Thursday, October 11, 2007

Lara Hodgson-Comments on Future Scenarios

Article: “Scenario Practice”
Scenario planning is important in everyday life in order to help predict the outcome of everyday situations. Scenario planning help people plan for the future and predict certain outcomes. Scenarios present learning opportunities the use for future scenarios. Driving forces help us predict the outcome to certain scenarios from past events. Predetermined forces allow us to identify the outcome to scenarios that have occurred before. There are different approaches to practice scenarios. There is “winners and losers” approach when people can predict the outcome but refuse to share them. There is the “challenge and response” approach, this is when a scenario presents itself and they grow stronger by dealing with the crisis as it comes. The last approach was “critical uncertainties” in order to plan scenarios you focus on the most influential factors and try to have at least three possible outcomes. Sub groups are helpful to practice and analyze situations, along with strategizing and conversing with others to practice scenario solving. This was interesting because people go through these process without even thinking about it.


Article: “How to Build Scenarios”

Predicting the outcome of scenarios is only the first part; letting uncertainties of certain scenarios go is another. “Scenario planning derives from the observation that, given the impossibility of knowing precisely how the future will play out, good decision or strategy to adopt is one that plays out well across several possible futures,” page 1. The point of scenario planning is to pinpoint certain events and highlight the forces to predict the outcome. After identifying the main problem, the decision to which possible way to dealing and solving the scenario depends on the individual. Driving forces fall into four categories; social dynamics, economic issues, political issues, and technological issues. These are some scenario logics that people analyze different scenarios. I think it is interesting, I don’t usually think out some scenarios so much to determine outcomes.

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