Ariadi Nugroho Learning Log

Scenario Thinking

A personal reflection

Let’s Stand Back from the Hot Spot

The first time I attended the course, I was a kind of confuse of what actually I’m going to learn. We heard a lot about system, interaction between elements of a system, and how those interactions may change the behavior of the system. The story about foods chain which described interactions of herbivore, carnivore, omnivore, and bacteria seems really covers everything you need to know about scenario thinking.

If we look the picture below, we could make a very good story about what is actually happening in an ecological system particularly in an underwater life. The sun will make underwater plants, phytoplankton, grow. These plants will be eaten by zooplankton, zooplankton are eaten by small fish, which is also in turn eaten by bigger fish. Those big fishes will be eaten by birds, birds eaten by snakes, snakes eaten by hawks, and eventually hawks die and decomposed by bacteria. Well, that was not really a complete story of what is actually happening in such habitat where biologists may have better descriptions complete with any single details of chemical reactions when photosynthesis process in a chlorophyll take place for instance.

Underwater Ecosystem

Another picture may describe above system better as we can see below.

Underwater Food Chain

Above food chain diagram looks very much the same as system diagrams I saw in the presentation day. I could easily point out two elements that are important or significant to the system, which are the sun and phytoplankton. Based on those high leverages I could make some stories of what going to happen if the sun, for instance, hides behind the clouds for a year.

Since the sunshine is no longer available, phytoplankton will die. In turn, zooplankton would also decrease in number and the impact would affect the whole chain. What will happen to the underwater life in this scenario? Will it come to extinction or Charles Darwin’s theory of The Survival of the Fittest will determine evolutionary form of this habitat? If the latter is the case, then we could expect a brand new ecological system will emerge in which zooplankton may eat their own species, and gradually there will be no herbivore in the ecosystem. Is that possible?

Back to the Real Life

Having the broad idea about how ecological system works and how the system may behave differently following certain significant changes on its elements, we could then try to reflect the same way to social system. The first important question to answer is how social system different from an ecosystem or ecological system? The answer to this question could be difficult but actually could also be very easy. Let’s try with the easy one. Social system constructed by interactions between humans, which may take form ranging from individuals, family, organizations, to countries as a political organization. These interactions are actually triggered by some interests or needs to fulfill or sustain the life of those exist in the system. Having said that, we may say that the only different is that social system consists of humans, and contrary, ecosystem consists of animal, plants, etc. where, however, the interaction is basically the same; that is to sustain the life of its inhabitants.

However, I think the big different is that social system is more complicated since humans have different characters, motives, interests, needs, etc. Human also has the ability to think, to develop solutions, alternatives, not only by feeling or instinct, like animal does, but by way of thinking and learning. Using the analogy of temporarily disappearance of the sunshine, humans will not act exactly the same to react to such phenomenon as we might expect from zooplankton when it has no more phytoplankton to eat. Humans reactions might vary based upon their interests, needs, motives, and even educational background to such a problem. It would also relevant to refer to Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs to explain how man would response differently on certain issue.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs

Abraham Maslow revealed that people could not commit to pursue the higher level of needs before they first satisfy the lower level of needs. Using this notion, we could argue that people react differently to an issue. A higher cost for internet access, for instance, would be a major issue for students and non issue for poor society. In the contrary, minor increase in foods price will dramatically affect consumption behavior of poor society. These kinds of different responses from elements on a social system have led to very complicated interactions between those elements and shape unpredictable outcome of how the system will behave in a given situation. Things will get more and more complicated when those individuals gather in an organization which usually has a certain response to an issue. How can we predict the organization’s behavior if that organization consists of people from different background with different interests, motives, and needs? To be more concrete, could we predict how United Nations would react if there will be an escalating dispute between U.S and EU? What the secretary general will say regarding to the issue, and what kind of action will be undertaken? In my opinion, this is one of difficult question to answer since it involves so many factors and interests that are needed to be explained in the first place.

System Perspective and the 'Black Box'

What we have done in our scenarios “The Future of the Global Village in 2020” was actually to unveil what is actually happening in the ‘black box’. Let’s use our body as an analogy. What would happen if we consume a 40% alcohol Vodka? We would get drunk, that is pretty obvious. However, we don’t really know what exactly happen to every single part of our metabolism system as they are affected by the alcohol. What we usually concern about is the result of the process that is getting drunk and enjoys that moment. The same thing happens when a doctor gives medicine to a patient. He is required to have the knowledge about human metabolism system so that he could give certain amount of medicine that will result to the desired outcome. This outcome is a result of a set of reactions in human’s body stimulated by the input (medicine). Those interactions are in fact very complicated processes that sometimes solving one problem will raise another problem as a result of insufficient knowledge about how the whole system work.

Some Remarks

Scenario thinking is a process of learning those processes and interactions in a system and finally come up with certain possible outcome based on forces that enter the system as inputs. Those inputs could be an organization policy, politics or economics policy that is enforced to achieve certain goals. By understanding processes and interactions inside the ‘black box’ and also recognizing hidden elements and processes in it, we could better predict how certain situations in present time will shape the future. The challenge for scenario thinking methodology is that it has to comprehensively map and explain relations, interactions between elements in a system, and for not being trapped in oversimplifying those processes. The challenge will get bigger, as we have faced, when we have to deal with something really big. A system that not only complex in interactions, relations, responses, and feedbacks, but also has a distinct and tentative nature in its elements – the society.

Another pitfall in using this systemic approach is the tendency to alienating the environment surrounding the system. Take engine system for example. We sometimes don’t take into account environment surrounding the engine system in assessing engine performance. In fact, outside temperature, wind speed, and other external factors have significant influence to the system as a whole. In our scenarios, we started with the idea of global village revealed by McLuhan which was mainly focusing on the role of media to the creation of such global world. However, we finally found that we couldn’t neglect other factors surrounding the media such as economics, politics, and cultures. Those factors, though indirectly, have contributions to media proliferation as well as to their nature. I’m quite sure that neglecting system environment in developing the scenarios would have made us miss the ‘Gorilla’ for the second time.

System and its Environment

Last but not least, we have to be very careful in treating system as an object. Unlike engine system or other physical systems, social system is totally different in nature. It has the ability to learn. In other words, social system is a dynamic system. Referring to David Korten, there is a ‘social capital’ in every society. This social capital can be considered as ‘social energy’ that has been developed overtime through the ability of those societies to learn -- a process that he called social learning. Obviously, this is another challenge for scenario thinking to deal with.

Eventually, what we have done, at least in my point of view, in developing scenarios for the future of ‘Global Village’ is far from complete. I also feel that we have also trapped in oversimplifying certain processes and failed to recognize some hidden elements in the system that might probably change the whole story. We need to do more research on how the system behave rather than base our judgment on assumptions that often mislead our perception about the system. However, realizing these in fact is a good start for me to understand how to use scenario thinking in developing strategic plans and dealing with future uncertainties.

“Components of systems are often hidden and only become apparent when someone tries to solve a problem. Solving it without looking at the entire system often only creates other problems that weren’t apparent before.”

- Phil Gyford