It should be clear now that scenario design and futures design can open up and help us claim the opportunity spaces that wicked problems hold. Three or four diverse scenarios, however, do not provide a unified direction to work towards. Instead, they lay the rich and insightful groundwork for guiding a collective journey towards the preferred future.

One might be tempted to criticize that we focus on the wrong things if we focus or work towards preferred futures, thereby neglecting today's massive challenges and the many people already deeply affected by issues today like the effects of climate change. We turn to futures designer Oskar Stokholm Østergaard, whom we have collaborated with for many years, to nuance this:

Others will argue that we desperately need the hope and radical ideas of preferred futures to escape the grip of the slowly collapsing status quo. I’ve found that working with both alternative and preferred futures in combination yields the best results for the transition-inspired work I am doing, especially when coupled with thorough backcasting, an attention to non-linear transition pathways, and a focus on immediate action and experimentation. (Østergaard, 2024a)

Through our experimentation with different corners of futures design, we have realized that driving processes that include a collective exploration of various plausible and possible and even extreme futures enable an essential next step: the convergence around a preferred future that nurtures collective understanding, urgency and hopefulness – and a very important ingredient: directionality.