To begin the process of writing the 2018 scenarios, Herman Miller held a two-day symposium for a group of employees and a diverse panel of invited experts; their task was to devise a set of “driving forces” and “critical uncertainties” that determine how the future might play out, and based on those, to develop scenario themes. “We include a variety of backgrounds and a variety of different kinds of thinking and skill sets in our team,” says Scenario Project Lead Maryln Walton, “to develop broad thinking and to spread the experience into as many parts of the organization as we can.” Based on their expertise, visiting participants were asked to tell stories about the future. Steve Weber presented his story through the lens of a political scientist; Mimi Ito through the lens of an educator and digital media expert; Grant McCracken through the lens of creativity and design; and Scott Doorley through the lens of a computer scientist and entrepeneur. “Applying expertise can be quite challenging when thinking about the future,” says Chris Ertel. “Some academics in particular have a fairly strong attachment to their own ideas in a way that isn’t always helpful. A phrase we like to use is: we’re seeking experts who have strong ideas that are loosely held.”

Ultimately, one of the goals of scenario planning is to synthesize the entire group’s knowledge, experience, and thinking into a set of plausible outcomes. “We aren’t trying to identify all the possible futures. These are hypotheses, not predictions,” says Walton. “Scenario planning really helps you percieve things differently—it opens up your mind to new ideas. We start asking different questions, challenge our thinking, challenge the team’s thinking. That’s what’s really important.” In addition to the the final set of stories, Herman Miller also commissioned contributions from writers in China, France, Russia, Brazil, and Australia to see how these possible futures might play out around the world to broaden the scope of the project and increase its relevance and utility.

Herman Miller’s three 2018 scenarios—titled Polarized World, New Normal, and Data Sphere—are currently in development. As our conclusions and hypotheses from these stories continue to evolve, we will be able to determine tangible design objectives and help our business—as well as our clients’ businesses—better respond to social change. 

CREATION STORIES
For the 2018 scenario planning session, Herman Miller invited six experts to deliver future provocations. Listen to four highlights from that session, below.

Steve Weber explores the tension between micro level connectivity and macro level disjuncture and the resulting disconnect between peer-to-peer connectivity and big institutions. Steve Weber is a professor at University of California, Berkeley, and author of  The Success of Open Source and The End of Arrogance: America in the Global Competition of Ideas.

Mimi Ito tackles issues of selective sociability and intentional communities and suggests that the boundlessness of the technological knowledge resources will create an extreme scarcity in the attentional resources available to humans. Mimi Ito is the chair in Digital Media and Learning at John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Professor in Residence, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine.

Scott Doorley imagines a future in which the intense emotional spectrum engendered by entrepreneurialism and innovation will require a much more physically adaptive and multifaceted workplace. Scott Doorley is the Creative Director at Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University.

Grant McCracken touts "cloudiness" as a new and valuable structural property: the blurred boundaries between the self, the group, and the organization creates a dynamism that will oblige corporations to be less distinct and siloed. Grant McCracken is an anthropologist and author of  Chief Culture Officer and Culturematics.