Winnemucca Futures Project #1

The Winnemucca Futures Project - winnemuccafutures.com

The Humboldt Development Authority (HDA) has partnered with other local organizations to initiate a county‐wide planning and engagement process to explore the future scenarios for the local area. The process will gather community input into a shared plan for local economic development and will identify key actions. HDA has contracted Innovative Leadership USA, Inc to assist with the design and implementation of this project. This company has extensive experience in regional and community planning efforts across North America and in rural settings.

What is Scenario Planning?
Scenario Planning is a method used to powerfully examine possible futures. This technique has traditionally been used in the corporate and military settings to generate one or more plausible scenarios about the future, using information about dimensions such as socio-political, environmental and economic trends.

Innovative Leadership has been working to transfer this powerful visioning and planning tool into the regional and rural community planning context. The strength of this approach is that it allows participants to explore a range of plausible futures and to assess their implications and consequences, better preparing them to adjust during time of change.

How Regional Scenario Planning works
The scenario planning process, as applied by Innovative Leadership, can be conducted in a one or two day format. The workshop involves a key group of stakeholders and community leaders. It builds from a solid factual basis and draws together the collective insights and intuitive intelligence of the stakeholders. This process is highly participatory and engaging.

The key elements include:
• Review of important global, national and local trends
• Identification of key local drivers shaping the future
• Clustering of critical sets of drivers
• Formulation of different plausible scenario 'spaces'
• Developing detailed narratives and descriptions about each
of the plausible scenarios
• Identifying preferred futures and critical actions steps




This process provides an opportunity for people to produce new insights about the future, and to identify key actions to move a region towards a preferred future.

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