Compare methods

	Seven Questions Scenario Method	Environmental Scanning for Foresight
Field	Futures Foresight Studies	Futures Foresight Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1996	2003
Originator	Global Business Network (GBN) and the Shell scenario tradition (Pierre Wack lineage)	Joseph Voros (generic foresight process framework); Millennium Project / Futures Research Methodology
Type	Structured-interview pipeline that seeds scenario building	Input-stage scanning pipeline for the generic foresight process
Seminal source	Schoemaker, P. J. H. (1995). Scenario planning: A tool for strategic thinking. Sloan Management Review, 36(2), 25-40.	Voros, J. (2003). A generic foresight process framework. Foresight, 5(3), 10-21.
Aliases	Seven Questions Interview, GBN Seven Questions, Shell Seven Questions, Oracle/Epitaph Interview Protocol	Foresight Environmental Scanning, Strategic Environmental Scanning, Foresight Input Scanning, Voros Input-Stage Scanning
Related	3	4
Summary	The seven questions scenario method is a structured interview protocol, associated with the Global Business Network and the Shell scenario tradition, used at the front end of scenario building to surface the concerns, predetermined elements, and critical uncertainties that will seed a set of scenarios. Rather than starting from abstract drivers, facilitators interview key informants and decision-makers using a fixed sequence of seven open questions — including the famous 'oracle' question (if you could ask a clairvoyant one thing about the future, what would it be?) and the 'epitaph' question about the legacy the organization hopes to leave. The interviews draw out what people most hope for, fear, and want to know, and the analysis of those responses identifies which forces are effectively predetermined and which are genuinely uncertain. As Schoemaker's account of scenario planning and Bishop, Hines, and Collins's survey of scenario techniques both stress, separating the predetermined from the uncertain is the pivot on which good scenarios turn.	Environmental scanning for foresight is the systematic surveillance of an organization's external environment to collect, filter, and interpret the signals of change that feed a structured foresight process. In Joseph Voros's 2003 generic foresight process framework, scanning is the input stage — the activity that gathers the raw material on which all subsequent analysis depends — and the quality of that input bounds the quality of everything that follows. The method is deliberately broad and continuous: it casts a wide net across many channels, sifts the resulting flood for what is relevant, and interprets the survivors into emerging trends and issues. As codified in the Millennium Project's Futures Research Methodology, environmental scanning is the foundational discipline of strategic foresight, valued because foresight that rests on a narrow or stale view of the environment is foresight built on sand, however sophisticated the downstream methods.