What increasingly affects all of us, whether professional planners or individuals preparing for a better future, is not the tangibles of life-bottom-line numbers, for instance-but the intangibles: our hopes and fears, our beliefs and dreams. Only stories-scenarios-and our ability to visualize different kinds of futures adequately capture these intangibles.

In The Art of the Long View, now for the first time in paperback and with the addition of an all-new User's Guide, Peter Schwartz outlines...