Health and safety in 2017 - HSE scenario building project

HSE commissioned Infinite Futures, working with SAMI Consulting and the Health and Safety Laboratory, to develop a set of scenarios for health and safety in 2017. The scenarios are intended to assist in HSE’s strategic planning.

Scenario building is an established technique widely used in industry, government and other areas. Scenarios are a useful way of bringing together the findings of horizon scanning and they can be used, for example to promote discussion of the future, to help anticipate future challenges and to test policy ideas. They represent alternative possible futures, but they are not predictions of the future.

The scenario process involved:

1. a series of interviews with key stakeholders to identify drivers of change;
2. a two-day workshop to prioritise the issues identified, select scenario axes and lay down the foundations for the scenarios;
3. a further workshop to explore wind-tunnelling techniques in order to demonstrate how scenarios can be used to test policy options.

The scenarios were unveiled at HSE's Horizon Scanning Conference, held in London in November 2006.

Further details of the process have been published in HSE’s Research Report series as RR600.

• HSE scenarios – Health and safety in 2017