Learning Log Ender Atalay

Learning Log Scenario Thinking Ender Atalay

Introduction - Personal reflection

This is a personal reflection about the course scenario thinking. Before I want to start with reviewing our scenarios and the course in general, first of all I want to thank all the group members of our group (Shahid Butt, Kammi Heydari, Marnix Eedens, Prewies Gaja and Richard Gerding). We had so much fun together while doing the scenarios (maybe sometimes too much fun ;)). Although we had some problems with certain deadlines and other internal problems, we really enjoyed working with each other as a team. As a member of this group, I analyzed the part of security and piracy in the gaming world. In this personal reflection I will try to describe and clarify what I have learned from these scenarios.

Scenario thinking, the course in general

I think that the objective of the course was fulfilled because we learned lot of things, like all the concepts, approaches and techniques to look at the world in different ways and finally how to come there. My opinion is that all these elements of scenario thinking came back in the lectures and in our scenarios. The lectures were really interactive and Daniel kept them very interesting and ‘alive’ thanks to his enthusiasm. I really liked the way he presented and explained it to us, especially the case about the drugs problem in the US (awesome!). Daniel used very clarifying examples from his own experiences and his personal background. This made some issues not only easy to understand but also very interesting. On the other side, I think this course had also its drawbacks. Firstly, I think we would have achieved better results if we had more time then only just three weeks for this course. As you might know this course consists of two parts: ICT strategy and scenario thinking. Like Daniel mentioned in the lectures, normally it will take you a lot more time to prepare and make good scenarios. Although we put a lot of effort and time in our research and the description of our scenarios, I still believe that we could have made better ones. This is mainly caused by the relatively short time that we had for this course. So for the next year, my advice would be that this course should be given during a whole semester (total of six weeks). On the other hand, I think that it was unnecessary to distribute the reader that was given at the first lecture. I think that no one really read the syllabus and it cost us also a lot of money (we are poor students!). But overall, I think that this course fulfilled his objective and it was a great experience to be part of it.

Our scenarios: The future of console based games

Before I want to describe my evaluation about our scenarios, first of all I want to say that I already had some experience with describing scenarios. During my bachelor degree in Business Informatics we learned somewhat about scenarios. So I knew that this would be very time-consuming, especially with another heavy course going on (=Corporate Finance). This is the reason why we divided the work: from now on everyone in our group worked individually. Furthermore, we encouraged communication, so as soon as someone had completed his work (for instance a driving force), he would inform the rest of the group via mail. The members of the group would than evaluate his work. However, especially in the beginning phase we came in big trouble. We had to do the first ‘deliverable’ of the scenarios, the different driving forces. The reason for this problem was that nobody really agreed with each other and we had different opinions and views about it. I think the problem was that we couldn’t take certain decisions. This is why I think that scenario thinking is not only about how the future will look like: it’s just more than that. It’s about how you should operate as a team where you should define clear responsibilities. Moreover, I have the feeling that scenario thinking is also about communication (like brainstorming) and taking serious decisions before a certain deadline. You can see it as a way to get people to talk to each other, be able to express all ideas and be open to other ideas. In addition, my idea is that you must involve everyone in the group to take certain decisions and even more important, agree on it. If I now look back to our scenario project, I think we lacked in this part and at the end this resulted in very vague scenarios. This all might sound very negative but I know for sure that we could have done better (in previous courses we have done great projects together). Time and stress were our biggest enemies in doing this project. The only positive side of our project was that we were not elected as the worst group (my appreciations goes to the GRID-group!).

Conclusion

To be honest, we still didn’t agree with the final scenarios. Like I already mentioned, time and stress was our biggest enemy while doing the scenarios. Looking back, I think this course was a great opportunity for us to prove how well we could operate as a team and work together in a relatively short period. Moreover, I liked the creativity of the course: we were able to design/build a very messy systems diagram that had no limits and special requirements. This was not always easy to do (chaos!). I really liked the enthusiasm that Daniel Erasmus brought into the lectures. He came with clarifying examples about how to think about the future and he shared experiences from his professional life. This made the course even more interesting. But one thing I know for sure: at least I have learned and experienced the foundation of how to make good scenarios in a very systematic way (uncertainties, driving forces, system map, key-uncertainties, and finally the scenarios).