Personal Reflection

Before the start of the “Scenario Thinking Course”, I had no idea about the direction to which the course was going to lead us and also what kind of a thinking perspective that I was going to gain at the end of the course. On the other hand, it was very clear for me that I was going to have fun since it was obvious that we were going to involve in creating scenarios.

During this short but intensive course, we were taught how to gather the ideas with the help of brain storming sessions. Instead of diving into the theoretical aspects of scenario thinking, it was preferred to teach it more with hands-on style. The efficiency of the group work was once more proved while bringing a discussion into a successful result that might be used in building a scenario. Of course, the most important thing was to collect and read as much data as we could about our target company. It was nice to see the different transition phases of the company’s changing strategies within the years.

One of the most important learning for me was to understand how it makes a big difference to look at the bigger picture instead of smaller parts of it. By gaining this ability, it becomes easier to forecast or see the possible future strategy of the companies.

Besides, looking at the past, current and possible future strategies of a company while building a model, different driving forces that might have an effect on the future of the company were taken into consideration. It was seen that the driving forces could be in different categories such as technological, social, economical, etc. Of course, the importance of each category was changing from the scenario to scenario.

One of the hardest things during the scenario building was to determine the right driving force since it should have been somehow related with the future of the company. As it can be imagined, different driving forces were taking the scenario to different routes because of their critical effects on the future of the chosen company. Therefore, it was critical to choose the right and most related driving forces for the chosen company.

Consequently, I can say that I gained a good experience about how to build different scenarios for the chosen companies. According to my opinion, scenarios can be built either by a company for itself to define a reasonable future strategy or by its rivals to adapt themselves for the possible future strategies of this company. As it can be concluded from this idea, to know how to build scenarios is a vital knowledge with no respect to where you stand either at the company site or its rival site to be able to stand in the game in the future