Personal Reflection - WC

I am not sure if I could ever be ready for this course. To be honest I did not think that predicting the future was a subject taught at a university. Maybe in astrology there is a side topic that deals with this, but not ICT in Business. When I received the reader, I immediately flipped to through the pages to see exactly what this scenario planning could entail. By reading the Shell case studies I was able to get a bit of insight of what this subject is. And it started really good. I was excited and had a drive to learn as much as I could. The first lecture was one of the best ones I have ever attended. The story telling technique of Daniel was amazing. As I looked around the room, all of the students were incredibly attentive. For comparison, at times I felt as if I was watching “The never ending story” for the first time when I was 8. And that was a big deal, it was the first time I was in a movie theater.

I particularly liked the examples and tad bits of information, which Daniel presented. It gave the lecture that extra touch of and separated it from any other lecture I have attended. Daniel is able to give an example and explain the reasoning for any possible question that is being asked. I find that to be quite amazing. The organization of the lecture did have a logical flow. It started with explaining the typical way of thinking by giving a concrete example of a rabbit and how it is affected by the eco system which it is surrounded by. The pitfalls of the conventional school of thought were discussed and the systems thinking was introduced. It all made quite a lot of sense. Even though it looked simple at the beginning and the explanation very rational, going through and actually implementing it via our own scenario proved to be quite difficult.

We have chosen the future of the workplace. Everyone included their driving forces and research questions on the Wiki. The collaborative environment was very effective and having access to previous works and complete scenarios help immensely. During our in class discussions, our group decided to look at the political and economical factors which will shape the way that the workplace will evolve. We had very heated discussions on this topic and finally were able to agree on the reasoning. We assumed that the technological advances will happen regardless of what takes place on the political and economical front. This has been true for decades before us. By concentrating on the political and economic environment in the EU we thought that we could inherently see how the workspace will evolve.

The systems diagram was quite a mess. A plethora of information, driving forces, links and scribbles. But it did help to map out our way of thinking. It was physical representation of how our brain worked to analyze the information. From then we tried two different approaches for figuring out the scenarios. The first approach failed miserably. We set up four quadrants with political and economical situation as the axis. Then we tried to transfer the main driving forces from the system diagram into a particular quadrant. This would in turn show the trends and correlations between the forces and could be ultimately turned into a scenario. After all said and done we had nothing except more doubt in the process. As Daniel suggested, we tried another technique, the double entry matrix. We came up with eight prominent driving forces/ uncertainties and mapped them to show which direction they will move in the future for example improving, stable or deteriorating. This process was done mostly by trial and error and logical thinking. The result was three different scenarios with somewhat surprising turn of events and a degree of plausibility. When it actually came down to writing the scenarios and compiling the timeline we have found that the different direction in which they were supposed to evolve was not as clear as we hoped to. We have refined the timeline and the story to show the clear difference between them, and we assumed that it will be enough.

Before our group presented we were still quite satisfied. During the feedback of other groups, Daniel insisted that they will need to formulate a better story instead of specific bullet points. We believed that we were on the right track. Were we ever wrong. The scenarios ended up being more of a trend analysis rather than a scenario at all. We tried to present our case with discussion with Daniel but we realized that we need some major improvements to our work. With hindsight he was correct. During the re evaluation process we found some very critical errors with the way we compiled our scenario. They did not relate to the future workspace in the least, and only described the forces and trends which will influence the workplace. They did not offer a vision to the future which what we ultimately were aiming for.

We quickly turned our attention to remodeling our assumptions and thinking. Did we succeed? I truly hope so. When I was writing one of our scenarios, I once again hit major brick walls. Having a good base of understanding and feedback from Daniel did help to overcome these. However I still think that scenario thinking and planning is one of the hardest professions or directions that anyone could undertake.