Personal reflection
Personal reflection
Introduction
Before the start of this course, I had a totally different idea about what scenario thinking could be. I thought the course, ICT planning, would be about how plan a project most successfully. To spot the bottlenecks and difficulties in a project, how to prepare for failures, so you could anticipate when needed. But also, how to utilize your resources and skills in the most efficient way. Afterwards, this thinking proofed to be a living example of someone, me, that was thinking in only one way. I was too focussed on my own expectations and blinded by my own ability to imagine what the content of the course would be about.
Scenario thinking is fun and interesting when you think of it as stories that outline you the possibilities that could happen in the future. You should not think of scenario’s as scientific proven forecasts, or else you will be tend to think too narrow minded.
Choosing the right topic
The first assignment for this course was to form a group and choose an interesting topic. With a group of 5 girls, we found it important to choose a topic that really speaks to us, because we had to put a lot of thought, effort and time in studying the topic. We wanted to pick a new, upcoming topic that we didn’t know very much about yet. That’s when the professor came with a list of Web 2.0 related topics. Web 2.0 is the future of internet, so this subject would be really challenging for us to study. The five of us were immediately interested in the future of intellectual property and luckily, we could use this topic. We decided to focus on open content and open source as well.
Driving forces
The first thing we had to do after deciding the topic, was to do a lot of research about the topic. For this, we formulated research questions that would help us to give insight in what we needed to study. Then we found very much information about the meaning of intellectual property, the debates about it nowadays, the regulations for it, when something is intellectual property and what related issues there are like copyright, patent, CC (Creative Comments), open source and open content. This was a lot of information, so we had to find a way to structure our ideas and make them clear to the rest in the group. We started by identifying driving forces for intellectual property. Every person would formulate 2 driving forces and when formulating the driving forces, we should think in five different perspectives: economical, technological, societal, political and environmental driving forces.
System’s map
The driving forces were used to make a system diagram, that was a long day at LIACS. We had so much information, so much ideas to discuss, that it was a good idea to use yellow pin-ups to write down all our ideas in keywords. We didn’t discuss the keywords before writing them down, we discussed them afterwards. It was like individual brainstorming on paper. After we thought we had all the ideas written down, we tried to structure them by perspective (economical, technological, societal, political, environmental). When we put all the related or overlapping keywords together, we found out, that they couldn’t be structured by perspective. We discussed them extensively and made the last changes. This is when the KISS (Keep it simple stupid) rule really applied, because we tended to elaborate on single keywords, when we could just separate them into two or three. We linked the keywords by drawing lines and putting a + or -, with below the meaning of these things (like enabler, helps, increases or reduces, etc). This is when the ‘messy is good’ rule of the professor really applied. It was a messy picture, but in this way, we all were updated with the issues surrounding intellectual property. The last keywords we added were examples in the future that would influence intellectual property.
Voting system
After drawing the system diagram/ map, a lot of discussion came forward when we had to vote for the important issues. Everyone got a pen and put a star (with the maximum of 5) behind the issue that she found important. After that, we put the issues in a table. In a group of 5 girls, who are friends in the first place, we could have fun and long discussions, but we also tended to deviate from the subject. The voting process continued in the train! We put the number of voting’s behind each issue and that is how we came up with al list of keywords to use for the scenario’s. We also found out that the previous driving forces were not that accurate anymore. That is when we decided to update the driving forces, 2 per person again, and relate the driving forces to each other.
Extremes and (un)certainties
After we came up with a list of 6 important issues to use for the scenario’s, we sat town to discuss these issues some more. We had to stretch our mind and prepare for the unrealistic things. A way to do this, we thought, is to think of 2 or 3 extremes at every issue. We forced ourselves not to only look at the good and bad extremes, but also to extremes that were in the middle. We also identified possible certainties and uncertainties at every issue. With the information that came up from this, we thought of possible scenario’s.
Scenario’s
What could happen with intellectual property in the future? This is a question, we asked each other quite often in the last phase of this course. The outcome of the process we conducted was that we wanted 3 scenario’s. With the focus intellectual property, we decided to think of the world in 3 extreme ways: • If every fact would become privately owned • If intellectual property would disappear and everything on the web would be freely available • If intellectual property would become customized We all wrote down are thoughts per scenario. Then we divided the scenarios, I had to focus on the third one and we all had to write out the scenario’s linking it to: o A timeframe (5 years: 2011) o The stakeholders o The basic trends o The key uncertainties o The scenario themes o Checking consistencies and plausibility The last thing that were done, before presenting the scenario’s, were the diagrams per scenario with a time frame to give an overview of what happened.
Conclusion
In this course, we had to do a lot of teamwork. It was a lot of work and structuring the process was the hardest thing to do. With a group of 5, often not everyone had the same idea of what had to be done and what was important. Often, people had different ideas of concepts. Also, because there are no standards for scenario’s and because scenario’s are stories, we had a lot of freedom in how to formulate this. A lot of communication led to the positive result of 3 scenario’s on intellectual property.
Scenario thinking has learnt me how to be prepared on a situation, by viewing it in different ways. In business perspective, I think scenario’s could be really helpful for managers who are, day-in-day-out, busy in the same environment, with the same issues. It is only natural that such managers, would find it difficult to think of creative solutions, that really bench their thinking. Good scenario’s could open their eyes and let them see what more possibilities there are. Besides scenario thinking, I have learnt a lot about intellectual property and Web 2.0.