Addressing Risk Governance Deficits through Scenario Modeling Practices

In a world of inevitable regret, those governing risk must build practices that withstand the vicissitudes of actual events by demonstrating that reasonable efforts had been and will continue to be taken despite those harms. However, what is reasonable depends on one’s worldview, and so not giving different worldviews appropriate consideration leads to deficits in the quality of risk governance. This project developed foresight methods for eliciting, discovering, representing, and modeling scenarios which capture the counterfactual forests created by disparate worldviews. These methods employ structural differences between objective and subjective relations toward physical events to delineate the actual points of contention, while maintaining neutrality by remaining strictly grounded in the input of the stakeholders themselves. These methods respect how people frame causal information psychologically, avoiding biases known to affect political judgment. Overall, these methods serve as a reminder that how we ask designs how we think. ii