Transforming the future of minerals exploration

AusIMM New Zealand Branch Annual Conference 2016

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Transforming the future of minerals exploration

J.P. Sykes1,2, A. Trench3,4,5, T.C. McCuaig6,7, T. Craske8, J. Dwyer9, N. Subramaniam10,11, S.T.M. Sullivan12,13 and W. Turner14

1 MAusIMM, Centre for Exploration Targeting, School of Earth & Environment, The University of Western Australia, WA 6009, Australia, [email protected]

2 Greenfields Research Ltd, Harrogate, HG3 3HA, United Kingdom 3 FAusIMM, Business School, The University of Western Australia, WA 6009, Australia,

[email protected] 4 Centre for Exploration Targeting, School of Earth & Environment, The University of

Western Australia, WA 6009, Australia 5 CRU Group, London, WC2A 1QS, United Kingdom

6 MAusIMM, BHP Billiton, Perth, WA 6000, Australia 7 Centre for Exploration Targeting, School of Earth & Environment, The University of

Western Australia, WA 6009, Australia, [email protected] 8 Thinkercafe, Geowisdom Pty Ltd., Applecross, WA 6153, Australia,

[email protected] 9 HiSeis Pty Ltd., WA 6102, Australia, [email protected]

10 Transmin Pty Ltd., WA 6090, Australia, [email protected] 11 Business School, The University of Western Australia, WA 6009, Australia

12 School of Plant Biology, The University of Western Australia, WA 6009, Australia, [email protected]

13 Science Directorate, Botanic Gardens and Parks Authority, WA 6005, Australia 14 Independent Geological Consultant, Bellevue, WA 6050, Australia,

[email protected]

Abstract

The future of minerals exploration remains uncertain as geological, economic, environmental and socio-political issues impact upon the funding and land access required for exploration. Technology, innovation and improved skills and education are often cited as general methods for resolving geological and even economic difficulties in exploration, however, this leaves critical environmental and socio-political issues unresolved. A recent scenario planning workshop, via an emergent and collective decision, investigated the interaction of technology, skills and education and the environmental and socio-political issues prevailing on explorers. The scenarios workshop used the Oxford Scenario Planning Approach and started out with purely strategic intentions. The initial findings suggested that technology and education played a key role in societal development overall and therefore the exploration industry could use these to enhance its reputation, and in turn overall access to search space. However, the systemic reputational vulnerability of the mining industry, where one incident by an industry party beyond the actors control, can damage the reputation of everyone in the industry, means this ‘reputation-based’ strategy is very difficult to pursue individually, and thus collective action is required. With this realisation, the workshop moved into a transformative scenarios approach, more focused on galvanising social action towards a better future. As such two future scenarios were envisioned – a negative ‘Two Peoples’ scenario, where the world is trapped in cycle of revolution caused by inequity between the ‘haves’ and ‘have not’s’; and a positive ‘iWorld’ scenario, which breaks the cycle creating a prosperous yet more equitable society. Clearly, the collective aim of the mining industry should be to move towards the iWorld scenario. To transition into this future, explorers must not only become more technologically sophisticated and innovative, but also more collaborative with both local communities, and national and supranational governments. This concept is described as ‘big exploration’ where the importance of ‘boots on the ground’ is not just geological, but socio-political. Whether companies, professionals, and the professional societies involved in exploration are ready for this transition remains an unanswered question.

Keywords: Transformation, scenarios, technology, education, society, future, mining, exploration.


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Introduction

This paper considers how technology and education (including skills training) can both enable and disable industry reputation and open-up or limit tacit access to exploration projects and opportunities – the ‘social licence to operate’, which currently controls the industry’s access to new, high quality projects (McCuaig et al., 2014; Sykes and Trench, 2014, 2016; Trench, 2014; Trench and Sykes, 2016a).

The paper is based on a scenarios workshop on the “Future of Minerals Exploration” run by the Centre for Exploration Targeting, with a team of around twenty participants from industry and academia gathering to build and analyse scenarios about the future of minerals exploration. The participants were free to explore whatever issues they thought important and, perhaps inevitably in a group dominated by scientists and engineers, futuristic technology quickly arose: nano-technology, artificial intelligence, automation, robotics and drones were all discussed. It was clear the group was familiar with technology and saw this as a key part of the future of minerals exploration (and mining). However, one of the purposes of scenario planning is to re-consider all the issues associated with an issue in a holistic manner. This allows participants to re-balance or re-frame (Ramirez and Wilkinson, 2016) the relative weightings of the various different factors in the situation, so that all are considered commensurate with their importance, rather than based on the team’s knowledge or the available data. In this case it became apparent that technology in mining and exploration could not be discussed, without due consideration of education and skills within the industry, and then the role of technology, education and skills within society.

Minority views and confused perceptions

Technology in the mining industry is often discussed within the context of the potential winners and losers within mining: Which technologies will be the next big thing? Which companies will be the winning innovators? Who will be disrupted? Which professions will disappear? The same worries proliferate within wider society and, as driver of a substantial amount of technological development and adoption, the mining industry also contributes to this kind of technological disquiet. A similar situation prevails with industry attitudes to education and skills training: Do we have the right education and skills? Do schools and universities teach the right skills? Are we prepared for the coming technology change? Again, these are feelings felt within wider society. As the custodian of an important share of Australia’s scientists and engineers, the mining industry is also a source of some of the disquiet over our intellectual preparedness for the future. Are the country’s scientists and engineers ready to take on the future challenges, not only within the mining industry, but also in wider society? The mining industry will be affected by societal change as much as any other part of society.

No discussion about education in mining can ignore the wider public’s understanding (or education) about the industry. Of particular pertinence is the apparent lack of understanding by the populace of the importance of mining, in that the sector provides the raw materials for most of the goods used every day. For example, a 2012 study by Hywel Jones and Maria Hanson found that over half of the respondents in a survey of (British) students did not know which elements were in their mobile phones. Despite this type of poor understanding, a 2014 study by CSIRO (Moffat et al., 2014) found that support for mining in Australia was broadly positive; though admittedly there were clearly some unhappy minorities (Fig. 1). The scenarios team summarised this situation as ‘confused perceptions’.


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Figure 1. Acceptance of mining in Australia based on a survey of 5,121 people by Moffat et al. (2014). Australia

is broadly supportive of the mining industry, though there is still a very unhappy minority. This result perhaps contrasts with internal mining industry perceptions that the general populace does not support the mining

industry, or that it does not understand the importance of the industry.

Moffat et al. (2014) also highlighted the linked challenges that the mining industry faces in winning societal approval – the ‘social license to operate’ – which is made up of a collective cost-benefit analysis of the economic, environmental and social impact of mining. When considered, the challenge of getting a mass of different people to informally assess the benefits and costs of a variety of complex issues relating to mining, it is easy to see how the ‘confused perceptions’ arise.

Broken promises

Some of the responsibility falls onto the mining industry for both the minority view and the confused perceptions, at least at a collective level. Reputation is metaphorically akin to glass – in that it takes craft and energy to build, but a moment’s mistake to shatter. In addition, the whole industry suffers an impact upon its reputation and social licence to operate, even if not all individuals and companies were involved in the reputation-damaging action. In the modern mining industry no one is ignoring the potential health, safety, environmental, and social risks associated with mining (Trench, 2014; Trench and Sykes, 2016b); these issues remain ever-present, and increasingly, at the core of the industry. However, despite our technological sophistication and higher levels of skills and education, terrible incidents still occur, such as at Samarco (Vale and BHP Billiton, 2015). Similarly, anyone who has visited mining dependent developing countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo will agree that the industry still does not re-distribute economic benefits equitably, even if it is not entirely within the industry’s control. The scenarios team characterised these as ‘broken promises’ – which damaged the industry’s collective reputation, reduced trust, revoked the social license and ultimately limited access to new prospects and opportunities for the whole industry.

The emergent aim of the scenarios workshop

The workshop tried to link together the confused perceptions and broken promises with technology, skills and education. The insight that arose was that mining and exploration technology, education and skills can not only be a force for uncertainty in wider society, but


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also as a force for good within society. They could be used as a way of building trust, reputation, support and ultimately ‘social license’. This therefore became the aim of the workshop – to explore how education and technology from within the mining industry could be used to minimise the social and environmental footprint of the industry and thus when effectively communicated, build trust within society and develop a stronger social license. The re-balancing or re-framing (Ramirez and Wilkinson, 2016) approach of scenarios strategising surfaces the underlying, and thus most interesting (Ramirez et al., 2015), problems for discussion. In this workshop the scenarios team probably found the biggest, most complicated problem the mining industry faces – the amorphous ‘social licence to operate’.

Methodology

Scenarios can be used for multiple purposes (Ramirez, 2008). Most commonly scenarios are discussed within the context of strategic planning – generating multiple, plausible, or probabilistic scenarios (Ramirez and Selin, 2014) for how the future could develop and plan appropriately (van der Heijden, 2005; Ramirez and van der Heijden, 2007; Ramirez and Wilkinson, 2016).

Another school of scenario planners see scenarios as a tool for social transformation – for moving complex situations forward by developing broad support for a particular action. Adam Kahane (2010a, 2012a,b) is the leader in this field. Kahane’s formative experiences were with the now-famous apartheid era Mont Fleur scenarios (Kahane, 2010b) for the future of South Africa post-apartheid, envisioning three futures for the country to avoid (Ostrich, Lame Duck and Icarus) and one desired future (Flight of the Flamingos). From this transformative scenarios were born (Kahane, 2012a,b). Another scenario planner, Clem Sunter, also became involved in these transformative scenario planning exercises in South Africa – this time however the scenarios started out as strategic scenarios, even though they evolved into a more transformative role eventually. Clem Sunter was an executive at Anglo American in the 1980s, then a part of the white elite, and was thus strategically concerned about impending political change in the country. As part of his strategic planning efforts, he developed two scenarios for the post-apartheid future of South Africa – known as the ‘High Road’ and the ‘Low Road’ (Ilbury and Sunter, 2011; Sunter, 2016). As the names suggest, the former involved a focus on reconciliation and movement forward united as a country towards a fair and prosperous future. The latter envisioned a future characterised by revenge, feuding, and a battle over a shrinking pie, leaving some better off temporarily, but all worse off in the long run. The scenarios were presented to both F.W. de Clerk and Nelson Mandela before the end of apartheid, and became part of the national conversation about how the nation should conduct itself in the future. These scenarios were thought to have had some influence on the chosen option of ‘truth and reconciliation’ by the country’s new leaders – a ‘high road’ approach.

Instead of generating equally plausible futures as with strategic scenario planning; transformative scenario planning envisages explicitly good and bad futures, with the aim of galvanising collaboration in moving towards the ‘good’ future or ‘high road’. This is something akin to the intervention required in the Prisoners Dilemma (Freedman, 2015). Without the ability to communicate the two prisoners will take the ‘low road’, blaming each other in the hope to save themselves – inevitably they both end up worse off. If however, they can communicate, trust each other, and work together, they both end up better off – the ‘high road’.


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The “Future of Minerals Exploration” scenarios programme

This paper covers the results of Stage 3 (of 4) of the Centre for Exploration Targeting “Future of Minerals Exploration” scenarios programme. Like the other stages of the programme the aim of the Stage 3 scenarios workshop was also strategic, with the aim of developing plausible futures and making high-level strategic exploration targeting decisions based upon them. However, like Clem Sunter’s High Road-Low Road scenarios, the emergent process of the workshop moved from strategic scenario planning to transformative scenario planning, as the workshop participants began to realise that collaborative efforts were required to bring about a positive future for the exploration industry.

The other scenarios generated in Stage 1 (Trench and Sykes, 2015a,b,c,d, 2016b; Sykes and Trench, 2016) and Stage 2 (Trench and Sykes, 2016a) of the scenarios programme also had a dichotomic battle between cyclical and structural forces – something that characterised this Stage 3 workshop as well. In the Stage 1 scenarios there was a battle between extracting rents from existing assets during the ups and downs of the mining industry cycle, as opposed to trying to break the cycle by discovering new world class mines and developing new mining innovations, which could disrupt the industry. Four scenarios were generated, in some the cycle was broken and structural changes were embraced, in others this was not the case. The Stage 2 scenarios looked at the energy transition, with one scenario focusing on the cycles of our ‘old’ fossil fuel economy, versus an inevitable transition to new forms of energy, where the uncertainties were both when the transition would occur and what the world would look like post-energy transition.

The Stage 3 scenarios described in this paper also looked at cyclical and structural factors, but this time instead of trying to assess strategically how structural changes may occur, and what the implications may be, the focus was on making the change – exploring what would happen if we do not break the cycle and what happens if we do. The cycle in this case is the cycles of inequality in societies, and frequent revolutions of the masses against the elites, be it revolution of the bloody or peaceful sort, where the mining companies are part of the elite and thus benefit or suffer in line with the political winds of the time (Trench and Sykes, 2016c; Fig. 2).

The next section describes the scenarios and is then followed by a discussion of the strategic implications of the scenarios, and in particular the actions that need to be taken by explorers to position themselves well in both scenarios, but also, more importantly, to start moving the industry towards the more positive scenario of the two.


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Figure 2. The systemic interaction of the two scenarios described in this paper (the Stage 3 scenarios).

The Stage 3 scenarios

A Tale of Two Peoples: Trapped in a cycle

“A Tale of Two Peoples begins with Thomas Pikkety’s (2014) observation of increasing inequality both within societies and between societies. As professionals in the mining industry we are part of the well-paid, wealthy elite, still generally in the developed nations (though admittedly for many in Australia’s mining industry it may not feel like you are part of the ‘wealthy elite’ at the moment1).

In this scenario, the ‘elites’ of this society who manage the commercial and political institutions are also able to control the mining industry to gain access to large volumes of low cost commodities for a wide range of low cost commercial goods. Mining in this manner however can come at a cost to local people and environments, with the economic externalities sufficiently detached from the elites that they do not suffer the consequences of local minerals extraction. Non-scientists amongst the elites do not even know where the metals and minerals in their consumer goods come from (Jones and Hanson, 2012). Mining occurs in the places that the elites in society value the least, and does not occur in those places that the elites value the most, regardless of whether they live there or not – a kind of environmental inequity, where only the rich can afford a clean environment (perhaps exemplified by the recent stalling of coal mine projects in the wealthy areas of Margaret River (ABC News, 2012) and the Hunter Valley (ABC News, 2016)).

Over time this leads to greater division in society, somewhat akin to the ‘capital city’ and districts of the Hunger Games (Collins, 2010), with a wealthy, safe, technologically sophisticated urban elite, in contrast to deprived outer regions with a focus on mining and other primary industries. Ever-larger mega-mining companies and operations have grown to feed the desires of the urban elites. Mining technology is focused on incremental improvements to facilitate greater scale. The workforce is divided sharply between fly-in fly-out, often ex-pat professionals and local manual workers (another potential problem indicated by Moffatt et al., 2014). The largest mines are focused on the poorest areas, and


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cause ever-more devastation, whilst the mining companies are administered from the cities by the elite.

Inevitably, such a situation leads to revolution. Countries fall apart as the poorer districts secede and then nationalise their mining industries. The mega-mining corporations collapse. However, with a lack of technological sophistication the regions are forced to mine using primitive methods, with old mines sites overrun by artisanal miners. The whole of society is worse off as a result. Scenes reminiscent of post-colonial mining in Africa are once again common. As technology and education is gradually re-developed however, a new elite develops, which is once again able to globalise, technologically advance and scale up the mining industry for its own economic good. Society begins to divide again…”

iWorld: Breaking the cycle

“The iWorld scenario, drawing influence from the eponymous company, breaks the cycle of revolution described in the ‘Two Peoples’ scenario.

In a world where open source technologies, such as Wikipedia, Linux and even Wikileaks, along with social media are democratising information, society is able to move forward as a collective whole. This techno-driven move towards utopia is optimised by giant, multi-national collaborative research projects, such as the Large Hadron Collider, that reflect an exploration-orientated society – focused on what is not known (Kahane, 2012a), rather than an extraction orientated society – focused on what is known. Global society builds on institutions such as the United Nations, to spread education and technological development across the world. An increasingly well-educated and wealthy society creates a positive feedback of technological innovation, wealth creation and distribution. Society becomes wealthier, fairer and more sophisticated as one. Genuine shared value between business and the populace is created (Porter and Kramer, 2011).

The mining industry benefits from this technological sophistication with the global intellect helping the industry simultaneously become safer, reduce its socio-economic and environmental footprint, and increase its volume of economic output. The mining industry is recognised as a key part of the global economy, helping the flow of raw materials around the world, whilst remaining a steward of those local areas in which it operates. Mining companies are ‘glocal’. This link between local operations and international ambitions makes mining companies a key part of the socio-economic ladder, giving everyone the opportunity to succeed.

Such a global society is then able to take on endeavours of a colossal scale, with space exploration and colonization a potential reality. This could be seen as a more ‘Star Trek’ like scenario – with a united world ‘boldly going where no one has gone before’.”

Discussion

Scenario planner and business strategist, Kees van der Heijden (2005) classifies corporate strategy into three competing paradigms: rationalist, evolutionary and processual. Rationalism is the traditional domain of strategy with predictable environments, where a ‘best’ strategic solution can be determined and then enacted in a so-called ‘do loop’, thus the authors of this paper prefer to think of this as ‘deterministic’ strategy. The scenario planning exercises described in this paper were undertaken precisely because, in the view of the researchers, the


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future of minerals exploration cannot be ‘determined’ and thus ‘deterministic strategy’ will not work.

More recently, as knowledge about the true complexity of business environments increased, and perhaps also as strategists moved out of the relatively predictable and dominant American corporate sector of the mid-twentieth century, evolutionary strategy became more influential. Evolutionary strategy posits that the world is so complicated and unpredictable that a winning strategy can only be realised in retrospect, thus organisations must constantly react to unpredicted events to survive.

A criticism of evolutionary strategy is that it leaves individuals and organisations somewhat strategically impotent. This is most likely not the case, companies and even individuals have some ability to shape the future, even if it is generally uncertain. Van der Heijden (2005) therefore suggests a third paradigm of processual strategy which combines elements of both rationalist/deterministic strategy and evolutionary strategy. It is dubbed processual, because a key component of the approach is developing processes within organisations which enable flexibility and adaptation, thus the authors prefer to think of this as ‘adaptive strategy’. Organisations that adopt adaptive strategy aim to take control of the issues prevailing on them from the outside world which reduce their strategic space (e.g. increasing health and safety, environmental and socio-political issues) and start to turn these problems into new opportunities – new strategic space which only you can enter (Ramirez and van der Heijden, 2007). Scenario planning plays a key role in the processual or adaptive strategic paradigm (Van der Heijden, 2005). When a collective effort is required to successfully implement a processual strategy, then the situation begins to drift towards a ‘Prisoners Dilemma’ type problem, and potentially a situation where transformative scenario planning becomes more useful.

A mining industry example of successful processual strategy may already exist in a cluster of exploration companies who have managed to turn the increasing requirements of health and safety to their advantage. By developing sophisticated safety systems, equivalent to those run by major mining companies, some junior minerals explorers have become the preferred partners of major mining companies in exploration joint venturing. Such a reputation allows these junior exploration companies access to funds and prospects unavailable to their competitors. Potentially an equivalent strategic approach may exist for the apparently access-restricting environmental, sustainability and socio-political issues, which are currently affecting the exploration industry – this became the key discussion point of the scenarios described in this paper.

Adapting to the future with processual exploration strategy

Both of the scenarios developed in stage three and presented in this paper are somewhat fantastical.2 The most realistic scenario is that elements of these scenarios will play out at a local level, at different times and places in the future – sometimes it will feel like you, or your company, are in the ‘Two Peoples’ scenario, and sometimes in the ‘iWorld’ scenario. Large companies may even feel that they are in both in different places at the same time.

The two scenarios generated suggest a number of implications for exploration teams. Firstly, on a strategic level, companies and explorers, must realise locally when they are in the ‘Two Peoples’ scenario. If they are in this scenario and not heavily committed to the area that they are working in, then they need to remove themselves from it. If they are committed to the area then they need to change the scenario (into the iWorld scenario), where technology and


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education may be an enabler of this change. From an investment appraisal perspective, areas that are in an ‘iWorld’ scenario are potentially better investments. As with the other scenario sets in Stages 1 and 2, in the scenario set described here, companies (and individuals) have to be able to survive in all scenarios. As such strategies must be robust to all scenarios, even if some scenarios are more preferable to others.

Both scenarios require work forces that are competent at collaboration – at all levels, perhaps best described as a ‘zipper’ approach to collaboration where connections are effective at all levels of the organisational hierarchy (Fig. 3). In the ‘Two Peoples’ scenario this is in genuinely working with people on the ground, who are the key to your land access and local acceptance, thereby gaining social license to operate. In the ‘iWorld’ scenario collaboration is at a grander scale with multinational organisations and governments on collective projects. Finally, as with all futures, both scenarios require a certain amount of technological savvy. In the ‘iWorld’ scenario this is grand-scale technology and sweeping change, which must be kept up with and embraced. It is also likely that technology will play a crucial role in enabling the communication required for such large-scale collaborative projects. In the ‘Two Peoples’ scenario, a world with little effective technology transfer and plagued by distrust, it is more of ‘boot-strapping’ and local re-invention of technology, which is likely to occur – how do you make things work where you are, with what you have locally?

Figure 3. The ‘zipper’ analogy of collaboration where connections are effective

at all levels of the organisational hierarchy.

The capabilities described in the previous paragraphs, with the exploration industry as the vanguard of the mining industry, can be described as a movement towards ‘big exploration’ and away from ‘small exploration’ (Trench, 2016). ‘Small exploration’ focuses only on finding new deposits and resources, and is what the industry does now. The larger concept of ‘big exploration’ also draws value from explorers who are typically the first contact with local communities and governments, and as a technology and innovation hothouse. This re-definition of exploration’s role in the supply chain is an important step in creating ‘shared value’ between business and society (Porter and Kramer, 2011).


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Changing the future with transformative exploration strategy

The above description is an example of ‘adaptive’ strategy, however, still somewhat individualistic in its approach. In theory it could allow a successful exploration company to open up new strategic search space for itself – based on a strong socio-political and environmental reputation. However, as discussed in the introduction, the whole industry suffers reputational damage when a negative incident occurs, regardless of whether an individual or company was involved in the incident, or whether it had better ‘processes’ or not. This presents a ‘Prisoners’ Dilemma’ type situation and thus the type of transformational scenario-based strategy described in this paper maybe required (Kahane, 2012a,b).

Thus, at a global level, the mining industry probably needs to work harder at moving the world towards an ‘iWorld’ scenario. Potentially this could be done by encouraging a better educated and technologically sophisticated society, which is both able to conduct mining in a more societally acceptable way, and appreciates the value of mining as a contributor to material society. Programmes such as Earth Science Western Australia (ESWA, 2016) and the positive use of social media (Mullard, 2010) would be important in bringing about this scenario. The insight that technology and innovation, as used in the iWorld scenarios, is in itself a key part of building industry reputation and establishing social licence only reinforces the idea of ‘big exploration’ or perhaps ‘even bigger exploration’. Such an effort therefore requires explorers to be able to clearly explain what they are doing and justify their societal value. In the future, it may be that the importance of getting ‘boots on the ground’ is not just geological but socio-political.

Final thought

The implication of the scenario set described in this paper is that as exploration professionals we not only need to be more technologically sophisticated, something we all realise, but that we must also be more socially-well attuned and effective communicators, with a genuine understanding of our place in society. It is a movement from corporate social responsibility (CSR) to ‘creating shared value’ (CSV) as advocated by leading management theorists Michael Porter and Mark Kramer (2011). Creating shared value by ‘big exploration’ could open up access to new opportunities and search space (or at very least protection from shrinking opportunities and search space).

Currently as exploration professionals, mainly with science and engineering backgrounds, we are probably not fully prepared for this. This raises the question of whether we should we be working with new types of professionals, better enabled to deal with societal engagement issues, or should we be better educating our science and engineering professionals to deal with this? Individuals, companies and professional associations, such as the AusIMM, are all responsible in making this choice.

Footnotes

1 It is sobering to realise that even an unemployed exploration geologist, living solely on ‘Newstart Allowance’ (approx. $13,700/year), with no savings or previous wealth to consume, ranks amongst the richest 20% of people globally, even when controlling for cost of living. An exploration geologist earning $100,000/year is in the global 1%, whilst a junior explorer CEO on $250,000 is in the global 0.1%. Figures from Giving What We Can (2016).


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2 However, it is worth noting that just a week after this scenario planning exercise, the ‘Two Peoples’ scenario metaphorically played out during the Brexit Referendum in the UK, which was described by BBC Political Journalist, Nick Robinson (2016) “as close to a revolution as we’ve experienced in my lifetime”. The losing ‘Remain’ campaign (which benefits from the status quo) was typically supported by younger, wealthier, better educated and employed voters in the South or big cities, with support from establishment institutions such as universities. The winning ‘Leave’ campaign (those for who all change is seen as good) was typically supported by older, poorer, less educated and often unemployed voters in small towns and rural areas in the regions, with the exception of a few key establishment figures leading the campaign (Burn-Murdoch, 2016). Again, in a source unrelated to this scenarios workshop, a global version of the kind of social division and ultimately societal breakdown envisioned in the ‘Two Peoples’ scenario was also recently described in the Templeton Prize acceptance speech by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (2016).

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the efforts of the non-authoring scenario workshop team members (Aida Carneiro, Aaron Colleran, Liz Dallimore, Deon deBruin, Edoaldo Di Dio, Chris Gonzalez, Paul Hodkiewicz, Amy Imbergamo, Heta Lampinen, Sandra Occhipinti, Daniel Sully, Marcus Tomkinson, Will Turner, Stanislav Ulrich and Wenchao Wan); as well as the guest presenters for the scenarios workshop: David Groves, Martin Lynch, John Southalan and Jessica Volich. John Sykes would like to acknowledge the financial support of a Centre for Exploration Targeting ‘Ad hoc’ Scholarship and the support of the non-authoring members of his PhD supervisory team: Mark Jessell and Nicolas Thebaud.

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