A working paper published by the sustainability-institute in 1999. The paper develops a taxonomy of attitudes toward the future — how different people and institutions interpret the same evidence about environmental and social trends — and argues for scenario-based thinking as a corrective to both unwarranted optimism and paralyzing pessimism.
The Taxonomy
The paper's central contribution is a typology of future-oriented stances, organized around the fable figures of the title:
Chicken Little cries that the sky is falling — alarm without discernment, unable to distinguish genuine signals from noise. Frequent false alarms erode credibility when the real problem arrives.
Cassandra has accurate foresight but is not believed. The figure represents the real predicament of those who correctly identify systemic risks — overshoot-and-collapse, exponential-growth in finite systems — but cannot translate accurate analysis into social response.
The Real Wolf is the actual threat that goes unheeded while attention is captured by Chicken Little's false alarms or Cassandra's unbelieved warnings.
The Case for Scenarios
Meadows argues that none of these orientations — confident optimism, alarm, or prophetic doom — serves well as a stance toward genuinely uncertain futures. What is needed instead is scenario-based thinking: holding multiple conditional futures simultaneously, not to predict which will occur but to understand what choices lead where.
This connects to her work on leverage-points and sustainability-indicators — you need to know what you're measuring toward before indicators can tell you anything useful. Scenario thinking provides that orientation without requiring false certainty.
Context
The paper was published the same year as leverage-points-paper-1999, the essay that became her most widely circulated work. The two papers together represent a period of synthesis in Meadows's thinking — connecting technical system dynamics concepts to questions of perception, communication, and political action.
The typology also reflects her experience with the balaton-group, where researchers from many nations compared notes on how their own societies processed (or ignored) signals about environmental limits. The figures of Chicken Little and Cassandra mapped onto patterns she had observed across decades of sustainability work.
The paper anticipates concerns that become explicit in thinking-in-systems-2008 about why accurate systems analysis so often fails to produce appropriate action — a problem that is as much psychological and social as it is analytical.