Combining intuition with objectivity in building scenarios

Abstract

Planning by means of scenarios has been carried out for 40 years. From introduction in l967 up to late seventies, analytic effort was directed to improve the scenario technique as a support decision for making. The three methodological lines that emerged are intuitive logic, probabilistic trends and prospective analysis. Subsequently preference for scenarios in planning did not progress as expected. This was due to the limited success of practitioners in dealing with excessive technicalities on the one hand and recurrent superficiality on the other. Furthermore, Millett (2003) emphasized middle management complaints that scenarios did not deal with competitive issues or to their critical business decisions. The author defined the challenges to be faced which were the resolution of misunderstanding regarding definition and methodology for scenario construction, clarification and expansion of the appropriate application of scenarios and reduction of resources necessary for scenario planning, all of which were addressed in the procedure presented. With an exploratory approach, subjective opinion from the intuition of specialists was combined with analytical methods. This procedure was applied step-by-step to construct alternate scenarios for residential consumption of electrical energy in the state of Parana up to 2015. Results from structured interviews with 14 specialists selected by appraisals, were combined with information from social, economic and electric power industry data bases. Low cost and transparency were the features of the three alternates scenarios produced together with their subjective probabilities.