The Long Way Back to Ourselves

9.8

Three Scenarios

This episode opens with a composite scene in an oil company's planning department in 1973, where two prepared scenarios let it react to the shock faster than rivals, and concludes that a scenario is no prophecy but a tool for exposing thinking errors. Using The Limits to Growth, the 1972 report by Donella Meadows and colleagues, it shows how refuted detail forecasts overshadowed in public perception a basic structure confirmed remarkably often. It then develops three scenarios, fragmentation, integration, and meaninglessness, each with concrete early indicators. The unforeseen collapse of the Soviet Union is a reminder that single events are hardly predictable, while structural tensions are recognizable.