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One of this site's prime features is the set of four scenarios of what the world of higher education may look like in the year 2010. Here's how and why we created them. |
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One of this site's prime features is the set of four scenarios of what the world of higher education may look like in the year 2010. Here's how and why we created them. |
Scenarios are designed to be used as planning tools. The authors of the attached scenarios don't claim to have predicted the future. We have predicted a future, or rather four possible futures. Of course 2010 will not look like any of these scenarios. But the point is not simply to expose you to our vision of the impact digital information technologies may have on higher education. The point is to have you consider the impact these technologies may have on daily life at your institution. The point is to have you anticipate developments and changes you may not otherwise have anticipated. The point is to have you consider which strategies will be most effective or prudent given any of four different directions toward which the future may lead us. And to identify those developments that may be the first indicators that the future is headed east rather than west, or north rather than south.
(This description of the scenario-building process has been synopsized from Peter Schwartz's The Art of the Long View. Schwartz is president of Global Business Network.)
Step 1: Deciding on the Question
The first step in the process is the identification of a central issue or question. In the case of these scenarios, the focus was almost predetermined: what will--or should--higher education and scholarly communication look like given the flood of digital information technology?
Step 2: Identifying the Key Factors
The second step is the listing of those key factors in the micro-environment that may directly affect the answer to the central question. For example, what factors within and between universities will help decide the effects of digital information technologies on the academy?
Step 3: Identifying the Larger Driving Forces
The third step is roughly step two moved up to the macro-environmental level. What are the forces within the larger environment that may affect the way in which our central question is answered? What are the forces behind those key factors we listed in step two?
Step 4: Ranking Factors for Import and Uncertainty
Step four is the ranking of the factors and forces listed in steps two and three. These factors are weighted for their effect on the central question. Which factors will be most significant in determining the answer? Coupled with this is a rating of the level of certainty or uncertainty for each factor. Significant factors that are sure bets will probably be present in all possible futures. But significant factors that are highly uncertain may help us differentiate among the scenarios we should create.
Step 5: Choosing Factors to Structure a Matrix
This leads us to step five. The goal here is to identify those few factors that are most significant and most uncertain. Clustering groups of factors may help make clearer the choice of these overriding factors. These are the factors we believe will decide the direction of the future around our central question. We can then plot each of these factors along an axis according to its uncertainty--one end of the axis and the factor turns out one way; the other end and it turns out just the opposite. By taking the two most significant such axes, we can create a grid or matrix. Each quadrant of this matrix represents the conjunction of one answer to each critical uncertainty. Each quadrant also represents a different future, and--if we have picked well our critical factors--the four quadrants represent the most different futures given our central question.
Step 6: Filling in the Details in Each Quadrant of
the Matrix
Now that we have captured the driving logic of each of the four scenarios, we can move to step six and begin to flesh out the details. What will the world look like in each quadrant? To answer this we return to the key factors we identified in steps two and three. How will each of these factors play out in each quadrant? Which way will the uncertainty in this key factor go in quadrant I? In quadrant II? And so on. This is where our decisions set off cascades of implications. These implications begin to form a plot--the narrative structure of a scenario.
Remember that in creating our matrix we are trying to plot out the four corners of the future world to be as different from each other as possible. So our scenarios will be exaggerated in opposite directions. This is what we want--to stake out the outliers and encompass the possible.
Steps 7 & 8: The
Payoff--Implications and Early Indicators
The final two steps are the payoff. Step seven involves looking at the implications of each scenario for current and future strategy. What strategy would stand us in good stead in several--or even all four--of the scenarios? Step eight is the search for early indicators: what developments will clue us in that we are heading into the northeast quadrant rather than the southwest? The earlier we can identify these, the sooner we can take appropriate action.
Step 9: Drafting the Four Scenarios
If you're creating scenarios to help a wider audience in a planning process, tack on these final two steps. After deciding on the major axes at the New Orleans seminar, we fleshed out details for four scenarios, one belonging to each quadrant. Each set of details was the raw material that was assembled into a logical flow of cause and effect, complete with a time line to mark the unfolding of events. These were the first drafts of our scenarios.
Step 10: Refining and Rewriting
At a second seminar in May in Chicago, a group that included a few of the New Orleans participants critiqued these first drafts and added to them, filling in holes and jumps with still finer detail. It was decided that the first drafts of the scenarios, while informative and well-plotted, were perhaps too summarial and discursive. Frank DeSanto, a professional writer with Michigan's Department of English, was brought in to rework the scenario drafts, to make them more narrative and compelling as stories. These second drafts, made fuller by drawing from the transcripts of both the New Orleans and Chicago seminars, are the scenarios included in this Web site.
React, cogitate, laugh, kibitz, ruminate, argue. Follow the embedded links to glimpse some of the seminar discussion that resulted in a particular development in a scenario. If you choose to move to the scenario response forum, consider these questions:
