Category: strategy

Reading Public Library: Scenarios to inform resilient strategy

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“The flexibility of the plan in part helps us to present our goals and efforts, because those goals and efforts can reshape as real world events interfere with business as usual…It really leaves room for creativity and the flexibility to adjust to the real world.”

Melissa Adams, executive director of Pennsylvania’s Reading Public Library, interviewed by Nancy K. Herther of the University of Minnesota, explains how a COVID-era scenario planning process informs robust and resilient strategy for her organisation and community.

“Another advantage was experienced during the transition between executive directors. The plan was decidedly not the prior executive director’s plan, it was the organization as a whole body’s plan. This made it easier for me, as the incoming executive director, to keep the plan moving forward…the article we co-authored has helped me really take ownership of this strategic plan.”

Reading Public Library, Pennsylvania

Book Chapter: Scenarios as a device for forming common futures

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“Scenarios as a device for forming common futures”, the chapter I co-authored with UCL’s Richard Sandford for the volume Building the Post-Pandemic University, can now be read for free online.

We argue that:

Universities need to develop ways of creating their own narratives of the future, in order to anticipate what lies ahead and recognise possibilities for change.

By developing their own capacity to imagine possible futures, rather than working with future narratives designed outside the university, institutions will be better placed to recognise their distinctive and heterogeneous character, to be clear about their particular orientation to the future and potential contribution to its development, and to strengthen the university community through this shared process.

You can find our discussion of scenarios, foresight, and universities’ particular situation as complex, internally diverse “engines of the future”, at Elgar Online.

'Dreaming Spires', by Flickr User JJBullock - Copyright JJ Bullock 2010
‘Dreaming Spires’, by Flickr User JJBullock – Copyright JJ Bullock 2010

Scenario Planning Blog at BMJ Medical Humanities

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“Though it’s just a trick of the calendar, as the new year begins our thoughts inevitably turn to the future. Yet we cannot gather data from events that haven’t happened yet, and forecasts drawing on precedent can flounder when situations are unstable.”

For the BMJ Medical Humanities blog, I cover a few scenario planning basics as we make our way into 2024.

Jay Huang from Pleasanton, USA – Low Fog Sunrise @Golden Gate Bridge, CC BY 2.0.

Useful perturbance: 2024 from the corner of your eye

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The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has just released its Preventive Priorities Survey 2024, a useful document which “evaluates ongoing and potential conflicts based on their likelihood of occurring in the coming year and their impact on U.S. interests”.

Launched in 2008 during the post-9/11 era of the “global war on terror”, the survey polls foreign policy experts to rate a set of contingencies proposed by the CFR, based on a call for suggestions on social media.

Reading the report is a useful way of “standing on the shoulders of foreign policy giants”, but also a reminder that, by looking only where the giants turn their heads, we may end up sharing their blindspots.

Rioters at the side of the U.S. Capitol, by Flickr user Bill Bryan – CC BY-2.0 DEED

As the economist Frank Knight argued, probabilistic forecasting depends on making analogies to past events: we calculate risk in a given situation by modelling that situation based on past experience. However, Peter Scoblic reminds us, analogy may be an unreliable guide in the messy worlds of business and geopolitics – especially because comparing current situations to past ones can trigger biases which will then be hard to shift.

Why is this a problem?

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“How I use the dream”: 5 reflections on strategy + reperception

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What do I do? I help people think through big decisions, individually or collectively, when situations are uncertain.

It’s strategy, not therapy, but there’s kinship between the two.

Learning about “what goes on within and between us”, the psychology of individuals and groups, nourishes the work – and you can find that nourishment in unexpected places.

Sometimes it’s pretty conventional: a journal article, a course at the Tavistock, formal professional gatherings such as a group relations conference.

Sometimes learning seems to find its way to you: a challenging event in your personal life yields a nugget of wisdom, a conversation with a musician provides an unexpected metaphor, or maybe you get an unexpectedly helpful book recommendation from a chatty shop assistant. (That’s how I first encountered the work of Irvin Yalom).

Sometimes you can learn a lot just from getting stuck in a transit strike.

Dreaming by Jozef Israëls

As Ellen Ramvi puts it, “learning is getting involved in what one doesn’t know” — and there’s plenty of ways to get there.

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UNESCO Ideas LAB: Staying with the trouble

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Over at the UNESCO Ideas LAB blog, I have a piece with colleagues Niamh Ní Bhroin and Steffen Krüger, drawing on our recent article for Prospects about scenario planning and the future of education.

Title card from the Oslo “Schools and/or screens” scenario set

Read “Staying with the trouble: Scenarios and the future of education” here.

Blink and You’ll Miss It: Surveillance, Society, Foresight, AI

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“How can we use events which haven’t happened yet to help us understand surveillance and society?”

Over at the blog Blink on Medium, I have a short piece with colleagues Carissa Véliz, Malka Older, and Annina Lux, reflecting on how to think critically about automation and surveillance in a season “swarming with futures”.

The IMAJINE scenarios

The post ties in to our recent article for Surveillance & Society, “The Art of Strategic Conversation: Surveillance, AI, and the IMAJINE Scenarios“.

ISF Threat Horizon Podcast: Exploring Cybersecurity Scenarios

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On the latest episode of the Information Security Form (ISF) podcast, I speak with ISF’s Max Brook and Mark Ward about using scenarios to help security practitioners see beyond present problems: exploring uncertainty, attending to blind spots, and strategizing more effectively under conditions of uncertainty.

Threat Horizon: Exploring the futures

“An app is not going to solve our democracy; it’s something we have to solve ourselves.”

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In the new issue of the journal Surveillance & Society, Oxford’s Carissa Véliz, sci-fi writer and aid worker Malka Older, and Capgemini Invent’s Annina Lux join me to talk about how future scenarios can inform discussion, debate, and decision-making about the relationship between artificial intelligence and surveillance.

Read “The Art of Strategic Conversation: Surveillance, AI, and the IMAJINE Scenarios” here.

New book: Building the Post-Pandemic University

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Next month sees the release of the edited volume Building the Post-Pandemic University: Imagining, Contesting, and Materializing Higher Education Futures.

Together with UCL’s Richard Sandford, I contributed a chapter on “Scenarios as a device for forming common futures: plurality and the post-pandemic university”

You can find out more, and pre-order the book, at the Edward Elgar website.