Delphi-based scenarios and risk management: A parallelism between paths destined to meet

The complexity that characterizes our current society expresses new, articulated and not always punctually classifiable problems. Traditional risk management processes are typically based on projections obtained from historical data and are not suitable to address new, unexpected or complex risks. A proactive and forward-looking approach to risk management should be followed, which can be defined as future risk management. In the case of novel and complex issues, in presence of high uncertainty and little experience (typical situations when data are scarce), multiple approaches and techniques might be used and, in particular, organized and combined in a mixed methods approach. The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive framework to manage effectively emerging and future risks by adopting a strategic foresight approach, which exploits a future scenario planning method and includes quali-quantitative tools. Our proposal consists of an integrated approach which, as in a protocol, indicates where and how to use each technique, in a consequential chain, in which the output of a step is the input of the following step. A four-year research project on future scenarios for contemporary families will serve as a representative example of this framework.