Building New Social Capital with Scenario Planning

Practitioners have observed that scenario planning contributes to building new social capital. In scenario planning terms, new social capital can provide access to new information, novel strategic options and unprecedented collaborative opportunities. However, there is no description or explanation in the literature as to how scenario planning can build new social capital. Reporting on research into the scenario planning process of two organizations, we find that scenario planning generates new social capital through learning with the conceptual future, which is a direct investment in building new shared systems of meaning – the cognitive dimension of social capital. This then enables the structural and relational dimensions of new social capital to emerge as by-products. The building of new social capital provides another purpose for scenario investments and another quality criterion by which to assess the value of these interventions. The insights of the research will be of interest to: scenario planning scholars; leaders interested in how to purposefully design and conduct scenario planning if a core intent is to build new social capital; and scholars interested in the cognitive dimension of social capital and its creation.