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Thinking and planning for the future is critical in a competitive business world. Scenarios are a common technique for investigating the future, but can be time consuming and challenging to develop, particularly when more than a single organisation is involved. An approach is presented here which shifts the focus of scenario building from the company level to the sector level, whereby a range of organisations engage collectively on a topic of mutual importance. A rapid technique was developed, with simple scenarios being constructed in 2–4h. This process was implemented in 13 multi-organisational workshops with participants from the construction and building industries, sectors which are traditionally short-term and reactive in their outlook. The resulting feedback, observations and experiences are discussed, together with examples of how the resultant scenarios have been applied. An example of causal map …