Alternate futures

"Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve."-Karl Popper

On October 26, 2014, UK and US flags over Camp Bastion, Afghanistan, were lowered for the last time during a ceremony handing control of the British base (and the US Marine Corps Camp Leatherneck contained with Camp Bastion) to the Afghan National Security Forces. The ceremony was an important milestone in the ongoing transition of NATO's role in Afghanistan from combat operations to a train, assist, and advice mission in 2015. It also provided a poignant reminder of the lessons of one of the most difficult and costly days of the nearly dozen-year-long NATO-led International Security and Assistance Force deployment to Afghanistan.

On September 14, 2012, Camp Bastion's fence line was penetrated by 19 Taliban insurgents who, once inside the base, killed two US Marines and destroyed six AV-8B Harrier jets while damaging two others. In addition to the loss of life, the attack led to approximately $200 million in damage to US Marine Corps assets. An April 2014 report released by UK members of parliament blamed the successful attack on a "high level of complacency" in the UK and US security system and noted that fewer than half of the guard towers were manned on the night of the attack

In response to the post-attack critiques about Camp Bastion complacency, the US Marine Corps devised a creative approach to avoiding a repeat of the disruptive raid by establishing what was referred to as a "dirt track red team," a standing group of a dozen young Marines and NATO personnel focused on thinking like the Taliban and devising "bizzaro things" that could happen to the base. Colonel Peter Baumgartner, commander of the US Marine Task Force Belleau Wood, in charge of security at Camp Leatherneck, commented to the Marine Corp Times in May 2014 on the rationale for the red team: "The last thing I'm going to do is stand here after a successful attack has occurred and go, 'boy, I never thought they could do something like that.' I refuse to have failure of imagination here."

Colonel Baumgartner's instinct to address the potential for failures of imagination should be heeded and adopted by decision-makers from across a growing range of critical domains facing uncertain and risk-prone landscapes increasingly vulnerable to disruptive events that drive straight-line projections of current trends along wildly different trajectories.

The ability to implement decision-support tools designed to address the potential for a failure of imagination will be critical to determining resilience, agility, and ultimately success for national security, private sector, and critical infrastructure organizations in the complex and uncertain world of the early 21st century.

New environments and new modes of thinking

Four forces are particularly important in shaping the growing degrees of complexity and uncertainty in today's world:

Devolution of disruption: More actors, in command of more and better capabilities, have the capacity to affect strategic, operational and market environments. In the national security sphere, this implies a broadening threat spectrum to security, sovereignty, and infrastructure protection-from competing nation states to transnational networks to ideologically imbued and technologically savvy individuals capable of using commercially available technologies in novel ways to massively disruptive effect.

In the private sector, this phenomenon manifests itself, in part, through the emergence of new and niche competitors as well as established actors seeking to penetrate new and adjacent markets; implement radical new business models or structures; or acquire new and disruptive capabilities (Google's acquisition of SkyBox and Titan Aerospace, for example).

For all domains and industries, though, the devolution of the capacity for precipitous disruption places a premium on a more nuanced understanding of the perspectives, capabilities, metrics, mindsets, objectives, and strategies of current and potential competitors, partners, customers, and other stakeholders that could shape or affect emerging challenges and opportunities.

Compressed timelines: Events are occurring and unfolding with increasing speed, from the initial signs of disruption to more urgent and pronounced crises or opportunities. The ability to anticipate and plan for a range of plausible challenges and opportunities-even those that are less likely- in advance of their taking place is increasingly required for corporate and government entities to develop signposts and hedging strategies that allow entities to anticipate and respond to dynamic, fast-moving challenges and opportunities.

Interconnected implications: Disruptive events and their proximate and secondary implications are rarely constrained by national, regional, or neatly defined industry or infrastructure boundaries. Anticipating the full suite of risks in such an environment requires a sophisticated understanding of the strength and complexion of a range of linkages and how decisions affecting one set of risks or actors may drive new or expanded risks that may not be intuitive.

Collisions and intersections: Risks and dynamics do not unfold in a vacuum. They collide and intersect in ways that are new, difficult to anticipate, and have consequences that are highly uncertain, stressing the need to examine and explore scenarios and responses to cascading crises or rapidly moving opportunities.

Alternative analysis tools offer analysts and decision-makers an effective means of planning for possible risk and uncertainty in increasingly vulnerable and unsettled operating environments. These tools are designed to achieve two linked goals.

First, alternative analysis methods ensure that core and frequently inherited assumptions about environments of interest are systematically challenged in order to overcome the perils of cognitive bias-including selection bias and confirmation bias-and groupthink, to which even the most sophisticated and reflective analysts and decision-makers are susceptible (see first sidebar at end of article). Second, these techniques also give decision-makers a structured means of expanding and exploring a broader range of alternative outcomes other than the most likely or the small subset of outcomes implied by current, observable trends.

Three categories of techniques are particularly useful in supporting decision-makers in better dealing with ambiguity and disruption: scenario planning, war gaming, and "red teaming."

Writing histories of the future: Scenario planning

"One thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination, is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him."-Thomas Schelling, winner of the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics

The term "scenario planning" is frequently conflated with "scenario modeling," but while they share some common elements, they are markedly different methodologies designed to achieve markedly different objectives.

While scenario modeling typically seeks to examine a set of scenarios in order to identify the most likely scenario(s) or the scenario with the greatest impact if it were to come to pass, scenario planning is, at least initially, agnostic about the probability of any one scenario occurring. The objective of scenario planning is not to predict a specific set of events that is likely to take place-though planning case scenarios can be incorporated into scenario planning-but to force decision-makers to consider a broad range of plausible, as opposed to merely likely, and distinct futures rather than low, medium and high versions of the same future.

By accepting all scenarios to be "true" and encouraging participants in scenario planning exercises to "not fight the scenario," scenario planning allows for assessments of challenges, vulnerabilities, dynamics, drivers, personalities, opportunities, capabilities, relationships, strategies, operations, and tactics relevant not only to each individual representative scenario, but also across multiple scenarios considered (see second sidebar at end of article).

Scenario planning is also an exceptionally valuable tool in helping organizations anticipate disruption or transition and in proactively responding to shifts in key environments of interest in order to mitigate risks or capitalize on opportunities. One of the most important outputs of any well-executed scenario planning exercise is the identification of signposts, or indicators, that one scenario or category of scenarios is more or less likely to come to pass. When signpost identification and monitoring are effectively matched with the development through collaborative and multidisciplinary scenario exercises of hedging strategies for dealing with each scenario examined, organizations can move to enhance resilience as shifts and disruptions are emerging rather than after they have already occurred.

Simulating the future: War gaming

War gaming (also called tabletop gaming, policy gaming, or strategy gaming) is a dynamic process through which stakeholders "play out" scenarios that simulate possible real-world environments of interest to sponsor organizations in order to achieve one or more of the following core analytical and educational objectives:

• Challenge and test plans, strategies, policies, and tactics
• Explore new or uncertain landscapes, markets, or competitors
• Identify and anticipate risks and disruptions that could affect policies, plans, operations, or landscapes of interest

Tabletop games bring together key stakeholders and select multidisciplinary subject matter experts who are divided into teams for the purposes of the game. These teams then role play specific perspectives within the context of a given scenario over the course of multiple "moves" or segments of a particular game. Games are flexible tools-there is no one right way to design and run a game-and can be applied across multiple industries and domains to support a range of analytical and decision-making purposes. These include understanding assessing which technologies will be most likely to affect business and landscapes, assessing decision-making of clients or competitors, and understanding vulnerability to physical or cyber-attacks (see third sidebar at end of article).

Through creating and asking participants to explore and navigate a simulated world that has ties to, but is not a duplicate of, existing environments, games create a collaborative and risk-free setting within which decision-makers are free to consider alternatives that they would not otherwise be able to address without fear of real-world repercussions. Games also require participants to make decisions in highly time-compressed environments-scenarios designed to take place over weeks or months or even years are played out in games lasting one to several days-forcing participants to invoke their intuition and identify alternative decisions and outcomes that may not be readily identifiable until participants have immersed themselves in the game environment and observed how decisions affect landscapes and issues of interest.

Injecting critical and competitive perspectives: 'Red teaming'

"Red teams are quintessential heretics. They are constantly trying to overthrow expectation."-Dr. Jim Schneider, School of Advanced Military Studies, Fort Leavenworth, KS

Red teams and red teaming-much like scenarios and scenario planning-connote different things to different people, meaning that a wide variety of applications for red teaming exists, including highly technical penetration testing or black hat/tiger team red teams designed to understand vulnerabilities in network security. As Dr. Mark Mateski, the Editor of the Red Team Journal blog, has noted, "for every red team that exists, a slightly different definition for red teaming also exists."

The IHS Aerospace, Defense, and Security alternative analysis training team focuses its red team training and implementation activities around two distinct types of red teams: adversary/competitor red teams, designed to better understand competitor mentalities and objectives, and devil's advocate red teams, designed to formally incorporate and empower contrarian thinking into decision-making and deliverable review processes.

As with war gaming and scenario planning, the term "red team" is adapted from military and security contexts. Specifically, the term comes from the color designations of various roles used in military and security war games (see figure below). Red is used to designate adversary teams.

As a result, red teaming is most frequently associated with a dedicated and systematic effort to better understand adversary or competitor objectives, strategies, capabilities, interests, priorities, strengths, vulnerabilities, decision-making, behaviors, tactics, and operations. Assessing adversaries or competitors can be a tricky proposition without the help of a structured red team approach to overcome "mirror imaging"-the temptation to project one's own ordered preferences and views of the world on competitors.

Adversary or competitor red teams, then, are designed to bring together multiple individuals with very specific expertise about competitors of interest who are asked to perpetually think like the competition and devise new and inventive ways of creating challenges for "blue team" interests. By developing a more nuanced and accurate view of critical competitor attributes, perceptions, and objectives, blue team decision-makers can identify asymmetries to exploit, competitor processes to manipulate or influence, and specific internal vulnerabilities against which to mitigate.

For example, companies in the global defense industry frequently incorporate red teams into large proposal efforts. These teams can consist of a combination of internal and outside experts with specific knowledge of competitor mindsets, capabilities, and models. Red teams are called upon to work collaboratively to develop running analyses of "win themes" and bid strategy and tactics for each competitor of interest. These insights are then fed back to the capture team, which uses them to address vulnerabilities and capitalize on competitive advantages in their own proposal.

The second category of red team of particular interest to IHS is the devil's advocacy red team, in which a group of experienced, creative, empowered, and critical individuals is asked to regularly critique and challenge key assumptions, usually from the perspective of the consumer of analysis, decisions, or new products and services.

Many in the business world, especially in functions focused on proposal and capture management, will be familiar with this version of red team, particularly within the context of serving as a stage in color team proposal review processes. The red team stage is an opportunity for a draft document to be critically evaluated by a panel of individuals empowered to act as devil's advocates and ask hard questions of the draft that are likely to be asked by the customer during the actual evaluation process.

Regardless of the objective and structure, red teaming is a powerful and adaptable technique to allow organizations to improve decision-making by considering their own strategies, processes, value propositions, and views of the future from the perspective of other stakeholders that seek to undermine or question these approaches.

A tool, not a silver bullet

Alternative analysis techniques- and the critical mindsets that buttress them-are vital elements of decision-making and strategy support in a world that is increasingly prone to disruptive geopolitical, political, security, technological, business, market and natural events.

These techniques-if properly conceptualized and implemented-can help decision-makers by:

• Suggesting how a wide variety of trends, influences and forces could shape risk environments
• Testing strategies and assumptions about risk environments and responses
• Considering in advance operational and strategic alternatives to managing and mitigating risk that would not be revealed through more traditional and conventional techniques While alternative analysis techniques take different forms and seek to achieve different specific objectives, all alternative analysis techniques stress the need to improve decision-making through collaborative environments designed to incorporate multidisciplinary, critical, and creative perspectives into efforts to challenge assumptions and expand alternative outcomes considered.

However, alternative analysis techniques are not a silver bullet. Scenario planning, war gaming, and red teaming, in particular, are tools designed to challenge existing analysis and to expand thinking about that analysis. Therefore, they must be incorporated with more traditional analyses, including expert commentary, models, and trend analysis, to gain a more complete vision of current environments, future outcomes, and understanding of the critical uncertainties that are shaping this future.

Moreover, alternative analysis techniques are not without implementation challenges and require clear and well-articulated objectives, parameters, and designs in order to most effectively help organizations anticipate-if not fully predict- disruptive events. However, if alternative analysis techniques are effectively implemented, their underlying mindsets and instincts to ask "why" and "why not" embraced by decision-makers, and their outputs supported by organizational leadership, these tools can successfully prepare organizations to adapt to shifting environments in order to effectively mitigate novel risks and capitalize on fast-moving opportunities.

Challenges in thinking about the future

Thinking about the future, much less predicting it, is inherently difficult, even for visionaries. Albert Einstein rejected the possibility of nuclear energy in 1932, for example, and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously claimed in 2007, "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance." All decision-makers seeking to assess and anticipate the shape, scale, timing, and pace of disruptive change and innovation are affected by five particularly prominent temptations that reflect the enormous power of groupthink and a range of cognitive biases in constraining forward-leaning analysis and decision-making:

The end of history: Decision-making frequently incorporates analysis concluding that current environments suggest non-perishable trends are certain to endure, amplify, or accelerate indefinitely. For example, in the 15 years preceding World War I, a flawed, but prevailing, mindset emerged that held that unprecedented technological sophistication, lethality of military equipment, and economic interdependence made great power conflict impossible.

Straight-trend analysis: Trends are critical to diagnosing future outcomes, but simply projecting current trends forward without contextualizing them or searching for outcomes or implications not visible through analysis of these trends is likely to lead to assumptions about future environments that are incomplete or incorrect.

Single-outcome forecasting: Forecasts can be exceptionally useful inputs into any decision-making process. However, basing decisions solely or predominantly on a single outcome can inhibit the ability of organizations to anticipate and adapt to disruptions.

Preferred outcomes: Organizations and individuals frequently consider only the data and perspectives about the future that benefit them most. From US radio pioneer Lee De Forest's rejection of the future of television to former Vice President Dick Cheney's statement that the uptick in attacks in Iraq in 2005 constituted the "last throes of the insurgency," the temptation to see only what one wants to see can be strong and, ultimately, deleterious to good decision-making.

Always/never: Analysts and decision-makers should be wary of absolutist thinking and the use of terms of inevitability, such as "always" or "never." Even physical laws are challenged and revised-albeit rarely-as more evidence leads to better hypotheses.

Applying scenario planning and alternative analysis: NATO futures

IHS Aerospace, Defense, and Security's ongoing NATO Futures multiclient study (to be released to subscribers in March 2015) provides a useful case study of when, how, and to what end to apply scenario planning exercises.

The topic of the future of NATO and European and trans-Atlantic security lends itself to a scenario planning exercise due to the enormous uncertainty surrounding these issues. For the third time in the last quarter century-the first two followed the Cold War and 9/11-NATO faces a radically shifting strategic context: Afghanistan, Russia, the Islamic State, Libya, extremism, cyberwarfare, and a range of internal challenges are all conspiring to create a new strategic context in which long-standing assumptions about security frameworks are being challenged in stark and destabilizing ways. This changed and complex context requires a radical rethink of the mission, role, structure, capabilities, and membership of an alliance that is likely to look fundamentally different in five years' time from how it has for the last 12 years.

IHS has tracked the evolution of this shifted context and assessed what this means for the future of this most resilient of alliances since January 2014 through a four-step process: in-depth, open-source, and multidisciplinary research to identify key drivers, uncertainties, and building blocks; scenario category identification and pathway generation; facilitation of collaborative workshops that bring together multidisciplinary expertise to discuss scenarios; and, critically, identification and monitoring of signposts that one scenario is more or less likely to come to pass.

Our work to date has identified several categories of potential scenarios to be developed and formally assessed over the remainder of the project, including:

• Segmented alliance: A cohesive alliance that seeks to play an active role as a geopolitical and military force throughout the world and effectively incorporates differing threat perceptions and prioritization by developing pockets of capabilities focused on specific threats.
• Fragmented alliance: An inconsistently effective alliance that is unable to fully marshal its deterrent and political capacity due to internal challenges and disagreements over the prioritization of issues facing NATO.
• Overextended alliance: An alliance that is unable to prioritize threats and takes decisions in the short term that may leave it vulnerable to longer-term challenges and competitions.
• Inert alliance: An alliance that gradually loses credibility and capability under the weight of a broadening threat spectrum, deteriorating security environment, fiscal and political realities, and the strains of aligning the interests of 28 allies.

War gaming for corporates: A case study

While "war gaming" is most commonly associated with military and national security planners, the practice-more commonly referred to as "tabletop" or "strategy" gaming outside of the military context- is increasingly being applied by private sector organizations seeking to test strategies, explore new environments, and enhance resiliency.

For example, IHS was recently asked to design, plan, facilitate, and provide post-event analysis for a one-day game for a technology company seeking to enter into a defense- and security-focused market. The game brought together 20+ stakeholders from within the sponsoring organization along with two IHS subject matter experts and a team of six IHS facilitators, note takers, and game controllers.

Participants were divided into two teams representing the client's interest and worked through two scenarios for distinct procurement competitions during two half-day "moves." Both teams, role playing the same entity with the same stated interests and objectives, approached each scenario in distinct ways, deriving valuable and, in some cases, counterintuitive insights. Indicative takeaways included:

Organizational challenges: The client organization was not set up in a way that would allow it to efficiently operate in and penetrate the market of interest, which required a set of specific administrative capabilities.

Networking and learning: The game served as a useful forum for stakeholders from across the company to learn more about who was doing what in an organization that was in flux at the time. Several participants noted that many of the capabilities and functions required to compete in this market were resident in the company.

Tangible recommendations: The game suggested specific, tangible recommendations for addressing identified structural and branding challenges.

Tate Nurkin is Senior Director, Thought Leadership, IHS Markit Aerospace, Defense and Security
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