Using Scenarios to Better Prepare Policing for the Future
Every police leader wishes they had access to a crystal ball to foretell future developments or events. Since those only exist in fiction, leaders must use practical, time-tested strategies for identifying potential challenges and strategies they can employ if undesired events occur. Scenarios are tools police leaders can use to address this need and plan for the future.
Futurists use scenarios as an essential part of their work to explore different potential futures, manage uncertainty, challenge assumptions, facilitate strategic planning efforts, promote proactive actions and enhance communication. In a world that constantly changes, this approach helps individuals and organizations better prepare better and influence their future. Just as futurists use scenarios, so too can policing. The following are just a few of the ways in which policing can benefit from the use of scenarios:
Explore Multiple Futures: Futurists recognize that the future is an ever-evolving sphere with numerous possibilities. Scenarios enable them to explore various future possibilities, each representing a plausible scenario that may come true over time. This approach helps them better comprehend how various trends and driving forces interact and evolve over time. Forward leaning police leaders also recognize that the need to understand the future forces that will affect policing is acute, and, fortunately, doable.
Manage Future Uncertainty and Complexity: Our ever-evolving world makes the future highly unpredictable and complex, and scenarios can provide policing a structured way of dealing with this uncertainty. By considering various plausible futures, police leaders can identify common elements and key uncertainties, giving them better insight into and preparation for what lies ahead.
Challenge Assumptions and Expand Thinking: Scenarios enable police leaders and their staff to challenge assumptions about how the world operates and think more broadly about potential changes and their implications for policing. Such expanded thinking is key for innovation as well as to avoid being caught unawares during disruptive changes.
Assist Strategic Planning and Decision-Making: Strategic planners use scenarios as powerful tools for testing the robustness of strategies in different future conditions. In addition, they can help police organizations and policymakers devise adaptable, resilient strategies that are suitable for various future outcomes rather than being optimized only for one predicted scenario.
Encourage Proactive Action: Scenarios can motivate individuals and organizations alike to take proactive steps today to influence the future by showing potential consequences of various choices and strategies undertaken. This is especially useful in policing where the stakes are high.
Improve Communication and Engagement: Scenarios provide a powerful means of conveying complex futures-related information in narrative form, engaging various stakeholders as a powerful means of making abstract concepts of the future more tangible and relatable, leading to more informed discussions of decisions concerning its future. This is a critical piece of leaders following an authentic community policing philosophy that considers policymakers and community members true collaborative partners.
The use of scenarios in futures research and strategic planning is clearly a valuable way for police organizations to explore possible future developments and then create strategies to help them realize preferred futures. These scenarios are not predictions, but hypothetical constructions, founded on rational and internally consistent assumptions regarding key driving forces such as technology advances, the economy, sociopolitical considerations and environmental forces. Researching and analyzing potential scenarios requires a bit of research and analysis, and the consideration of diverse, sometimes contrary, perspectives. Scenarios must be plausible yet diverse enough to challenge conventional wisdom or organizational assumptions and can often be presented visually to increase engagement and understanding.
Scenarios provide organizations with the ability to anticipate various future developments and create adaptable strategies to better achieve a preferred future state. For policing agencies specifically, scenarios provide insight into changes in crime trends, societal attitudes, regulatory shifts and technological advancements - encouraging proactive rather than reactive strategy development. Creating effective scenarios requires the identification of key issues, gathering relevant data, determining major influencing forces and crafting plausible future narratives. They then serve to test various strategies while maintaining flexibility during an organization's planning process.
The recent Covid pandemic is a good example of an event that took most police agencies by surprise. They were suddenly struggling to find protective equipment for their personnel and develop policies to cover the requirement for social distancing. Yet, the SARS epidemic that affected Toronto, Canada in 2003, devastated its police department. Its impacts and “lessons learned” were studied extensively by prominent law enforcement organizations and their findings publicized. Despite these efforts, the lessons from Toronto were either unknown, forgotten or simply ignored by American policing. Had police leaders reflected on Toronto PD’s experience, and “gamed” the effects of a Covid-like pandemic on their own agencies, perhaps they would have had plans and equipment in place when Covid blazed through the U.S. and the rest of the world.
Good, critical evaluation of the scenarios a police agency is considering using is vital. Competent scenarios can be identified by their relevance, diversity, ability to challenge assumptions and their utility in strategic planning. A good scenario provides new insights and unveils unseen opportunities or risks. Their effectiveness is often evident through the discussions or decisions they generate. Given their dynamic nature, scenarios must be reviewed periodically to remain useful. When developed in a collaborative, thoughtful environment, they play an integral part of strategic planning processes for policing. They provide a structured way of anticipating future uncertainties while helping develop anticipatory, adaptable strategies.
In future articles we will discuss the “how to’s” of constructing scenarios and using them to develop policies and practices to help achieve desired public safety futures.