Wicked Strategies by John C. Camillus

Author:John C. Camillus
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4426-2406-1
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2016-07-07T04:00:00+00:00

Predictive scenarios are widely employed, and most firms are familiar with their development and use. Also, as indicated earlier, predictive scenarios are more feedback-based than feed-forward-oriented. For these reasons, we will not be exploring predictive scenario building any further.

Coming back to the taxonomy of uncertainty, it bears noting that, as the atomic physicist Niels Bohr is reputed to have said, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” The second kind of uncertainty, multiple different futures, bears out Bohr’s aphorism. In many contexts a single end point with some predictable volatility doesn’t exist. Disruptive technologies and government regulation can create alternative, very different futures.

A graphic example is the impact of regulatory changes on US industries such as health care (the regulations relating to “Obama Care”), financial services (the Dodd-Frank regulations), utilities (controls on pollution and greenhouse gas emissions), nuclear power (safety regulations) and communication (governmental spectrum management and frequency-band allocations). This kind of uncertainty (figure 7.2) is generated by the challenges – disruptive technologies, conflicted stakeholders, and wicked problems – created by the interactions of the three mega-forces.

Possibility or learning scenarios5 are capable of coping with multiple alternative futures. This scenario-building technique helps identify robust actions that can reasonably be expected to work in all the alternative futures that may happen. Possibility scenarios and robust actions are useful feed-forward techniques and will be described in detail later in this chapter.

Figure 7.2 Type 2 Uncertainty: Multiple Different Futures

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.