Learning Log Jurjen Borst

Intoduction

Four lectures of scenario thinking, in which we did some scenario thinking ourselves. I came up with something about open source, which later became software development. Although other groupmembers (S Ramauter, H van Doorn, G van der Meyden and J Cormont) came up with some more challenging ideas, such as the legislation of drugs, this was the one which was related to our education. From the start it was clear that this course was all about brainstorming, researching and also some drinking.

What

Scenario thinking is all about thinking about different scenarios, well that’s what we all do all the time isn’t it? But during this course I became more conscious about the importance of good research and brainstorming with others when planning on important projects or investments. Also in daily life I became more conscious about it and it’s actually quite some fun to think and research about scenarios when you look at important things that happened in the past (for example what would have happened if …).

Why

The most important thing about scenario thinking is to come up with good arguments. Anybody can think of certain things that might happen when certain investments in a business are made. But actual research on the matter is important to open the eyes of the people that make the key decisions on these investments. In the process of creating good arguments, driving forces are important to formulate, these are the most important factors on why a project would fail or not in the future. Every parameter that has to do with these driving forces has to be researched to get a good view on the stability. When scenario’s are made, the decision makers have much research available and can combine the scenario’s with their business experience to make the decision.

Who

In this course we learned about the use of scenario thinking in businesses, we got a nice example of Vodafone and the UMTS auction. In the scenario we got to see a close resemblance with the eventual reality (Vodafone lost a lot of money with this). But if Vodafone knew about this scenario at the time, why did they placed such a high bid then? The people within Vodafone gave their preference to a probably much better looking scenario. That’s why it is very important for the people within the company, that know the market well, to stand behind the idea of scenario thinking and fully cooperate with the researcher. The researcher can be from within the company, which means he knows the market well, but his objectivity might be the key factor then. On the other hand, for an outsider, a lot more research and other valuable resources are required.

The Tool

During the course we all got introduced with wiki, which is a nice resemblance of the whole open source idea. In wiki anybody can change things, and it’s based mostly on trust in other people. Just like open source (although there are usually quality checkers involved with projects). As I have been using Wikipedia (an encyclopaedia based on wiki) for some time, I never contributed anything to it, or was interested in how it worked! But wiki offers nice advantages over controlled applications in some cases, if the right group of people is targeted (a news website with over 2 million users a day for example would be a big failure). In future projects I will definitely keep the idea of wiki in mind.

Conclusion

The most important thing I learned is to become more conscious about scenario thinking. Scenario thinking is in my opinion important because managers can make better decisions when they combine the different scenarios with their own business knowledge and experience. But at the end it’s still the manager who decides, after all, of the 4 scenario’s that are made, at least 3 are wrong…