Explores how images of the future are perceived and categorized, and how the discipline itself uses 'plausibility' as an evaluative criterion - and why that may be a mistake.

1. T H E O R Y
2 APF Compass | October 2015
What are crazy futures, and
why do we need them? Let me answer this
question by considering both words: First,
‘crazy’, as contrasted with ‘normal’
generally and then specifically with
‘plausibility’ as a term of art over-used in
futures and foresight practice, especially
scenario planning. Second, ‘futures’, that is
images of non-existent, forward
temporally displaced situations and
contexts and their generation, especially as
contributing to perceptions of ‘craziness’.
In the process, I will also explore the
notions of complexity and chaos, and what
they imply for the usefulness of crazy
futures in contrast to plausible futures.
What is ‘crazy’?
Judging behaviour as
‘crazy’ is subjectively relative. When I
was a child and walking down the street
and the person coming towards me was
talking to herself out loud, I would very
likely cross the street to avoid her. Now
we are surrounded by crowds of people
‘talking to themselves’—and no longer
consider it ‘crazy’ because it is contextually
appropriate in an era of mobile phone
earpieces. It is neither unusual behaviour,
nor out of the ordinary, given a specific
technological setting. The same applies, of
course, to different cultural settings:
flooding a bathroom by using the shower
hose outside of the stall is ‘crazy’
behaviour in the USA but perfectly
rational in Japan, where the bathing room
has a drain in the floor, and one is
expected to be clean before entering the
bath.
So if we define ‘crazy’ by contrast with
‘normal’, then it is the unusual as
contrasted against the usual. ‘Crazy’ is
subjectively relative to internal
expectations filtered and biased by milieu,
culture, and technological setting, among
other things. That is precisely its utility to
futures thinking. ‘Crazy’—and the sense of
nervous apprehension it engenders in
viewers—highlights and problematizes the
assumptions and points of view that
compose the normal. If the various futures
we face are composed of surprises, of
novelty—of the abnormal—then crazy is
just what we need: it exposes our blind
spots, the dangerous limitations of our
assumptions.
But a more specific new antonym to
‘crazy’ has emerged in futures practice in
the last few decades. Rather than
opposing crazy with ‘normal,’ it equates
‘crazy’ with ‘impossible’, and opposes it
with ‘plausible’.
What is ‘plausible’?
In the early ‘80s Roy Amara gave us a
classic conceptualization of the set of all
images of the future as roughly divisible
into possible, probable, and preferred
(Amara, 1981). This was useful because it
was robust: possible was the set of
everything—every future possible to
imagine, whether or not they had already
been imagined; probable was monitorable,
if not measurable—researchers could
observe emerging issues growing in
momentum, becoming trends, evolving
into greater probability; and preferable
was articulable—researchers could engage
stakeholders in value discussions and
judgements and essentially map the value
territory. In Venn diagram terms, the
categories overlap, but are still useful as a
conceptual base for futures research
methods.
Yet somehow over the intervening
decades, the terms have morphed to
Crazy Futures: Why Plausibility is Maladaptive
by Wendy Schultz
One person's craziness is
another person's reality.
Tim Burton
* Crazy * music, dudes
and dudettes! …he’s *
crazy * about his dog /
fishing / iPad… You want
to go bungee-jumping?
Are you * crazy *?
You keep using that word.
I do not think it means
what you think it means.
Inigo Montoya to Vizzini, in
The Princess Bride
Wendy Schultz’s presentation on Crazy Futures was one of the
highlights of the APF’s ‘Follow The Sun’ Virtual Gathering, held in
2011. She has now written a working paper based on the
presentation and an earlier article. I’m delighted that Compass is
able to include a shortened version of that working paper. (AC) .

2. T H E O R Y
APF Compass | October 2015 3
‘possible, plausible, probable, and
preferable futures’. Ruud van der Helm
carefully explores operational definitions
that distinguish possible, probable, and
plausible (van der Helm, 2006). He
reviews both objective probability (based
on the repeatability of systems) and
subjective probability (based on personal
or group utility functions); and also offers
distinctions between absolute possibility
(based on the known laws of reality) and
contingent possibility (based on
capabilities at given points on a time
horizon). Van der Helm then contrasts
both of these with plausibility, due to its
intrinsically subject-related nature based
on judgment and conviction. The
challenge for futures practice is “to
develop futures that are indeed ‘equally
plausible’ but sensibly different (van der
Helm, 2006, p26) in order to present
convincing alternatives for exploration.
Sometimes the wide and
woolly set of ‘possible’ drops entirely
from the field of view, and only ‘probable,
plausible, and preferable’ futures remain.
Ramirez and Selin suggest that as futures
studies, foresight, and scenario planning
evolved, probability evaluations became a
key evaluative criterion for forecasters
focussed on predictive capability, where
plausibility became the hallmark for
exploratory practitioners focussed on
appreciating alternative futures (Ramirez
and Selin, 2014). ‘Plausibility’ has emerged
as a primary operating assumption, even a
criterion for excellence, within English-
speaking scenario practice (especially
within the community of ‘scenario
planners’).
Here is a partial inventory of the
evidence:
• ‘To be effective, scenarios must be
plausible, consistent and offer insights
into the future. … Plausibility: A
scenario must be plausible. This means
that it must fall within the limits of
what might conceivably
happen.’ (FORLEARN, 2005)
• From ThinkingAbout the Future:
Guidelines for Strategic Foresight,
‘plausible futures: reasonable
outcomes, with a discernible pathway
from the present to the future. For
example, discovering extra-terrestrial
life within the next decade is possible,
but not plausible.’ (Bishop and Hines,
2006, p128)
• From The Scenario Planning Handbook:
‘scenarios must meet the following
criteria: they must be plausible – that
is, they must fall within the limits of
what might reasonably be expected to
happen.’ (Ralston and Wilson, 2006, p
121)
• ‘Scenarios are possible future states of
the world that represent alternative
plausible conditions under different
assumptions.’ (Mahmoud et al., 2009,
p798)
Let me emphasise the first two of these
quotes because they clarify the matter by
offering a definition and an example of
plausibility. FOR-LEARN suggests that a
plausible scenario ‘must fall within the
limits of what might conceivably happen.’
The authors of ThinkingAbout the Future
suggest that plausible futures offer
‘reasonable outcomes, with a discernible
pathway from the present to the future.’
They further clarify with an example:
‘discovering extra-terrestrial life within the
next decade is possible, but not plausible.’
The difficulty with both of these lies in
the subjective capability and state of
knowledge of the viewer: the more
knowledgeable the viewer on the topic of
the scenario, or its component details, the
more events and futures they are capable
of imagining as something that could
‘conceivably happen.’ In the example of
discovering extra-terrestrial life, the
scenario is possible, but perhaps of low
probability. But it is in fact plausible,
because discernible pathways exist not
only for the evolution of extra-terrestrial
life, but also for our potential discovery of
it (given the various robotic surveys of
other planets we have launched recently).
Defining ‘plausibility’ is
problematic. This limits its
usefulness as a criterion for excellence in
futures thinking, even assuming that it is
an appropriate criterion for excellence. So
let’s hit the dictionaries once again: what
is the technical definition of ‘plausible,’
and what is its etymology? The Merriam-
Webster Dictionary tells us that plausible
means:
superficially fair, reasonable, or
valuable but often specious <a plausible
pretext>; superficially pleasing or
persuasive <a swindler… , then a
quack, then smooth, plausible
gentleman — R. W. Emerson>;
appearing worthy of belief <the
argument was both powerful and
plausible>.
When consultants use the label
‘plausible scenarios’ it is code
for ‘Don’t give the client crazy
futures’.

3. T H E O R Y
4 APF Compass | October 2015
Embedded within the structure of this
word is the professional vulnerability that
all futures researchers face in practicing an
intellectual discipline for which there are
no future facts, in a world of decision-
makers hungry for an evidence base: how
to appear valuable when we are suspected
of purveying specious results and being
quacks.
My observations of how consultants use
the label ‘plausible scenarios’, or ‘plausible
futures’, suggest that it is actually code for
‘don’t give the clients crazy futures, or
they’ll reject them, reject us, and we won’t
get paid and will never work in this town
again’. How often in strategic foresight
projects do the end results offer truly
transformational futures that challenge
participants to consider the possibilities of
deep structural change? How often do
scenarios create ‘productive discomfort’ in
how people see the world (Ramirez and
Selin, 2014, p67)? Of worlds with entirely
different economic or political systems?
Of usefully crazy futures?
What are ‘futures’ – and why
and how do we think about
them?
While scenario thinking per
se originated in Herman Kahn’s policy
strategy concerns (Kahn, 1962), the origin
of futures thinking is rooted in the image
of the future, and concerns of futurist Fred
Polak for the vitality of human culture and
civilizations (Polak, 1961). We shouldn’t
limit the ‘futures’ in ‘crazy futures’ to
strategic scenarios alone. Such purpose-
designed images of the future compete for
mental and emotional space with a nearly
endless supply of images of the future
generated across human activity.
Imagining long-range futures is a talent
unique to our species – so what images do
we create, how do we create them, and
what are they for?
Futures studies as an intellectual
endeavour includes the inventory and
content analysis of existing images of the
future. Humans express imagined futures
in all media, as all variety of cultural
constructs, and in varying scales of
personal and civilizational usefulness.
Images of the future in advertisements,
counselling programs, and in daydreams
target personal behaviour by expressing
self-fulfilling or self-defeating prophecies.
In the same way, community,
organizational, and political futures
attempt to inspire group action through
both cautionary tales (‘doom and gloom’;
nightmare futures), and through
aspirational tomorrows (visions). Images
of the future are embedded in all political
discourses and ideologies, whether they
warn of imminent national collapse at the
hands of the opposition (nightmare
futures), call for ‘Holding the course!
Steady on!’ (present-trends-extended
futures), or depict a happy era to come
(Conservatives: A return to the Golden
Age! Liberals: An All-New Brighter
Tomorrow!). At the largest scale, Polak’s
call for aspirational, transformative images
of the future was meant to catalyse
civilization-level vitality.
But categorizing any
specific image of the future as a
nightmare or a vision is entirely subjective.
Furthermore, it is a subjective judgment
that can generate tragedies. Conflicts arise
when people fear that a nightmare future
is the hidden goal of others around them.
And any extreme of difference is labelled
‘crazy,’ whether it is extremely good,
extremely bad, or extremely different.
We could probably conceptualize a
craziness scale for futures, anchored at
sanity/normality/plausibility on the one
end, and ‘completely bug@%$@ crazy’ at
the other extreme. It might be
operationalized as the percentage of any
given population that perceives a specific
image of the future as offensively, scarily
transgressive and transformative beyond
all bounds of reason and decency. If
nobody feels the future is beyond all
bounds, it’s normal and plausible as normal
can be. If 50% of the people feel it’s
beyond all bounds of reason and decency,
and the other 50% do not, then it’s only
moderately crazy. And so on.
Image: Wendy Schultz, 2014.

4. T H E O R Y
APF Compass | October 2015 5
Scenario planners and
scenario builders are not alone in devising
images of the future. Artists, advertisers,
novelists, screenwriters, animators,
sculptors, analysts, and leaders all generate
stories, images, and artefacts expressing
different future outcomes and
environments. So do prophets, astrologers,
tea-leaf readers, shamans, and particularly
skilled remote viewers. By extension, if
rigorous but intuitive tools such as guided
visualization earn scepticism, artistic
inspiration may as well – and astrologers,
shamans, and remote viewers earn outright
derision.
Why shouldn’t they? Why shouldn’t we
just discard images of the future generated
by ‘crazy’ methods such as astrological
computations and shamanic trances and
remote viewing? To answer that we must
return to the conceptual foundations and
core assumptions of futures studies as a
field of research, which include three basic
axioms:
1. There is not one single future, but
multiple alternative futures;
2. People’s beliefs about the future, and
their images of the future, affect their
decisions and actions, which in turn
create the futures as an emergent
property of aggregated interconnected
actions;
3. Because any given lived future at any
given moment is an emergent property
of a complex system that frequently
exhibits chaotic behaviour, it is not
possible to ‘predict’ human futures.
It follows from these axioms that it is
not important which image of the future is
correct, or best supported by empirically
credible data, or most plausible. The most
important future is the future the greatest
number of people believe the most: it is
the future on which they are basing their
decisions and actions. If people read
astrological forecasts or tea leaves or goat
entrails, and then act on those images of
the future, then those images of the future
are important for us as futures researchers
to consider. The craziest methods can
generate compelling futures, and crazy or
not, compelling futures are the futures
that should concern us the most.
Given that societies and cultures
contain multiple sources of novel ideas
and crazy futures, critical analysis of
existing images of the future should be a
cornerstone of comprehensive futures
research. When researchers move beyond
content analysis of existing images of the
future to creating purpose-built images of
the future for exploratory, critical, or
strategic purposes, then it may be useful to
generate crazy futures by design to mimic
their emergence across societies and
cultures.
Why are crazy futures the
most useful?
Consideration of the basic axioms of
futures studies points directly to why
crazy futures are useful: we are embedded
in—and are ourselves—complex systems
flirting daily with chaos. In describing the
‘edge of chaos’ (Langton, 1990), Chris
Langton’s egg diagram maps the transition
boundaries between periodic, chaotic, and
complex states. This diagram categorizes
four types of systems. There are fixed
systems, existing in a state of maximum
thermodynamic equilibrium, meaning
maximum entropy (or death). There are
periodic systems, which are ordered but
not adaptive. There are chaotic systems,
characterized by sensitive dependence on
initial conditions, and non-linear
determinism. Finally, there are complex
systems that are self-organizing, self-
directing, self-repairing, and adaptive.
The self-directing and adaptive
characteristics of complex systems result
in evolutionary change over time,
We all agree that your
theory is crazy, but is it
crazy enough?
Niels Bohr
Transition boundaries between periodic, chaotic and complex states. Source: Chris Langton
We are embedded in complex
systems flirting daily with chaos

5. T H E O R Y
6 APF Compass | October 2015
producing in turn novel emergent
properties. They generate surprises. If
sentient, they undoubtedly surprise
themselves. Emergent properties are ‘out
of the ordinary’, if by ordinary we mean
the previous patterns of ordered system
behaviour. So any complex adaptive
system (and all human systems—whether
single individuals or collections as
organizations, or communities, or nation-
states—are complex adaptive/evolving
systems) will at some point or another
generate ‘crazy states’.
It becomes even more likely
that these systems will exhibit ‘crazy’, that
is, ‘out of the ordinary’, behaviour if they
are stressed by larger energy or
information flows. One response to stress
in a complex system is a transition into
chaotic behaviour. This phase change also
creates the potential for novel and unusual
behaviour outside the
ordinary.
Langton’s diagram
summarizes system
characteristics as
observed externalities.
In contrast, Snowden’s
Cynefin Framework
offers the internal view,
as the observing
consciousness attempts
to make sense of
dynamic systems and
events in transition.
“Cynefin … contrasts
how things are, with
how we know them,
with how we perceive
them” (Snowden, 2013). Cynefin organizes
both the systems, and the knowledge
about those systems, in order to suggest
‘best fit’ paths for actors navigating the
dynamics of those systems and events.
One of the best fit paths suggests a
deliberate brief dip into chaos precisely to
generate radical innovation, or potential
‘crazy futures.’
So in the end, a focus on ‘crazy futures’
may be the most adaptive strategy we can
encourage people to adopt, and a focus on
‘plausibility’ the most maladaptive. Is your
future crazy enough to help you, your
organization, your community evolve?
Better that we rehearse the full range of
surprises that may await us across our
futures, than be ill-prepared and unable to
adapt. Emergence and evolution are
preferable to equilibrium.
Coda
In order to thrive in whatever
futures we pass through, it helps to
rehearse what our values, assumptions,
decisions and actions—our very sense of
self—might be in those futures. Authentic
rehearsal inevitably requires that at some
level we choose to believe not only what is
plausible, and not just what is probable or
possible, but that we stretch our values,
assumptions, and sense of self to believe
and rehearse for the impossible as well.
So call me crazy. ◀︎
You have to go on and be
crazy. Craziness is like
heaven.
Jimi Hendrix
Alice laughed. ‘There's no
use trying,’ she said. ‘One
can't believe impossible
things.’
‘I dare say you haven't had
much practice,’ said the
queen. ‘When I was your
age, I always did it for half
an hour a day. Why,
sometimes I've believed as
many as six impossible
things before breakfast.’
Lewis Carroll / Charles
Dodgson, Alice in
Wonderland
Cynefin Framework, David J. Snowden, Cognitive Edge
Note
This article is an update of an essay originally written
for the Mutual Learning Workshop on Crazy Futures,
27 June – 1 July 2011. This activity of The Bucharest
Dialogues was sponsored by UEFISCSU, the Romanian
Executive Agency for Higher Education and Research
Funding, and their support is gratefully
acknowledged.

6. T H E O R Y
APF Compass | October 2015 7
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Dr. Wendy Schultz is Director of
Infinite Futures, a futures
consultancy based in Oxford,
England. She is an APF member, and
a Fellow of the World Futures
Studies Federation.