Earlier this year we hosted more than 130 public sector and business leaders, innovators, academics, and designers from around the world in the BLOX-building on the Copenhagen waterfront. The purpose was to explore, then build, alternative future scenarios for societies and businesses in the year 2050. Our team is still hard at work processing the scenarios as a strategic output and a set of tools. While the work has been delayed by the corona crisis, there’s time for a bit of reflection on the link to the current situation.

See, we had no idea the conference participants would imagine and plan a scenario for 2050 that would become eerily real just a few weeks later.

Four alternative futures

Through an intensive, one-day interactive workshop titled Experimentation by Design, the participants produced baseline scenarios and applied them to different domains such as the future of work, of cities, manufacturing, welfare, and mobility. The baseline scenarios were built across two axes of high uncertainty and high potential importance: Will our future society be mainly shaped by narrow market needs, or by broad, holistic, societal needs? And will our dominant governance model – for states as well as for enterprises – be mainly centralized or distributed? Crossing these two axes produced four general future outcomes, which could shape our world as we know it (e.g. “centralized and market-driven” or “distributed and driven by societal needs”). The resulting four domains became the overarching frame for discussion at the event.

One very real present

At the time, a few participants had heard news of a strange airborne flu-like virus originating from a Chinese megacity and already wreaking havoc there. Fast forward six weeks, Copenhagen and most of the world was engulfed by a pandemic. On March 11th, 2020, the government of Denmark announced a near-total shut down of the country; followed by closed borders a few days later.

Is this future happening?

One of the future scenarios developed on that chilly January day in Copenhagen reflects exactly the situation we found ourselves in during lock-down this winter: A world where power, especially governmental, is highly centralized, and where market dynamics take a back seat to societal demands.

Named Beta, the scenario describes a world where systemic issues are destroying the planet and fueling unprecedented levels of inequality. To counter the issues, people put their trust in a political solution. Governments are empowered with a wide mandate to regulate society as needed to ensure society is socially and environmentally constructive.

As they developed this scenario, some participants talked about it as “Big Mother” overseeing and accommodating our every need; others warned of too much power in too few hands.