Tjeerd Tesselaar Learning Log

Personal Reflection

Introduction
This personal reflection paper deals with the ICT Planning course, which was taught at Leiden University and part of the ICT in Business master’s program. In short, ICT Planning has provided us with a methodology, scenario thinking, to be able to create a common language which brings together managers and IT professionals.

In this reflection paper, first I will discuss how I have learned and if this could have been improved, second I will discuss what I have actually learned and how I was able to use this in practice, and last I will form an overall conclusion about the ICT Planning course.

How have I learned?
To be able to reflect on how I have learned, we should take a look at how the course was setup. Once a week, for three weeks, two sessions a day were given. First a lecture provided us with the necessary information, followed by a workshop which essentially is about, as you all know, putting what you have learned to practice. It was really helpful that these sessions were on the same day, because all the things that were said during the lecture were still fresh in my mind.

During the introduction we had to form workgroups. As usual I became part of a group I am quite familiar with because we have worked together in the past on different projects already. Not only the workgroups itself, but also the strong personalities in our group unleashed heavy debates and discussions. These sometimes tiring debates and discussions helped me to better understand the information provided during the lectures and most importantly helped me realize that there are a lot of different perspectives from which we could view our subject GRID computing.

Furthermore the flexibility of the open WIKI environment helped our group to communicate ideas, results, and other information in a fast and easy way. Because the WIKI is an open platform it enabled me to view the work of other groups as well, who were using diverse approaches leading to different outcomes. This provided new insights and new material for yet other heavy debates on our way of working.

In summary the following all contributed to a positive learning environment:

• Setup course; both lecture and workshop on the same day.
• Workgroups; heavy debates and discussions.
• WIKI; open environment.

Of course there is always room for improvement. Could I have gotten more out of the course? Probably the answer is yes! And there are two aspects I think are applicable here namely 1) process, and 2) time.

In my opinion we as a group were not paying enough attention to the whole scenario planning process. This means that we were so focused on the actual products we should make, rather than also look critical at how we are coming to these products. For instance we can see this when we presented our scenarios where we used “Good VS Bad Technology”. Whereas we already had written down some pitfalls to avoid, consisting of: “Constructing scenarios based on too simplistic a difference, such as optimistic and pessimistic“. This shows that if we had looked better at the information that was already available, we could have avoided this pitfall.

Another aspect which prevented me from getting everything out of the course was the short time we had. In effect we had four contact days and finished the course in about five weeks. Normally this takes a while longer, thereby contributing to the learning process and the quality of our scenarios.

What have I learned?
Scenario thinking is out of the box thinking, challenging old assumptions. And when focusing, sometimes we miss the obvious! This became especially apparent when the professor showed us a movie clip where we had to count the bounces of the basketball but somehow didn’t see the gorilla walking by. This made me feel a bit silly. How was I able to miss this big black gorilla? Anyway, the professor made a point well taken.

Another interesting fact that was pointed out during the lectures was that people have a somewhat unified view of the future. This is referred to as the assumed future that nobody questions. But what if that assumed future doesn’t turn out the way we thought it would be. And that’s the name of the game; creating new, fresh interesting, surprising, creative, and especially plausible scenarios that are challenging this assumed future. I am not going to write down the whole contents of the course here, instead the following section explains how I recently was able to use scenario thinking in ‘practice’.

I attended a master’s class where a company was presenting the new e-ticketing system that is going to be introduced in 2007. This e-ticketing system is going to affect the lives of every Dutch citizen who is using public transportation. One of the major concerns in this case is; is the public actually going to use this new system? I couldn’t help thinking what if! In this world to become and nobody questions, at least as many travelers will be using the new system and maybe even more. But what if, the basic concept of bringing people to their work changes to bringing the work to the people. This new trend which could be a possible scenario has a major impact on such a large scale project!

Conclusion
The ICT Planning course has been really interesting and stimulating. It made me question my own assumptions about the future and from now one I will be looking at the world and what others are saying with a critical eye and ear. I regret that we only had limited time to finish the course because I believe scenario thinking will be helpful in the future. The power of using scenarios became clear to me after the professor presented the Vodafone case. The scenarios were surprisingly accurate! Having such scenarios in place enables organizations to make important decisions now which will have its impact in the future. Overall the ICT Planning course was a great experience.

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