In previous chapters we have laid out the underlying theory, methodology, and practical steps involved in scenario planning as a social and knowledge generation process. In this chapter, we describe what is involved in learning and teaching scenario planning. This returns us to the planner as learner theme introduced in Chapter 1.
It is now impossible for anyone to read the thousands of publications on scenarios and scenario planning produced every year. Even if that were possible, learning scenario planning is like riding a bicycle: you can read all the “how to” guide books and operating manuals, and someone can tell you how to ride it, but you only know how to ride after you get on to the bike, feel the balance and turn the pedals, and even fall off a few times. So too with learning scenario planning; like learning to cycle, it requires practice and reflection as well as engaged fun. These are the features of action learning, a method in social science research that focuses on learning through reflection on one’s actions. In this chapter we describe how we have gone about designing educational programs to this effect.
Similarly, we suggest that learning about scenario planning benefits from scholars engaged in the practice. In our own work we have found that bringing scenario planning into contact with different fields of scholarship yields insights on why it works and how it can be improved. In this chapter we outline how we have done so through the four Oxford Futures Forums we have convened to date.
An important purpose of this book rests on a related view—that as a continually evolving field of practice, scenario scholars and practitioners need to engage actively with each other to keep abreast of new developments and review claims of better practices. We hope this book is useful to fellow scenario planners that also act as teachers, learners, and researchers.
This chapter is organized as follows. First, we outline a philosophy of learning that is explicitly based on Churchman’s (1971) design of inquiring systems, which we introduced in Chapter 3. We relate this philosophy of learning to van de Ven’s (2007) “engaged scholarship,” to Trist’s “social engagement of social science,”1 and to Schön’s (1983) “reflective practitioner.” We make the case that the design of executive education as an inquiry process seeks to bridge two important divides: one between scholarship and practice, and the other between scenarios and other fields of scholarly inquiry. We consider how these design choices work both in the pedagogy of the Oxford Scenarios Programme (OSP)2 and in the action learning and research of the Oxford Futures Forum (OFF).
Second, we consider how the learning of scenario planning actually happens. We examine the advantages of collective learning while attending to individual learning styles. We then invite the reader to consider the implications of understanding that learning is cyclical; that it never ends; and that it can be enhanced by being friendly toward errors. Third, we situate learning scenario planning as reflective practice. Finally, we link learning scenario planning as reflective practice with designed inquiry. We examine how designs can attend to individual learning styles in a collective setting, and we consider how to design feedback to enhance learning.
The elements of successful learning presented in this chapter have been garnered from designing and repeatedly redesigning the OSP. The OSP is a key research and development facility and test bed for the OSPA. To date it has graduated nearly 500 alumni(ae), and has utilized some thirty-one live case studies (including four repeats).
The OSPA’s pedagogic design has also benefited from what we learn about scenarios theory and practices through the OFF. The OFF is an invitation-only event held every three years where we invite scenario planning scholars and practitioners to compare their research and practice with the work of scholars and practitioners in other fields. Four OFFs have been held to date.3 In the 2005 OFF we confronted scenario planning with the field of social ecology, and in particular Causal Textures Theory which we introduced in Chapter 1. It led to two co-edited books: Scenarios for Success (Sharpe and van der Heijden 2007), and Business Planning for Turbulent Times (Ramírez et al. 2008a), plus several academic papers. The first OFF was special not only because it showed the design to work (“proof of concept”), but also because we in Oxford were gifted the Pierre Wack Library, which now has dedicated facilities in the Executive Education facilities at Egrove Park.4 In the 2008 OFF we confronted the field of sensemaking, largely drawn from organization studies, with scenario planning. Several conference papers and the monograph Beyond the Financial Crisis: The Oxford Scenarios (Flowers et al. 2010) were produced. In addition, exchanges during the forum led to a workshop on plausibility hosted by Arizona State University. The 2011 OFF confronted complexity theories with scenario planning. So far one paper has been produced from that event. The 2014 OFF brought design scholars and practitioners together with scenario planning scholars and practitioners, and several spin-off projects—notably a special issue of the journal Futures—are currently in development.
Two common divides are thus addressed in the OSPA pedagogy—that between theory and practice, and that between scenarios and other scholarly fields. In this section we discuss how the designs of the OSP and OFF address such divides in order to help people learn scenario planning.
In terms of the divide between theory and practice, prominent organization theorist Andrew van de Ven, in his influential book Engaged Scholarship (2007), proposed that academics are increasingly called upon to put their theories into practice, yet this is rarely done.5 He suggested that evidence-based practices put forward by researchers are often not taken up. It appears that even other academics do not pick up their colleagues’ work very often, citing each other’s work less than might be expected.6
The lack of uptake of research outputs into practice is regrettable: “Abundant evidence shows that the civic and academic health of any culture is vitally enriched as scholars and practitioners speak and listen carefully to each other” (Boyer 1996, 15, in Van de Ven 2007, 7). It is this active, mutual listening that provides the focus of the design of the OFF, which supports a process of generative dialogue to facilitate new shared insights and encourage further collaborations.
The OFF design addresses some of van de Ven’s suggestions for bridging the scholarship–practice divide. As the call for submissions to the 2014 OFF stated, it is designed to be “a form of inquiry where researchers involve others and leverage their different perspectives to learn about a problem domain.” The OFF’s design is centered upon “a relationship involving negotiation, mutual respect, and collaboration to produce a learning community.” The OFF is concerned with “studying complex problems with and/or for practitioners and others,” and is open to “many ways to practice engaged scholarship.” Finally, the OFF’s design helps to critically establish “identit(ies) of how scholars view their relationships with their communities and their subject matter.”
Yet the OFF design intellectually predates van de Ven’s influential work on engaged scholarship. It is based on designs for inquiry established several decades earlier. One of these traditions is action research and the “social engagement of social science” that Trist and his colleagues developed in the Tavistock Institute after World War II through to the 1970s.7 Another, more specific reference point for the OFF design is Churchman’s (1971) The Design of Inquiring Systems, which we discussed extensively in Chapter 3. Thus the OSPA philosophy of learning, as reflected in the design principles of the OFF, pivots on the concept of “a system of appreciative inquiry” that confronts scenarios with other fields of scholarship.
As we discussed in Chapter 3, Churchman analyzed how major Western philosophers developed the field of epistemology (the study of how we know what we know) through different approaches for seeking “truth” and different methods for considering something “truthful.” Here we link what we do in our programs with these different epistemological positions.
The designs of both the OFF and OSP invite those who participate in them to be open to new inputs; this is consistent with Lockean inquiry, which seeks truth through consensus among a community of inquirers. In the OFF we do not assume a priori information. Instead, we invite participants to follow an inductive process of inquiry which begins with an exchange of perspectives and selected literature jointly to build associations about scenario planning through active listening and generative dialogue.
The OSP pivots around a set of core concepts (Leibniz would call them “axioms”), grounded in working with senior professionals or executives who bring live cases, that is, a real company, municipal government, or NGO currently facing a major strategic issue or decision. The participants learn about the concepts from lectures given by the faculty and other experienced practitioners, and apply these to concrete, real-world scenario planning interventions. The executives who bring the live cases are in the role of learners, and sometimes the live case work leads to new concepts or variations on practices.
In the design of the OSP, two separate teams of six to eight participants work in parallel on the same live case. Each team constructs two or more strongly felt and conflicting draft (first iteration) scenarios, either with the deductive or the inductive method discussed in Chapter 5. The draft scenarios are presented and critiqued; this review helps participants discover how the framing in each scenario contrasts with those offered by the other scenarios, as well as with the frame currently used by the executives in the actual live case. After revision, the following day, the teams present at least two contrasting scenarios (second iteration) to executives of the live case study they worked on. This process is consistent with Hegelian inquiry, which centers on the clash of conflicting ideas. We discuss how these live cases enable learning later in this chapter.
To invite contrarian views into the classroom (and to countervail any bias or blindness in the faculty viewpoints), we have adopted a peer review and evaluation system. Thus, each iteration of the OSP is observed by two independent reviewers: an internal (Oxford-based academic) and an external (non-Oxford based) scenario planner, scholar, or experienced executive development practitioner.8 They write reviews of the program for the faculty and this helps us continually to improve the program.
We saw in Chapter 3 that Singerian inquiry accepts multiple data sources, multiple interpretations of reality, and thus multiple truths; and that this resonates strongly in actual scenario planning interventions. We try to reflect this practice in both the OSP and OFF by emphasizing that any truth arrived at is temporary and context dependent.
As we have seen throughout this book, the appreciation of (sometimes dramatically) different framings of the future context of a system lies at the heart of how the OSPA operates in conducting scenario planning interventions. This idea also applies to learning scenario planning. Thus, in the OFF, participants confront (amicably but robustly) tenets held in the field of scenario planning with tenets held in another field of scholarship and practice—scenario planning with turbulence, or as we are now calling it, TUNA conditions (in 2005); with sensemaking (in 2008); with complexity (in 2011); and with design (in 2014). For example, in the 2014 OFF, participants came to disagree with van de Ven’s views on the role of design. In his view, design is limited to designing the research itself and does not extend to the building of theories, the formulation of problems, nor to their solution. Yet in the 2014 OFF, the participants came to appreciate that the links between scenarios and design practices were extended to be also pertinent for scholarship seeking to explain and describe potential futures. This new appreciation extended the scope of the roles that design (and scenarios) can hold in engaged scholarship.
We have just described the constructive confrontation between scenario planning and another field which characterizes the design of the OFF. We also include this constructive confrontation in the OSP, and do so with our tradition of “Oxford briefings,” whereby colleagues from different parts of the university come and speak about what they are doing. We have had colleagues from fields including cognitive psychology, biology, nanotechnology and physics, medicine, medieval theology, classics, migration studies, environmental change, transport studies, astrophysics, mathematics, and anthropology. The sessions invite learners of scenario planning to imagine and seek out new connections.
The learning this enables is two-fold. First, by bringing in perspectives outside the immediate focus of the concepts and live cases, our Oxford colleagues illustrate the challenges and opportunities of provoking those engaged in scenario planning to consider new and different perspectives. As we mentioned previously, Wack first noted the use of “remarkable people” in supporting executives to think “out of the box”; and such “throwing in things from left field” (as American baseball fans would put it) has become a well-accepted technique in scenario planning. We carefully select scholars that are both leading edge within their chosen field and curious about connections with other fields. Second, these sessions stimulate OSP participants to draw learnings about scenario planning practices from the new connections they may have made. This demonstrates the recursive linkages between reflective practice and reflexivity, which we discuss later in this chapter. We have in turn been invited to help some of these colleagues with their research in several of those fields: transport, environment, migration, retailing, etc. Thus, working with scenario planning can result in the creation of new possibilities.
We have delved into the literature on adult learning as well as action learning (see Ramírez 1983; Morgan and Ramírez 1984), and concluded that scenario planning is best learned by doing it and reflecting on that action (see next main section, on scenario planning and reflective practice).
An important aspect of learning involves understanding the different implications of errors and mistakes. As we see in this section, errors are mismatches between expectations and outcomes; recognizing them and reconciling the mismatch is the essence of learning (Argyris and Schön 1978). So in the OSPA the capacity to notice and analyze errors is a key element of learning, and this is done in a space designed to be safe from the consequences errors often have in everyday organizational life. An example is failing to attend to the purpose of an intervention as a way to assess scenario planning effectiveness.
Mistakes, on the other hand, occur when a less experienced practitioner is unaware of, or repeats, actions that are already recognized by more experienced colleagues to be ineffective. An example is confusing scenario planning with strategy making. While scenario planning education can help less experienced scenario practitioners to avoid repeating mistakes, error contributes to new learning for the field as a whole.
Our experiences suggest that people learn scenario planning better in groups than alone. We have coached individual clients, but joint learning settings appear to works best. Perhaps our experiences align with the logic of Venezuelan parents trying to help their children learn how to play music; with the “El Sistema” pedagogy children are placed in orchestras early on, and they generally learn to play their own instrument faster and better while playing in an orchestra from the beginning than they would on their own.9 So we organize participants in our programs in learning groups, with individuals taking on the role of group learning leader and learning observer in turns. Yet, we also attend to the fact that each individual learns in his/her own specific way, and we strive to foster conditions wherein these different learning styles can support each other. Graduate and senior staff teaching assistants keep the focus on the learning more than on the task; participants come to Oxford to learn scenario planning, not to complete tasks perfectly (as they must do in their home settings).
This is not without its challenges. We find that many OSP participants are strongly predisposed by their professional training to find what they consider “the” solution; this reflects normal operating practice and the usual demands of their everyday working lives. Many participants have a tendency to overattend to completing each task and to perform well with the executives of the live case, striving for perfection at each stage, rather than enjoying a sufficiently rich practice session that is meant to enable their learning.
In our view, learning scenario planning never ends. This is for several reasons. First, practice can be continually refined, as one does in trying to master dance, tennis, or chess. Next, scenario planning has craft-like features which benefit from guild-like apprenticeship and peer feedback. This is because effective scenario planning relies on learners (as planners) embracing their hopes, fears, distress, discomfort, and inquiry10 through action learning. Finally, so much is happening today, as the field of scenario planning11 and futures studies more generally develops, that there is always something new to be learned.
In the OSP we have thus designed the role of faculty to be “on the same side of the table” as the participant in the inquiry process. How the learner will put the learning to use, how the purpose and evaluation criteria for the intervention are to be set, and the issue whose plausible futures are being inquired into, are positioned “on the other side of the table.” That is, our primary role as faculty is one of facilitating or helping the participants to learn, much more so than merely conveying information by lecturing at them.
In addition, as teachers we find that teaching is an excellent form of learning: it requires our clarifying what we understand to ourselves, as well as helping to redirect our own attention to new challenges and interesting research questions. This is characteristic of action learning. So we suggest that executives, who come to our programs as participants, engage in a similar action-learning teaching process with their colleagues when they go back to their home organizations.
We mentioned earlier that many years ago our late colleagues Chris Argyris and Donald Schön (1978) suggested that the gap between expectation and outcome (“error”) is the source of all learning, but only when the gap can be considered safely, that is, without fear of sanctions. Error may come either from a performance anomaly or deficit, or from unrealistic expectations. We agree with Argyris and Schön that error is a normal part, if not an essential component, of learning. Yet the topic of error is rarely addressed in the scenario planning literature, and when it is the emphasis is typically on something other than the performance of the scenario facilitator.
For example, in a 2006 issue of Organization Studies, Richard Whittington engaged Gerard Hodgkinson and George Wright in a dialogue as to why a scenarios-based intervention by the two authors ostensibly failed. Hodgkinson and Wright blamed the failure on client related issues, and Whittington ventured that perhaps problems in facilitation were involved. They agreed that the intervention was “premature” (2002, 1898, 1905) in relation to the turbulence emerging in the client organization’s environment (2002, 1898). Although the three scholars failed to venture any guidance as to when in the rising turbulence it would have been advisable for scenarios to be deployed, we applaud this rare and frank exchange on error in scenario planning work.12
In the OSPA, it is important to distinguish between the errors of scenario planning that are inherent in the continual evolution of the field of practice, and the individual mistakes that can be made by practitioners who may be less experienced, less attentive, or less professional. Regarding mistakes, we are interested here in offering guidance to those practitioners who want to learn and improve their practices.
To date most practitioners have not started their scenario planning work with formal education in that field. In effect, they have learned and honed their trade mostly on the job. However, several universities, including Oxford, offer programs for the interested but inexperienced beginner scenario planner. In addition, there are helpful guides to how to do things properly. For example, in a frequently cited paper Paul Schoemaker (1998) issued a list of twenty things that can go wrong with scenario planning interventions, along with suggestions about how to avoid each of them. Box 6.1 lists some of the most common traps and pitfalls noted by Schoemaker. These resonate with our own experiences.
Several of these traps and pitfalls reflect the fact that scenario planning practice often goes against the grain of conventional wisdom, particularly the “wisdom” held in professions such as law, medicine, or engineering, which is increasingly “evidence based,” “factual,” and narrowly “rational.” Wack, one of the pioneers of Shell’s scenario practice, recognized the political liabilities of executives exposing their ignorance, and suggested that to engage their interest some, but not all, critical assumptions could be challenged at the same time. If all such assumptions were to be challenged at once, the scenarios would likely be rejected and the learning potential unrealized. Or as he so eloquently put it, “You take the piece of bread and you put it in front of the goldfish, but not so far that the goldfish can’t get it” (quoted in Wilkinson and Kupers 2014, 67).
Schoemaker (1998)
Mistakes can be made safely within what Winnicott (1962) first called “transitional spaces,” which as we saw in Chapter 3 are designed to help an individual or a group test the “as yet unknown” safely within the confines of the “already known” (see also Amado and Ambrose 2001; Ramírez and Drevon 2005). Thus, while an expert may find it very hard to be caught being wrong, scenario planning can open a space for the future in the present that allows learners to notice and learn from mistakes.
To amplify the bicycle metaphor from this chapter’s introduction, we design the scenario planning learning process for safe learning that allows for both errors and mistakes. One must try to stay on the bike and accept that inevitably one will fall off (that is, make errors and mistakes) several times until one “gets it.” One can neither learn to ride a bicycle nor learn how to do scenario planning solely by being lectured at by someone. The participants that come to learn scenarios with us in Oxford are mostly “reflective practitioners” in the sense we describe it in the next section. We help them to reflect critically on their own practices with us, with each other, and with the help of our own reflections on how we learned and continue to learn to do scenario planning work.
In the OSPA, mastery in scenario planning is enabled through reflective practice. This term was coined by Donald Schön (1983), and means taking time to stop and reassess how one is practicing something and why one is doing it in a given way, and to open oneself to consider and try out alternative forms of that practice. Thus, this process involves making explicit what works and what does not. Dialogues among less and more experienced scenario practitioners as well as between expert practitioners and the “users” in the live cases—the wider teams, communities, and organizations that need and use scenarios—enable the learners that come to work with us to assess what might work and to examine critically what has worked, and how and why.
The OSPA incorporates several approaches to learn how to practice scenario planning that are consistent with reflective practice:
The OSP recognizes that scenario planning has always been a practice-led field, or perhaps craft, rather than a theoretically derived body of abstract knowledge. We thus have come to appreciate that iterated reflective practice is a most effective way for people—experienced or not—to learn and understand scenario work.
The OFF also incorporates reflective practice. That is, the practices of scenario planners can be critically assessed by scholars of scenario planning helped by perspectives brought in from those of another field. Thus, by confronting scenario planning with design in the 2014 OFF, we asked that scenario planning practitioners and scholars manifest through actual designs what they imagine before they can or will describe this in words; that is, to manifest their images of plausible future contexts with media other than words, as designers do. We also asked the designers to consider working more like scenario planners, so that they would lend more attention to describing the assumptions they make of the contexts their designs are meant to live in rather than letting these designs “talk for themselves.” We have found this type of robust and amicable confrontation to be a fertile and powerful catalyst for learning, generating insight, and provoking experimentation.
Reflective practice, where one reflects critically on what one does, also invites reflexivity, that is, using one’s advice and methods on oneself. In short, we seek to practice scenario planning in our own professional lives and use scenario thinking to develop new options, to understand alternative points of view, and to inform choices. For example, in 2005 one of us worked with academic colleagues at Oxford using scenario planning to consider the future shape of executive education in the University of Oxford. This informed a decision to sell the Executive Education business (then housed at Templeton College) to Oxford’s Saïd Business School in 2006. One of the consequences of this activity was paving the way for the merger of Templeton with Green College to form Green-Templeton College.
In the executive education programs we offer at Oxford, we distribute van der Heijden’s (2005) book Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation to participants. It provides detailed practical guidance on how to design, build, and use scenarios in planning. We do not seek to cover all of van der Heijden’s inventory of choices in method. Instead, we support student participants to navigate the critical methodological choices open to the reflective scenario planning practitioner. To put it in culinary terms, rather than providing a good recipe in this book, we aim to cultivate chefs capable of delivering remarkable gastronomic experiences.
We also distribute learning logs (small personal diaries) to the student participants. At the end of the week-long program the material individual learners have “downloaded” as notes into their learning logs is “uploaded” into collective learning walls. These are photographed and made available to all participants, so each can benefit from the insights noted as important to remember by fellow learners. They are fascinating artifacts of group learning in action.
As we mentioned earlier, the OSP is designed as an inquiring system to enable learning on the part of student participants and faculty members alike. (Recall our discussion of Churchman’s (1971) inquiring systems.13) In this spirit, the faculty, including ourselves, have produced several research studies based on our engagement in this inquiring system. A notable example is our article on the deductive scenario method called “Re-thinking the 2X2 Scenario Method: Grid or Frames?” (Ramírez and Wilkinson, 2014). This study arose from our noticing that we replied to comparable questions from student participants in incompatible ways when they asked how best to use the widely used “2 × 2” (“matrix” or “deductive”) method. We reflected upon this and discovered that the scenarios literature and practices in the field were equivocal in how they treated the dimensionality of the axes of the 2 × 2 scenario framework. In brief, we found that while van der Heijden (2005) stipulates that those using this method describe the axes using “either/or” parameters, many scholars describing and analyzing different scenario planning experiences used “more/less” axes instead. So we set out to clarify the nature of this methodological conundrum and the choices made visible to practitioners based on our analysis.
This kind of learning can also be considered inquiry or research; it is useful not only for the program’s faculty because it will help us improve our responses to participants’ questions about the deductive building method, but also for students because it helps them to make more informed choices about their scenario building processes so that those processes can better fit the intended purposes of the user(s).
This exemplifies how we think of the job of faculty in enabling adult learners to learn scenario planning effectively. The job centrally involves designing a system of inquiry for participants to do the inquiring, with the help of faculty, teaching assistants, and other participants.14 (Also note that faculty are themselves in the same inquiring mode they want the participants to be in.) Hence, the job of faculty is to design and guide the inquiry, including defining and nurturing the transitional safe spaces (Winnicott 1962) in which learning can happen, as seen in Chapter 3. The classroom in this mode of “teaching” becomes a safe space to learn—where embarrassment is contained, and where errors, mistakes, and ignorance can be seen as learning vehicles. Criticism in the classroom is about how one is learning as well as what and why one is learning. This design for learning enables the participants to go into what Kurt Lewin referred to as the “unfreezing” process of unlearning one’s way away from prior views and practices, then moving into spaces in which testing out alternatives to those they entered with can be assessed safely, and by the end of the program “refreezing” on to another, hopefully richer set of concepts, methods, and understandings.
As will be obvious by now, we have learned that design plays a crucial role in effective scenario planning learning.
In the OSP, design begins with an appreciation of each participant’s learning expectations. The OSP attracts a very wide range of learners: managers and consultants; policymakers and advisors; full-time academics; foundation, NGO, and intergovernmental agency executives; aid, resilience, and development experts; and analysts and researchers from all sectors, regions, and industries (for example, on the future of agricultural research, humanitarian relief, forestry research, mining research, medical research, and educational research).
Each individual learner has a different learning style. Many have attended other executive development programs at all kinds of institutions and universities, and have expectations on how executive learning sessions operate. Some are ICT-savvy and others not; many are jet-lagged or/and do not have English as their working or mother tongue. Some participants come with pressure to take something back to the organizations that employ or sponsor them, and to do something concrete with whatever they expect to learn very soon to ensure that the considerable investment in attending the program “pays off.”
Despite these differences, the participants share one critical thing: each one aims to increase his/her mastery of the craft of scenario planning, and to become a more rigorous, more effective practitioner. So we offer many pedagogical supports, too many for any one participant. We think of ourselves as operating a bit like a ring master in a multi-ring (multi-piste) circus, drawing attention to the many different acts on display, so that each person finds something that moves him, interests her, and spurs their own learning. Our intent is that each participant finds a broad and varied-enough set of pedagogical supports to enable him or her to learn the craft of scenario planning. Some of these supports are available only during the week they spend with us in Oxford, such as the help in one’s learning group offered by the teaching assistant, or time with faculty members shared over dinner. Other supports, such as bibliographies and guides for steps to be pursued, can be taken home and worked with alongside colleagues or clients in the weeks, months, and years to come.
Thus, we design myriad learning routes people can take to learn scenario planning, practices, and thinking. In any one session we may offer multiple methods, processes, and routes each individual participant can take up in their learning. Moreover, we have designed ways to help participants learn with each other. Participants work in groups of six to eight with the help of teaching assistants (DPhil students, but also university staff colleagues), in parallel with other groups, sometimes on the same issue or problem as others, sometimes on a different one. Sometimes they are instructed to use the same scenario method on a particular task as another group, sometimes a different method. These different approaches, some experimental, are designed to enrich learning. The learning is iterative as is reframing in the OSPA: various iterations of scenarios are co-produced in the classroom, and we help those executives who have lent their live cases to our participants to be able to recap the lessons from the week in Oxford when they return to their office and recreate with their colleagues the scenarios and the process of developing them.
The design of possibilities for feedback is central to learning. Feedback operates between experience and conceptualization, linking discovery processes involving observation and imagination with grounded testing and experimentation (Kolb 1984). We have built into the OSP deliberate feedback loops for individuals as well as groups. Each morning of a program, we like to open the day with a feedback review of the previous day’s proceedings prepared by a different group of participants, in which they note both their learnings and new questions these have given rise to.
Participants learn a lot when asked to write down what they think they have learned (as do scholars). So we provide each person with a small diary (the learning log mentioned earlier) and time to write down what they have learned, and we encourage them to share their writings with each other. In encouraging individuals to jot down ideas in this way we support them not only individually, but also enable them to give feedback to each other at various times during the day.
On the last day of the program we design in a feedback session of the whole week that every individual contributes to from their own individual reflections as jotted in their learning log, where they write up “aha!” insights and questions and learnings on big whiteboards (one for each day of the program). As mentioned earlier, these are then photographed digitally and shared electronically with everyone.
Another feedback feature that has been designed into the OSP fosters our own learning; that is, each iteration of the program is reviewed by external experts as well as internal Oxford faculty. This peer review provides valuable feedback to faculty and helps us improve the program each time we deliver it. For example, one set of suggestions was to include one case as a point of common reference for all participants, who come from very different walks of life. This suggestion has been incorporated into the design of the program in the form of a presentation of a completed scenario intervention by an established practitioner. (Some of them are former students of the program.) We typically change 10 to 15 percent of the program from one iteration to the next.
The design of the OSP is, as we stated earlier, consistent with the tradition of engaged scholarship. The late renowned social scientist Eric Trist, one of the key scholar-practitioners of the Tavistock Institute (and one of Ramírez’ mentors15), believed strongly in the “social engagement of social science,” that is, generating knowledge from concrete, systematic engagement with real-world problems. (Some refer to this approach to scholarship as action research.) The design of the OSP draws explicitly from this tradition, in that participant learning is centered on an actual engagement. Participants work with actual organizations and their executives over the course of the program. The thirty-one live case studies we have utilized so far have included: two National Health Service Trusts, the City of Helsinki, Titan (India’s largest watchmaker and jewelry retailer), Selex Sensors, BMW, the Royal Mail Group, Music World (India’s then largest music retailer), Discovery (a South African insurer), the Jordanian operations of telecom company Orange, Atkins, and the Swiss Public Broadcaster SSR. The cases have also included NGOs such as Chatham House, the Koestler Trust, Oxfam, the Global Footprint Network, the National Breast Cancer Coalition (US), and the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation/Social Innovation Generation of Canada.
Two or three organizations are selected for each iteration of the program, and two or three groups of six to eight participants work in parallel on each of them. At the time the organizations are used in the program, they are experiencing a real strategic conundrum, issue, or problem. The organization lends its conundrum—and one or more of its executives’ time—to OSP participants with the full understanding that the primary and clearly expressed purpose is to help these participants to reflect critically upon and learn about scenario planning. In return, the executives have the benefit of the thinking of fourteen or twenty-one participants from around the world focused on the conundrum they have brought to the table for a full week, with a good method taught by expert faculty and facilitated in group learning. Most of the organizations used over the past decade have found the insights they receive from this work to be valuable and helpful; this is currently an ongoing research project led by one of us.
Engaged scholarship invites those of us who work in this way to pay attention to scholarship, not only engagement. Improvement in practice and contribution to scholarship are also the two hallmarks of action research. What does such scholarship consist of in terms of the OSP and more generally the OSPA? We have come to learn and now believe that one cannot “train” people to do scenario planning, as if scenario planning acumen was a question of bettering one’s muscles (as in training for the triathlon, or for the Tour de France bicycle race). There is no doubt that experience helps, and the “guild-like” professional development apprenticeship in scenario planning with good reflective practitioners has always been important. But scenario planning now is a sizable and vigorous academic field in its own right, and we must work in ways that peers in related fields such as strategic management or public administration can also relate to. To this end, in the OSP we have sought clarity with our participants on the “deeper” aspects of scenario planning work seen in Box 6.2.
Thus, participants in the OSP learn with our help how ontological positions and epistemology affect methodological choice; and what implications these choices have for determining appropriate techniques and capabilities, and, in turn, the specific tools to be used. Thus, if I think time proceeds only from past to future I will likely use forecasting, but if I think the future may come toward me I may be more open to considering scenario planning.
* For example, we use or refer to Gareth Morgan’s (1983) Beyond Method and Paul Feyerabend’s (1993) Against Method.
In this chapter we have outlined what we believe are the essential elements needed to enable adult learners to learn scenario planning effectively. We described a philosophy of learning that is explicitly based on designing inquiring systems (Churchman 1971). We then related it to van de Ven’s views of engaged scholarship, to Trist’s social engagement of social science, and to Schön’s reflective practice/practitioner. These touchstones inform the design choices we have made in developing both the OSP and the OFF. We analyzed the advantages of collective learning while retaining designs that also enable attending to each individual’s unique learning mode. We proposed that learning scenario planning is iterative and never-ending, and that it is fostered by creating transitional spaces that enable safe learning from errors and mistakes. We concluded that this learning happens best when considered as reflective practice and engagement as well as joint and ongoing inquiry.
In effect, we seek to design scenario learning so that the learner is in the same position as an aspiring and talented cook seeking to become a great chef. We are careful in how we lay out the kitchen and the restaurant, and how the menu for the learner is set up. We help the learner to understand how s/he might offer the insights s/he has produced so they can be digested by other learners. For example, in what ways can learners best convey their ideas and insights to the executives from the live cases, so that those executives can take those insights back to their colleagues (or bosses or subordinates) in their home organization?
As we have said elsewhere in this book, we do not believe scenario planning is simply a matter of following the steps in a recipe book. When everyone learns, each in their own role and style, the learning we have seen in the OSP classroom and the OFF seminar room can be replicated in the boardroom or away day, where the strategic planners who come to work with us to enhance their learning work every day.