RR600 - HSE futures scenario building: The future of health and safety in 2017
This report describes the processes, output, and participant evaluations of a scenario-building project completed for the Horizon Scanning function of the Health and Safety Executive. The scenario process incorporated critical issues of change derived from 28 interviews of HSE policy-makers and outside experts. Participants in a two-day scenario-building workshop chose drivers of change from among these issues, and created a framework defining four different possible futures for health and safety in the UK in 2017. The scenario process also incorporated the emerging changes identified by horizon scanning as 'hot topics' for health and safety. Results from the workshop were written up in two formats:
- 'research scenarios' that include supporting evidence such as reference to other government agency foresight research and scenarios; and
- 'workshop scenarios' that present the key ideas in a vivid but compressed format to generate group dialogue.
As a test of their efficacy in generating policy discussion and ideas, the scenarios were deployed twice:
- at the HSE Horizon Scanning Conference in November 2006 to spark wide-ranging discussion of possible challenges facing the HSE; and
- in a subsequent wind-tunnelling workshop to demonstrate how scenarios can be used to consider specific policies in the face of potential change.
This report and the work it describes were funded by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). Its contents, including any opinions and/or conclusions expressed, are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect HSE policy.
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