The honest answer is: We don’t know. We can’t know. But we can simulate the entire process with the help of “What if…” scenarios—representations of possible developments. Even though these scenarios may never take place 100 percent as described, they are very valuable for companies, because they make it possible to prepare for what could happen. The world is becoming more fast-paced and complex, and companies are adapting to these changes. The future is resistant to linear “stay the course” thinking of every kind. We expect the future to include sudden breaks, which are now usually referred to as “disruptions.”

Many companies have their own corporate foresight departments to deal with such future-oriented issues. “Corporate foresight departments are valuable because they enable companies to prepare for future developments so that they won’t be caught off guard,” says Cornelia Daheim, the owner of Future Impacts, a consulting firm specializing in this area. But sometimes companies find it difficult to look ahead. As a consultant for foresight projects, Daheim believes her main task is “to question basic assumptions and think the unthinkable”—in different variants called “scenarios.” That’s a real challenge, she says: “Companies must gain the confidence to accept that what’s self-evident today may not be self-evident tomorrow.”

But this courage will be rewarded, because it widens our horizons and opens our eyes to previously unimagined risks and opportunities. Björn Theis, a Foresight Manager at Evonik, explains this by using mobility as an example. What would happen if autonomously driving vehicles were available in the future? This technology would enable businesses to make goods transportation more efficient. It could also reinforce the trend toward the shared use of private cars. Owners of autonomously driving electric cars could conveniently rent their vehicles to others via an app during periods when they didn’t need to drive.

In this scenario, the vehicles’ daily mileage and the wear and tear on their individual components would increase significantly. What's more, the increased number of different users would give rise to a greater interest in antibacterial and hygienic materials for car interiors—that’s how Theis continues to develop this scenario. The materials that would be used in the robo-taxis of the future would have to meet new requirements. For the Evonik Group as a specialty chemicals company that supplies products to the automotive supply industry, this kind of change in people’s mobility-related behavior means changes in the market, which it will have to identify.

A futurologist’s job is complex and multi-layered. Above all, it requires an ability to think in holistic terms. Theis studied ethnology before deciding to focus on researching the future. He joined Evonik in 2014 after working for a consulting firm in the area of corporate foresight and helping to set up the Futures Studies master’s degree program at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Evonik’s Corporate Foresight department combines social, technological, economic, ecological, and political trends and their possible effects into holistic future scenarios and uses these scenarios to identify opportunities and challenges for the Group. Digitalization is one of the themes it investigates. “This is an important trend that can’t be overlooked, and it will therefore have a strong impact on the future of the specialty chemicals sector,” says Theis. But what does this mean for Evonik in concrete terms? To find out, Foresight team members talk to experts who are investigating the various facets of the digital transformation. What will be the impact of artificial intelligence in the future? What kind of work will it do? And where will it be used? What roles will robotics, cryptocurrencies, and virtual reality play in the chemical industry? There’s no end of the questions for which Theis and his team are seeking possible answers.

The creation of plausible and consistent scenarios is a lengthy and laborious process. Countless factors have to be analyzed and connected with one another. And the foresight experts don’t base this work on gut feelings or rough estimates. Futurologists have spent decades developing methods for identifying and analyzing trends. “Trends can be documented empirically and reliably. I know how these things develop,” says Andreas Neef, a Managing Partner of the Z_Punkt consulting firm, where Björn Theis used to work. Some sequences of phenomena are regarded as mere “weak signals.” “These are isolated events that only permit us to make assumptions,” Neef explains. Only if several weak signals come together do they slowly develop into a trend.

But even if the researchers have identified such a trend, in many cases it’s not clear what it will lead to. “The basic danger is always that we may overestimate or underestimate certain developments,” says Neef. He uses the “Fridays for Future” school strikes as an example. Is this a flash in the pan, or will the demonstrations grow into a global movement? There are still many “critical uncertainties” interacting with one another.

One of the approaches used by futurologists to represent these interactions is the “explorative scenario method.” They create concrete and consistent representations of how the world could look in the future. “A scenario tries to align the many different developments with one another and also to include their interactions,” says Neef. “Because this attempt can never be completely successful, we always look at several scenarios that assign more or less weight to certain aspects whose occurrence we consider more or less probable.” The companies don’t simply select their favorites from the scenarios that are offered to them. “Instead, they use all of the scenarios to derive a strategy that is as robust as possible.” In this context, “robust” means that the company can make preparations for the future no matter which scenario prevails.

Foresight Manager Theis and his colleagues also use this method to help Evonik initiate innovations purposefully and at an early stage and to review and further develop long-term strategies. The Foresight team has developed five scenarios for the period between now and 2040. In the “Digital Champions” scenario (page 19), the major Internet companies use their know-how and their mindset to tap an increasing share of the added value of traditional industries. The “Sustainability Paradigm” scenario (page 15) describes how sustainability becomes the defining principle of economics. In the “Chinese Dream” scenario (page 18), China develops into a technological, economic, and political global force. In the “Turbulent Times” scenario (page 14), nationalism, fake news, and populist forces lead to ongoing deglobalization. The “Deceptive Calm” scenario (page 13) looks at the future from another perspective. In a system based on “business as usual,” problems accumulate and possibly lead to collapse.

These are five alternative courses of development that could become relevant to Evonik’s business operations in the medium to long term. In this context, Theis talks about “futures.” “We’re not making any forecasts, because there’s more than one possible future,” he says. The five scenarios worked out by ­Evonik’s researchers provide the company with a range of future options. Each variant is based on plausible and very well-founded assumptions and is logically deduced in four steps (see the graphic on the right).

The scenario project began with a question: What major forces will have an impact on specialty chemicals companies over the long term? “We’re looking at the major forces in the world,” says Theis. To this end, the team spent the past months interviewing over 100 in-house and external experts from the fields of science, politics, and business, assessing future studies, and conducting workshops. Their work resulted in a list of more than 100 factors that will have a profound impact on the specialty chemicals sector. They are subdivided under the headings Ecology, Politics, Society, Technology, and Economics.

In the second step, the experts reduced the multitude of influencing factors by selecting the key factors from the list according to certain specific criteria. These factors will have a substantial impact on the specialty chemicals sector. However, in many cases their future development is extremely uncertain, and they are also interacting with many other factors. The 25 factors that will have the strongest impact and form the basic framework of the scenarios were comprehensively analyzed and described. They include factors such as population growth, artificial intelligence, and climate change.

“In the third step, we asked how these key factors could plausibly develop in the future,” Theis explains. Between two and four future projections were derived for each key factor. In some cases, conflicting developments are possible. For example, it’s conceivable that biotechnology, including genetic engineering and artificial organisms, will receive worldwide acceptance—but it could also be banned.

Finally, in the fourth step the projections were connected with one another and assigned different weights. Within a network of stable and plausible relationships between the projections, the five computer-supported scenarios were created.

The scenario method was developed in the 1950s in several places including the RAND Corporation, a US think tank that was founded after World War II in order to advise the USA’s armed forces. Later on, companies including Motorola, General Electric, and UPS also assigned researchers the task of making it easier to calculate the future.

In the 1970s, corporate foresight created a genuine competitive advantage for the Shell Oil Company. The company’s managers had run several scenarios that played out what could happen if the supply of petroleum decreased. When OPEC imposed an embargo on oil deliveries to various industrialized nations in 1973, Shell was prepared and could react promptly. By the end of the oil crisis, Shell had become the world’s second-biggest and most profitable company in its sector. Back then, this success spurred other companies to also try their luck with the scenario method. However, many of these attempts were discontinued. It was evidently difficult to find the right path between methodological overengineering and superficiality.

Since that time, however, the methods have been considerably refined. René Rohrbeck, a corporate foresight expert who is a professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, deplores the fact that even today many companies are addressing the challenges of the future too hesitantly. “Even extremely convincing scenarios fail to reach their target if they are not channeled into strategic action,” he says.

Rohrbeck believes there are three main reasons why even well-meaning managers are not drawing the necessary conclusions. Many companies are overstretched by the rapid speed of change in markets and customer wishes. Because of the stringent demands of their daily work, managers don’t take the time to discuss future scenarios. In addition, companies often behave like supertankers: It takes them a long time to change course, especially if the change means calling currently profitable business areas into question without any guarantee of success.

At Evonik, decision-makers at all levels and in all the business areas of the Group were involved early on in the development of future scenarios. Chief Innovation Officer Dr. Ulrich Küsthardt is confident that the scenarios for Evonik’s long-term planning will create great added value. After all, they provide a basis for strategies that respond to the largest possible number of eventualities. “The ideal outcome would be a no-regrets decision that guarantees that you won’t do anything wrong,” says Küsthardt. However, even the very best scenarios won’t help the company make such a decision. “We don’t know the future; we only have well-founded ideas about what could happen,” says Küsthardt. “However, our goal is to develop optimally robust strategies for the innovation of tomorrow and beyond.”

On the way to this goal, the scenarios of the responsible strategy and innovation units are extensively discussed at Evonik. “We’re like chess players in this regard,” says Küsthardt. “We look at the various options and play them out.” For example, companies that want to be prepared for “Turbulent Times” must ask questions such as: Should we strengthen our regional and local units? If the world becomes less globally integrated, what will our future business relationships with customers, dealers, and suppliers look like? Do long-term contracts still have a future, or will contract terms become shorter? “It’s always a question of weighing up the issues. The discussion of the possibilities in itself already creates added value for the participants. And if concrete measures are then derived from the discussion, we’ve done a good job,” says Theis.

As a foresight manager at Evonik, he long ago stopped needing to persuade people that his approach was useful. “As soon as the managers realize how relevant the scenarios are for their work, they’re all fired up,” he says. Today the managers can’t wait to read the Corporate Foresight reports, says CIO Küsthardt, adding, “The managers have to make decisions and want to initiate activities. But they can only do that if they know what options they have.”