Four futures, and what each would do to a classroom.
Two axes, crossed, give four situations coherent enough to rehearse against. That is more useful than a forecast, and they should never be read as one.
How to read them
The set contains four internally consistent worlds, each possible enough that a plan which fails badly in one of them is a plan with a known weakness. None is a prediction, and the future may be none of the four.
The discipline that makes scenarios worth the effort is refusing to rank them by likelihood. The moment a group decides which one is most probable, the other three become decoration and the exercise has quietly turned back into forecasting, the thing scenarios exist to avoid.
They also do not sort into good and bad as tidily as the names suggest. The flourishing scenario contains real losses, and every one of the other three contains something a school could reasonably want. Reading them as a moral ranking is the fastest way to get nothing out of them.
Why they were written as stories
Each scenario carries two narratives: a day in the life of one resident, and an hour-by-hour account of the same day across a student, a parent, a teacher, an industry stakeholder and a policy officer. That is a lot of prose for what could have been a table, and the choice was deliberate.
A table of implications can be agreed with. A narrative has to be argued with, because it commits to specifics: a name, a time, a decision someone made at 14:20 that could have gone otherwise. When people push back on these, they push back on the specifics, and that is the conversation worth having.
The five roles recur across all four futures on purpose. Holding the cast constant is what turns four stories into one comparison: the same kind of person, in the same kind of morning, under four different sets of conditions.
The dimension that did the most work
Each scenario was also worked through five dimensions of teaching and learning: the classroom environment, curriculum (with pedagogy and assessment), the partnership and operating culture around the school, how students behave and how teachers act.
Assessment turned out to be the sharpest discriminator, and I did not expect that. Across the four futures the classroom furniture changes less than you would think, and the technology in the room changes less than the vendors would like. What changes almost beyond recognition is what a credential means, who issues it and whether anybody believes it. If you only have time to stress-test one thing against these four, test assessment.
Four futures
The set
Laid out as the matrix above, so a card's position on the page is its position on the two axes. Read across rather than down, because the comparison is the method.
Velvet Cage
Harmony maintained through algorithmic comfort and quiet control
Read Softly, with numbersEight days
Artefacts from inside the futures
These are potential stories, the kind of thing that might be written from inside each of these futures as a news piece, a blog post or a day simply recounted. The features of the four scenarios were drawn from them. Each one deliberately pushes the early signals from the scan further than the evidence alone would go, so that what a signal would feel like becomes something you can argue with. Four sit inside a single scenario. Four cross between two, which is where they earn their keep, because the boundary is the part a 2×2 cannot draw.
Read the eight days8 stories · about 1,500 words each
Pick a day above to read it.