Seminar 9 Review

The Main topic covered this seminar was something called scenario planning. Though i know or could guess mostly what it is i decided to check the "expert(s)" Wikipedia.

Scenario planning or Scenario thinking is a strategic planning method that some organizations use to make flexible long-term plans. The basic method is that a group of analysts generate simulation games for policy makers. The games combine known facts about the future, such as demographics, geography, military, political, industrial information, and mineral reserves, with plausible alternative social, technical, economic and political (STEP) trends which are key driving forces.

What i understood it to be was a method used to prepare for every(or most) likely events by expecting it and prepare your plan of action if it were to happen.

To teach professor Lee Gilbert was using a presentation which he said he had made atleast 10 yrs ago about the telecommunications industry. He talked about terms like norms laws and standards and the differences between them. We learnt how many other external factors influence our decisions and actions starting from task related factors to the unknown future forces. Then he showed us a plan he had made about the telecom industry with 4 scenarios ranging from the ideal to the nightmare cases and studying the changes and reactions of the environment, market etc in each case.

In this plan 3 of the four scenarios were easy to understand but one of them was called zero sun, and though you could say it was the practical bad case(i.e. between good and nightmare) i could not figure out the rationale between the naming... so back to Wikipedia. It defines Zero-sum as:

A situation in which a participant's gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participant(s). It is so named because when the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero.

At this point the professor set us a small assignment. We were to determine a set of 3 variables which will be strongly affected in the case of a company entering the singapore WI-FI market and setting up hot spots.(He stressed here on the number 3 here since he felt, from experience, any less than 3 was too less and any more than 4 was too much) In the end thats what happened, even though he got the answers from everyone in the class, most of them could be combined with each other to for just 3-5 variables. The seminar ended at this point after the professor collected the technology plans and remining us about our upcoming project and to make edits to the wiki, which he said he was locking next week.