Personal Reflection Egon Gleisberg

Personal reflection

Written by: Egon Gleisberg, S0021032

“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”
Niels Bohr (1885 – 1962)

Above-mentioned quote of Niels Bohr clearly phrases the difficulty to predict the future. We live today and what will happen in a few years is hard to say. The only thing we can do is explore the world as it is, and try to steer it in a early stage by taking certain precautions. But without pretence of being able to predict the future or being able to influence the environment in a major way.

Best practices (e.g. Shell) show us that scenario thinking is a powerful methodology to make companies aware of different possible futures. What these companies need to know is in what way and to what extent they need to change strategy in order to survive in these possible future worlds. I think that the process of scenario thinking itself is the most important for companies, not the resulting extremes that scenarios tell you about in the end. This process lets (top-)managers explore uncertainties that, as an iceberg, are not visible from the surface, and comes up with the driving forces that are the true engines of change, which together form the scenarios [1]. The scenario development cycle for managers is creating a way of thinking that they need, in order to design their strategies at best.

As mentioned above, I think that the creative scenario development cycle is an important process. So also during our ICT strategy and planning course, where a team was formed to walk through this scenario development cycle. From the start on, as a team, we had difficult discussion that led us to very different extremes in the road to Location Based Services (LBS) in 5 years. Not ever a lecturer told us to work as messy as possible (No KISS-es!) and that’s why I couldn’t understand the reason why we should. Making the System’s diagram was indeed really messy, and the diagram quick looked muddled. But afterwards I realized that the discussion on where to put driving forces and why to put them there, led us to a different level of talking about our own project.

All team discussion on making the scenario’s were even harder. It took us many hours to finally agree on the axes that formed the backbone of our scenarios. But than the funny part of scenario development started: thinking in extremes. Every scenario that combined two extremes of driving forces created a world that probably never would occur. But this extreme thinking leads to a different way of thinking about the world in a couple of years, and a combination of all this extremes will indeed shape our world in the near future.

References:
[1] www.scenariothinking.org
[2] Paul. J.H. Schoemaker, 1995, Scenario Planning: A Tool for Strategic Thinking, Sloan Management Review
[3] Michael Y. Yoshino, Carin-Isabel Knoop, 2006, Scenario Planning Reconsidered, Harvard management update