Dominance, stakeholders’ moves and leadership shifts: New directions for transforming futures

• A stakeholder perspective invites to investigate power relationships in futures thinking.
• Strong and weak dominance offer a conceptual framework to discuss power relationships in action-based scenarios.
• Stakeholders’ moves and dominances are a key issue of scenario transformation.
• Dominance transformations in action-based scenarios suggest challenging leadership issues.

Futures literature invites researchers to investigate stakeholders’ interests, actions and reactions, as well as to introduce an analysis of power and influence in scenario thinking. The purpose of this paper is to assess how the concept of dominance can help to improve scenario building and futures thinking as dominance transforms leadership within action processes. First, we examine power at work at different levels using concepts that relate to dominance and leadership shifts. Secondly, we discuss methodological proposals to implement the concepts of weak and strong dominance in action-based scenarios design and the implications of theses concepts for refining the approach of leadership in futures thinking. We conclude that paying attention to dominance transformations in scenarios is a promising direction to develop stakeholder and leadership analysis in scenario thinking. We suggest further research on the connection between history and futures thinking.