book, skillfully interweaving scholarly and practitioner insights. Rowland and Spaniol draw on their detailed knowledge of the relevant scientific and professional literatures, combining them with the results of a series of interviews undertaken with a number of van der Heijden's “colleagues, coworkers, collaborators, students, and friends” (Rowland & Spaniol, 2021, p. 1), who they invited to offer their reflections on the first (van der Heijden, 1996) and second (van der Heijden, 2005) editions of the book. The list of colleagues they interviewed includes some of the field's most prominent scientist-practitioners. The result is an article that sets out the many achievements of a book that has contributed to the betterment of academia and practice alike, locating them in the evolutionary context of both the literature and some of the major world events that have preoccupied many of its users.

I first became aware of this book shortly before its formal publication in 1996. My colleague George Wright and I were engaged in a consulting project with the leadership team of an organization that was struggling in its efforts to break free from its (then) current strategy. It was immediately apparent that the strategic conversation in the organization concerned had become rather stale, and the process tools and insights of Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation were exactly the sorts of tools and insights that would enable us to help rejuvenate it. George and I were fortunate to have in our possession a preprint of the entire manuscript, and, with Kees van der Heijden's permission, we were able to make full use of its contents. In so doing, as so neatly encapsulated in the narrative crafted by Rowland and Spaniol (2021, p. 2), drawing in turn on the preface of van der Heijden (1996), our overriding aim was to enable the leadership team:

‘…to articulate, fully and unambiguously, their organization's unique “business idea” from their perspective and based entirely on their internal, working vocabulary. By “reperceiving” their organization through painstaking interviews, analysis, reflection, presentations, and more,” [we sought to enable] members of the client organization… [to be] better able to see their situation and themselves “in a new light” (x). And, from this “unique insight,”… [have] “the opportunity to create… distinctiveness” in their “unique offering,” and, thus, gain “competitive advantage.”’

The observations encapsulated by Rowland and Spaniol (2021) concerning the potency of the business idea, the key role of remarkable people in reframing the conversation as necessary at the required moment(s), the advisability of focusing on only a small number of scenarios, and the notion that the primary purpose of scenarios is to enable strategic conversations that align actors' mental models, thereby enabling shared awareness and action-taking, are the very reasons we were attracted to the van der Heijden (1996) volume. For all of these reasons, we decided to adopt it as the basic guide to our work. Subsequently, it has featured prominently not only in my ongoing research and consulting practice, but also in my teaching of the behavioral foundations of strategic management to specialist Masters and MBA students, and in my delivery of executive development courses.

Having explained how the various strengths of Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation highlighted by Rowland and Spaniol's (2021) review article resonate with my own reading and use of the book, in the interests of balance, in the remainder of this short commentary, I want to offer my brief reflections on some of the more critical observations raised by them. In particular, I want to make two interrelated observations, regarding: (1) the need for a greater appreciation of, and contribution to, the theorizing of scenario practices; and (2), the need, in particular, to deepen understanding of the role of emotions and intuition, and address the very practical question of how to harness them to better effect.

Like Rowland and Spaniol (2021), I am intrigued by Kees van der Heijden's disenchantment with scientific theory and his seeming reluctance to engage more deeply in the theorizing of scenarios-based practices. The reluctance of practitioners more generally to engage with scientific theorizing (and the scientific method) is an issue of enduring concern in the futures and foresight field (for more extensive discussions of these issues see Fergnani & Chermack, 2021a, 2021b and the accompanying commentaries). The net result is surely a major deficit of understanding regarding what particular features of scenario techniques work best, in what particular circumstances, and for what particular reasons (see also Healey & Hodgkinson, 2008; Hodgkinson & Healey, 2008, 2018; Schoemaker, 1993).

Given his extensive and highly successful practitioner experience, it is only natural that Kees would want to prioritize documenting and codifying his many first-hand accomplishments and those of his colleagues, rather than seeking to appease the demands of anonymous peer reviewers. However, doing so at the expense of explicating more completely the generative mechanisms underpinning those accomplishments was surely a lost opportunity to advance both the art and science of enabling strategic conversations and, indeed, enhance the academic standing of the futures and foresight field (cf. Fergnani & Chermack, 2021a, 2021b; Hodgkinson, 2021).

Surely, the skilled practitioner of scenario techniques must display artful ingenuity in adapting to the behavioral dynamics prevailing, an art that demands the theoretical insights of the behavioral and social sciences writ large. Fortunately, such was the richness of creative ideas within Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation (among Kees van der Heijden's many other publications) that numerous scholarly researchers have engaged extensively with his writings, evidenced by the impressive volume of the literature surveyed by Rowland and Spaniol (2021). Nonetheless, my abiding sense is that, had Kees persevered with—rather than become disheartened with—the formal peer-review process, theory, research, and practice pertaining to scenarios-based techniques would have been all the richer, and progressed far more quickly and smoothly.

Illustrating my more general concern in respect of the undertheorization of the Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation book is the manner in which Kees mentioned only in passing the importance of emotions and intuition as major determinants of scenario processes and outcomes. The need to address this fundamental limitation fell into sharp relief two decades ago, when George Wright and I reflected on our efforts to facilitate a series of scenario planning workshops within a deeply troubled organization, which failed to go as planned (Hodgkinson & Wright, 2002). Having explicitly contracted our services with a view to fostering constructive debate within her senior leadership team regarding the medium-longer term strategic direction of the organization she was leading at the time, it soon became apparent that the CEO was neither willing nor able to engage meaningfully in the very processes she had sponsored and codesigned in conjunction with ourselves. As documented in Hodgkinson and Wright (2002), this case highlighted a major gap in the reflective-practitioner literature regarding how to manage effectively the attendant dysfunctional socioemotional process dynamics that can rapidly escalate when workshop participants come to realize that there are no readymade palatable solutions to the uncertainties prevailing. Having highlighted the potency of the affective side of managerial and organizational life, Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation, like Kees's subsequent publications (e.g., van der Heijden et al., 2002) is remarkably silent on how to address it.

The Hodgkinson and Wright (2002) case provides an extreme example of the lengths to which powerful actors with vested interests will go when the scenario process begins to reveal alternative framings and fresh insights so profound that they threaten their fundamental senses of self. Rowland and Spaniol (2021), in contrast, confine their attention to the important distinction of formal and informal organizational structures, discussed extensively in the organization theory and design literature. Almost entirely absent from their reflections on Kees van der Heijden's Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation is the equally important distinction between explicit/formal and tacit/informal knowledge and the role of nonconscious cognitive–affective processes that fundamentally drive many aspects of scenario thinking and strategic conversations (Healey & Hodgkinson, 2017; Hodgkinson & Healey, 2011). I find it very curious indeed that this aspect of the informal was similarly lacking, theoretically speaking, in van der Heijden's (1996, 2005) books and much of the work that has been inspired by them, in which the role of emotions, for example, although readily acknowledged, is addressed all-too fleetingly. Even the imaginatively titled sequel to the van der Heijden (1996) volume, The Six Sense: Accelerating Organizational Learning with Scenarios (van der Heijden et al., 2002), mentions merely in passing (see, in particular, pp. 164, 263, 275) that scenario thinking, especially through the use of “the seven questions” (taken from the van der Heijden, 1996, volume) will “unwittingly reveal what [interviewees] regard as the main uncertainties in the business environment, their hopes and fears, their in-built assumptions and emotional attachments. Surfacing these allows individual and organizational mental models to be mapped and understood” (p. 164). More generally, according to van der Heijden et al. (2002), scenarios thinking elicits feelings of fear, hope, security, and threat, and senior managers have a responsibility to “[a]cknowledge personal vulnerability and provide support from the center. This is particularly important during periods of disruption that accompany the learning process. Create a trust that this support will be forthcoming in the future” (p. 275). Beyond these basic insights, the only other fleeting mention of emotions is on Page 165, where van der Heijden and colleagues note the importance of creating “a shared feeling of identity among the management team, ultimately helping to improve the dynamics of the strategic conversation.” What this means in theoretical (or even practical) terms beyond these most cursory observations, much like in the original Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation (both editions), is simply left to the reader's imagination.

The foregoing limitations notwithstanding, as I noted at the outset, Kees van der Heijden's Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation is an outstanding achievement. The academic and practitioner communities are both surely all the richer for it. However, it is rather telling that, like van der Heijdenan (1996, 2005), Rowland and Spaniol (2021) only fleetingly mention emotion, quoting Figueiredo (2007, p. 1014), who in an earlier review of this classic work, underscored the basic point “that strategic conversation is best understood as charged with “emotion” and about “informal conversation” (Rowland & Spaniol, 2021, p. 10, endnote 13). Affect, or related conceptions such as “gut” feelings/intuition, despite their obvious significance in all but the most mundane of scenarios-based events, attract no mention whatsoever. Perhaps the ultimate reason for this continuing neglect, is that, until relatively recently, the quest to understand affect, emotions, and intuition was decidedly “off-limits” within the field of psychology and the wider social and behavioral sciences, which for much of the 20th century eschewed “hot” cognition in their pursuit of attaining scientific respectability (cf. Hodgkinson et al., 2008). Accordingly, at the time Kees van der Heijden wrote his highly influential book, there was a paucity of theoretical ideas with which he could engage meaningfully to develop his ideas on these important matters. Indeed, when George Wright and I wrote our aforementioned reflections on a scenario planning intervention of our own, with the notable exception of scholarly works grounded in the psychoanalytic tradition of organizational analysis (Kets de Vries, 1980; Kets de Vries & Miller, 1984), we found very few theoretical resources we were able to draw on. Fortunately, however, over the course of the past two decades, there have been considerable advances in the social, behavioral, and organizational sciences that have filled this theoretical void (for overviews, see Healey & Hodgkinson, 2017; Hodgkinson & Healey, 2018). To date, however, too little of this body of work has addressed directly the microfoundational challenges pertaining to futures and foresight practices, thus presenting rich opportunities for deeper theorizing, not least to explicate fundamental bridging mechanisms that might integrate better the art and science of scenarios-based practices (cf. Figueiredo, 2007, p. 1014).