Personal Reflection

Log Entry: 2005 March 11th 13:00

Today is the first class of strategic planning. Damn it’s a whole day! Don’t they allow us some rest?

You wouldn’t image what kind of weird guy the professor was! He had a really, really strange laugh that whenever he laughed, we laughed. To make it worse, I never figured it out why he laughed so often. Besides, he used that cartoon like fascinating voice to announce us a brand new world we would be able to see after the whole course. That was bragging, wasn’t it? It used us more than 20 years to form our opinion of the world, and he wanted to change it within 20 days!

Apart from those, I’m still interested. Since the professor was really handsome, especially with the braid which made him charming and distinctive from all the professors I’d ever seen. And he was so passionate that I couldn’t help thinking he’s one of those ebullient Latin American dancers.

Although still suspicious about his “ambition”, I knew that if I like a professor, I’m going to make the course!

Log Entry : 2005 March 11th 19:30

Well, after the morning class, I have the impression that scenario planning is a learning process about the future possibilities of the given topic. It’s not about the figures, nor about what everybody thinks the future will be like. It’s about out of box thinking, and it is the clever that sees both the forehand and background.

While the class of interesting, the workshop was surprising! Omitting all the interesting topics we came up, Daniel directly headed for the only topic that I absolutely had no clue of: the future of “Greed” computing! While he showed great interest in it and discussed in depth with Richard, the computer genius of the group, I sat there “soundlessly”, resenting Richard for the “out of mind” topic he proposed.

Thanks to my optimistic nature, no sooner than I found it was actually “Grid” Computing, I decided that I’d take the chance to become a master in it. Somehow, this bad luck sparkled a flash in my mind: would this innocence be an advantage in scenario planning? Without insider’s profound knowledge, wouldn’t it be easier to take an outsider’s view and challenge the official thinking in the field?

I began to savor Daniel words now. Perhaps his “brand new world” isn’t really a “world”. It is a way of looking at the world. Yes, instead of telling us what the world actually is, he tries to give us a powerful tool to see the impossibles, and challenge ourselves to think about what if they come true. Whether we can handle the tool depends on our effort and his.

Log Entry: 2005 March 16th 21:30

The last week is probably one of the most intensive ones of the new semester: not because of the course, but because of my self-learning process. I had to read dozens of articles concerning grid computing, come up with the answers to the research questions my group discussed during last week’s workshop, and find out the uncertainties and driving forces of grid computing.

The challenging thing of learning is that: when you’re learning something new, you always find there is something else related you have to learn as well. Having studied grid computing intensively, I now know a lot more than itself. As grid computing is an aggregation/evolutionary concept of all the related technologies in distributed computing, the web, cluster, peer-to-peer, visualization, etc, it is impossible to truly understand it before studying those technologies first. Moreover, to take a holistic view, technology itself is just the top of the iceberg. You have to know the economy, the market, the politics, in all, the overall environment to know why it is there, will it still be there, what forces are driving its development and to what directions.

Having touched all these areas, my head is now bomb-blasted with various sorts of information. I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s class and see what Daniel is going to teach us.

Log Entry: 2005 March 17th 19:50

Today's class is about Systems Thinking. I like it a lot especially with the “War on Drugs” example.

With systems thinking, the dead facts and figures have suddenly become, to me, a lively creature that has a live of its own and is reactive to human actions. You stick it, it will shrink under your force yet you never know somewhere else will just rebound as revenge. As a result, you can no longer think statically, they are lively, and you have to be lively as well. No wonder Daniel is always so passionate! The world in his eyes must have been a dynamically changing creature (animal/ friend/ living existence?? You name it)!

Yet that’s not all. You need a way to sort all the aspects you can collect and patch them up back to a clear mosaic of what this monster actually looks like. And that is systems diagram. With its help, the intangible monster has to betray itself as on a 3D map. It makes me feel like Harry Potter!

Yet this is just the start of the magic trip. To understand the meaning of this map and the reactions of the monster it conveys, I have to image myself as a little raindrop, falling down on top of a mountain, drifting along the chine with the help of wind to an uncertain destiny. What if the wind changes direction and strength? What if I’m landing on a different mountain? ...

This is a trip of imagination, and scenario planning has become to me a trip of imagination with lots of novel things to discover. I began to fall in love with this course!

Log Entry: 2005 March 22th 14:24

The problem with lovers is that after the first period of freshness and admiration, they always fall in trivial quarrels to get along with each other. It seems the same case with me. This week is wholly terrible!

There is a Chinese saying: To look at a flower is easy, to embroider it is hard. It took us several days drawing and re-drawing the messy systems diagram, which is actually the easier part. The hard part is to figure out two most important uncertainties. As the systems diagram is about relationships rather than individual driving forces, most things are inter-related. It is really hard to identify the most important from the messy yet not to loose sight of the whole picture.

Richard and I had a lot of “fierce” quarrel over what is important and over the relationships between the driving forces. It was astonishing to know how different people view the world! I thought some of their ideas ridiculous and couldn’t believe it. I guess it was vice versa… At first, this was really frustrating. Sometimes long silence followed and nobody knew how to break it. Slowly and gradually, I became used to it and tried to keep the tension down by reminding myself again and again: Be open! Be open! Be open! When I started to listen to what other people thought, I felt totally different. Although their ideas might not be all right, but they were inspiring, what’s more, they could remind me of something I hadn’t thought of before. It’s hard to deny that people are simply smarter than you are in certain areas, and you can only learn by listening.

I’m glad that my effort paid and the argument didn’t hurt our friendship: we finally came up with a satisfying Systems Diagram, and agreed upon the relationships between the driving forces, as well as the two most important uncertainties: economy and technology development. The scenarios won’t be far away!

The greatest lesson of this week? Be open to different voices, you will learn!

Log Entry: 2005 March 24th 19:30

Today it was the third yet also the last course of ICT planning. How time flied!

Having in mind the framework of how the scenarios should be like, I felt pretty easy. Actually I was glad to find that Daniel used the same logic analyzing the relationships between driving forces of economy, regulation, supply, demand and substitution as we did. We almost draw the same picture!

One important thing learned in this class is that, writing scenarios is not predicting the future. They should not be classified as bad or good. It’s a deduction of the inter-related forces that caused a certain result. It can come up with unexpected ones, which needs creativity and imagination; however, the wild ideas should be plausible before they can be put into the scenarios.

Another thing is that in Daniel Vodafone case study, I found a Scenario Summary Table, in which 9 uncertainties are listed, and accordingly, each scenario are discussed around this 9 uncertainties. I found this much more natural than only talking about two most important uncertainties. Only focusing on the most important, we are subjective to loosing sight somewhere during the process. This summary table would be a good reminder of all the important uncertainties and their roles in the construction of final scenarios.

Log Entry: 2005 March 28th 22:16

This is the last week before the final presentation. Everybody is busy around. We independently worked on the scenarios and came together for discussion, in order not to kill other people’s ideas in their infancy.

It’s not hard to imagine that, again, we experienced hell a lot of argues before we finally agreed upon three selected scenarios. I found the Causal-Effect Time Line (I gave it this name) an extremely helpful tool in visualizing and rationalizing scenarios. By studying the causal-affect relationships between different driving forces put on a time line, and comparing the diagrams of different scenarios, we can have a clearer vision of what is important and why the story is heading this way. With this diagram available, scenarios are in effect shaped, just needing some final touch to make it interesting for audience.

Log Entry: 2005 March 31st 16:30

It finally came this day: the presentation of our work and effort! This was another learning experience, not for our own project, but for hearing what other groups have done. Some groups are very systematic, some are very creative, and some brought unexpected fresh ideas, all of which are intriguing. I truly enjoyed the form of sharing and open discussion, which laid the deep essence of scenario thinking: Keep learning both within and beyond your boundaries.

At the end of our presentation, Daniel gave us a brief suggestion on a further think of Grid’s commercial market application opportunities, which I would like to discuss further in Academic Reflection.

Final Entry: Conclusion

Looking back what we've done, it seems we've been through a long way from what we originally were to what we've been transformed into. Yet it indeed was only 20 days sharp! Daniel didn't break his words.

The world is still the world. However, something is different: the way I look at it. Many things are savored and learned beyond the description power of words. I would Love to take the honor to thank Daniel, the very passionate mental tutor, for his effort in bringing me into this brand new world. And I never regret this valuable experience.

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