An Introduction to the Oxford Scenarios Planning Approach

hello everyone and welcome to our april 2021 forsyth friday thank you for joining us today my name is jessica streit and i'm the deputy director of niosh's office of research integration at this time i will turn the mic over to dr sarah felkner nyesh's associate director for research integration for some brief opening remarks sarah the floor is yours thank you jessica and good morning and good afternoon and good evening um i am sarah felkner and the associate director for research immigration at niosh and welcome to foresight friday it is my distinct pleasure to introduce today's foresight friday speaker dr rafael ramirez dr ramirez is the first professor of practice at the university of oxford where he directs the oxford scenarios program and the oxford network strategy lab he's one of the world's leading experts on scenario planning and has worked extensively with non-governmental organizations corporations intergovernmental agencies governments and thinks tanks he's the author of several books and scholarly papers and he sits on the editorial boards of three scenario planning journals dr ramirez holds a phd from the wharton school at the university of pennsylvania and masters degrees from york university in toronto and oxford prior to coming to oxford dr ramirez was part of shell's scenario team and professor of management in hcc in paris dr ramirez is co-developer of the oxford scenario planning approach which focuses on how scenario planning can be used to support strategy and public policy and it is now our privilege to welcome dr ramirez to niosh rafael you very much sir can you see me okay yes i can and hear you okay okay and i'm gonna share my screen and if this works it'll be great can you see this okay we see your slides thank you okay thank you very much for inviting me to niosh and uh for for this event i'm quite privileged on it i got into scenario planning literally by accident um in may of 1976 i was working as a carpenter for the canadian coast guard in hay river in the northwest territories of canada that's the southernmost place where the canadian coast guard has a station to service the mackenzie river which is used as a highway in the winter and in the summer it's full of barges that take material up to the arctic for oil and gas exploration and i had an accident became 20 in the hospital in hay river and that in effect changed my life i i was not a great carpenter obviously having had an accident and ended up in hospitals in alberta and ontario they did pay for my last year of university and the rest is history as they say and i entered what uh for me was a surprising world of the industrial accident and the victims of industrial accidents i created from that canada's first program of literacy for injured workers in those days the hypothesis was that injured workers that were illiterate were dangerous because they could not read safety and rules and then they got themselves into accidents and i came up with an alternative hypothesis which is that there are dangerous jobs and less dangerous jobs and if you are well educated as dr felkner and i and i guess everybody on this call is we get the less dangerous jobs but if you're an illiterate you get the dangerous jobs and it was the job not the uh not the illiterate person that was dangerous and i helped these illiterate people some of whom were very very smart and capable to become literate so that they could then enter the retraining uh schemes that were available to them across canada but which were were not available to them if they were still illiterate and with frontier college in toronto i ran this for two years this world of the accident is a very strange world somehow in our societies in in quote unquote advanced western countries we accept that there's these huge numbers of people that are killed and maimed at the job 54 times more people wounded in the american workplace than in the vietnam war 14 000 workplace homicides so going to work is is dangerous 14 000 is there's more than three times 911 and still this is considered to be normal it was not always the case that this rate of injury and disease and in the case of the us homicides at work was so acceptable this guy francois eval who was is a remarkable scholar he uh was doing his doctorate in france roughly at the same time as i was finishing my doctorate from wharton looked at the history of the welfare state and he basically has this hypothesis that the industrial accident in france is at the basis of the of the welfare state the number of people being killed by industrialism in france was enormous maybe even higher than the figures i've just shown for the united states and there were lots and lots of widows and lots and lots of um uh maimed people and there was a big societal push against industrialization and in order to minimize the bad effects that one on accidents and health that industrialization was having according to fonso ivald the owners pooled some money and the workers pull somebody for the widows and so on and when the government saw that there were two pools of risk management being operated side by side joining them together gave rise to the welfare state at least in france i don't know if that is also the history of social security in the states but i remember reading this book and saying this is quite fascinating that the industrial accident is the public good that then all kinds of other uh social services uh emanate from so i got as i say into scenario planning literally by accident the um the work i was doing on industrial health and safety led me to a remarkable scholar called eric trist scottish man who a gentleman actually who was then at york university in toronto and who had written extensively about how to design safer workplaces in coal mines in northern england and scotland and i went to see him saying you know i'm working on how to design safer jobs and i see that you have done this and so he took me in and i did my master's degree with him um and uh by then he had moved from doing industrial accidents and safer designs to doing search conferences which led me to scenario planning and so from workplaces to scenario planning was the bridge was eric trist who was one of the founders of the tavistock institute here in the uk and the tavistock institute created a formal scholarship which i have adhered to as well as possible in the new circumstances we're in as opposed to what was happening in post-war britain which is a set of books he published at the university of pennsylvania press called the social engagement of social science a fantastic collection of essays and the social engagement of social science suggests that we social scientists i'm actually a card-carrying social scientist in the british association of social scientists we are here partly to serve society and to help society engage with the problematic issues it faces and it happens to be that i do that through scenario planning and we work very much like clinical doctors work in uh in the school of medicine we do actual engagements in the real world so i'm hired as a consultant here and there to do work and some of the consultancy engagements i do uh i become very good colleagues with my clients who then become co-authors and we write books or papers or things together so we do three things at the same time we engage with societal problems we teach and i'll come back to that and we do research together and when the three circles of engagement research and pedagogy come together and you have this magic uh three for one effect that's where being a professor of practice has its sweet spot the book that we use in the scenarios program that i teach is this book on the left which i co-authored with my dear colleague angela wilkinson who was also a shell with me came to oxford and is now uh secretary general and ceo of the world energy council strategic reframing the oxford scenario planning approach and it's very important uh before i move on to the mit sloan management review um paper here on the right to realize that for us the scenario planning is not just to do foresight it's to serve strategy and in the business school uh that employs me i'm i'm employed as a strategy uh professor who happens to do scenario planning i'm not a futurist i'm not a foresight person i'm a strategy person and over the years we've had many opportunities i've come to touch on them in a moment to write up what we do here is a piece of work that i co-authored with uh three ex students steve church house was head of strategy at rolls royce the people that make airplane engines not the posh cars when i met him then became head of digital for rolls-royce alejandra palermo was head of foresight for the royal society of chemistry and jonas who's brazilian uh had been with us in in my class and the the four was got together and compared in this mit sloan management review paper how the methodology here on the left can be adapted to everything from uh investing in the future of um airplane engines to investigating the future of a whole scientific field as is the case with with chemistry and steve did scenario planning at rolls-royce with our methodology i was involved as part of a relationship between rolls royce and oxford alejandra went and did her work on her own but following our methodology and then we wrote it back together and it's nice to see that this approach can be adapted to many different things but we start with the user and as opposed to doing scientifically valid explorations of truth as is the case with chemists we don't we're not after truth in the future because truth is factual and all of the facts are in the past i can take it for a fact that we will end this call in 45 minutes but it isn't a fact so we are not in scenario planning looking to be truthful about the future the way forecasters pretend to be we are looking to bring in useful perspectives with eyeglasses positioned in the future and bring those future possibilities that we construct as a point of view into the present to inform strategy here and now so we look at the way we look and these eyeglasses at the bottom here illustrate that those of us that have eyeglasses uh i'm one of them we we cannot take our what our glasses tell us for granted sometimes it's very difficult to look beyond the frame of the glasses the glasses will transform what is seen in particular ways and what we're going to do with scenario planning is to manufacture our sets of eyeglasses to look at the present from a different point of view and for a whole bunch of reasons we locate those points of view in the conceptual future to serve that particular use and user here's an example of the range of organizations beyond the rolls-royce and royal society of chemistry that that the methodology has been applied to on the southwest it's the future of aids in africa done for the united nations a whole host of world economic forum activities have been informed by it with mercy corps in the states we looked at the future of humanitarian aid i've worked twice with the senior people at the international monetary fund i'll come back to one piece of work on that axa has used this for cyber security airbus has used it the british medical journal used scenario planning to look at the future of global global research varzilla which makes engines for ships used it on the future of shipping and power atkins an engineering firm looked at for the future of the engineer the national breast cancer coalition looked at the future of its mission with it the international atomic energy agency has used it for the future of nuclear safeguards probably one of the scariest pieces of work i've done diabetes uk on the future of diabetes the european patent office on the future of patenting cisco did scenarios on the future of the in internet and the gastroenterologist on the top right did work on the future of gastroenterology so you can see that big and small organizations in the public domain intergovernmental governmental private ngos can use this methodology and adapt it and make it render it useful one of the key things that scenarios do is to frame the problem in different ways than the way it's framed today so this is a a bit of a cute picture from instagram of what you see in instagram is not necessarily what is there to see and one of the things we are very attentive to is what is the context of whatever it is that one is looking at for example if you're doing work on the future of the price of energy you can either frame out or you can frame in the cost of carbon and depending on whether you frame it or you frame it out you get a totally different picture of what the future might hold for you so one of the things we like to do i was just in a call at the moment an hour ago with a group of people using the methodology to assess future demands for research on covet which includes some of your colleagues in the cdc uh what is going to be framed in and what is going to be framed out in each of those scenarios the um the methodology we use uh and that is quite distinct compared to to other methodologies including some i understand that you're using uh in in niosh is this what my students call the onion the three circles the people that are served are in the yellow circle in the center we do not think of them primarily as decision makers some other scenario planning methodologies consider but we think of them mainly as learners and i've been doing this now since roughly 1980 i'm still learning how to do it and everybody is learning about scenarios but we think of a scenario user primarily as somebody that is a learner a learner and who is learning about the context of the context that they inhabit the first circle the black circle the transactional environment or business environment is made up of parties that from the point of view of the learner in the center is a um is a person with whom they can shake hands uh and with whom they do strategizing and with whom they have some influence because they have this relationship where they can shake hands with each other so if it's a company you would have a client relationship strategy which includes sales and customer satisfaction and customer retention strategies which is the green arrow in the in between the yellow and the black you have an investor relations strategy for your shareholders and people that you borrow money from you have a supply supply chain strategy for your suppliers employee relations with your employees competitors strategy etc so you strategize with and for and in relation to these counterparts in the in the black circle scenarios are not the link between the yellow and the black but between the light blue and the black scenarios are about the factors in that blue circle that are beyond the influence of the actors of the sorry of the of the yellow central learner user who is going to be using the scenarios so uh they might be able to influence their suppliers by negotiating with them or or their clients or even their competitors by lowering prices or doubling prices or whatever but they cannot influence the price of oil or the demographics of brazil or the geopolitical trends in the middle east or technological innovations coming out of japan or china so these are the factors out there and the important thing here is that we're not doing scenarios of the organization itself the yellow part we're doing scenarios of the context of the organization and so we look at trends which is here the blue arrow which trends will continue for a long time so will the demographics continue will climatic co2 accumulation in the environment uh continue will increase the inequality continue over the period of time we're considering things and then we look at things that could come from the future and new possibilities will russia change whenever mr putin goes will cuba change after the castros will the royal family in this country the uk be any different once not only prince philip who just passed away but also queen elizabeth passes away etc and so we construct alternative points of view in the future where whoever was a client in the black circle might be reclassified as a competitor in the purple circle or as a partner in the red circle or as an investor in the pink circle and we start looking at what if the world is different from the one that we are planning for would those green arrows still hold or would we need to make them more agile and different should the red happen instead of the black one thing that is really important in the english language which is not my native language my native language is spanish is to be attentive to what we mean by different words in in our methodology scenarios are things that might happen to my context independently of my will options are things that i could potentially do on strategy is choices in many contexts of many of the people that come through our classroom they think of options as scenarios which is then highly confusing so we need to be quite clear on the terms and what they mean one of these very important ones is that the future is not the long term and this is why when i was invited to join the board of the journal futures uh i told them you know i'm not a futurist and a scenario planner and they said that's why we want you we'll have enough features on the editorial board um this is uh uh something that was highlighted to me by by my colleague and co-author angela wilkinson if you look at the oxford english dictionary the oxford english dictionary not the other dictionaries and you look up the meaning of the word the future in english the future is not something we go into the future is something that comes at us it's something that is a time to come in spanish it will be por venir a future to come and it's a future that is to come and that is expected to be different from the present so with scenario planning in the oxford approach we don't work for the future we work with the future for the present we work with the future that might come towards me and that informs the optionality that is open to me or close to me in making my strategies going forward my strategy is my plan to go forward but the future comes to me so i'm not working for the future as a forecaster would would do i'm working with the future to the present and i'm in a prospective condition when i'm attentive to the sense of future that i have in the present am i scared of it excited by it um hopeful or am i just ignoring that sense of future ignoring the future is a choice that many of us make because it's just too scary or time consuming to concern about ourselves with it so let's be clear that the interface of the strategy is between myself as a learner with those i interact with and the interface of the scenarios is between this big contextual environment that is beyond my influence but might be coming towards me and the context in which i live in so the scenarios inform not what i do they inform the context in which i work and act they always come in sets and it's very important that one of the usefulness of the scenarios is in the differences between them the difference that makes a difference is where information comes from here on the left is an example of a piece of work done with the colleagues in the international monetary fund in washington where they looked at things on a 2x2 a lot of the work we do is not on 2x2 but this one was and so on the left side uh there's a world with quite a lot of trust and the right one uh one with not a lot of trust uh the north side is a world in which i get substituted by a robot technology substitutes humans and the south one is i get to be even better as a faculty member with more coffee more eyeglasses or better eyeglasses perhaps hearing aids and all kinds of other things that i take to enhance my competence and we use this as a map not as four boxes and they put three scenarios they looked at technological race twin peaks and circle of trust the scenarios on the right were done by an ex-student of ours in the world economic forum in the middle of the 2008 economic meltdown these were presented in davos in january of 2009 and the question was whether the pace of economic power shift would be meaning basically new york and london do not do very well and shanghai and singapore and dubai do better slower or rapid east or west and whether the response would be harmonized or discordant and this was just before the g20 and all of the central banks got together and went harmonized to the north and uh snowed things uh going east as fast as people feared so we ended up much more in our re-engineered western centrism at least for quite some time and most of financial services although some activities moved to other of the quadrants so to make it short in the scenarios approach we have developed we are not that interested in data or facts in accepting as much as they can inform and manifest the plausibility of the scenarios we're not interested in predictions uh we're much more interested in making plausible and purposeful scenarios useful scenarios than probable ones there's people out there that like to put probability to their scenarios we think that's impossible in the kind of radical uncertainty that the scenarios face they're not about the self they're about the context they're not for anybody but they're for somebody else you have to know if if i was working for niosh who exactly in new york the scenarios are for there would be different scenarios for the head of hr than the head of risk management than the head of whoever looks at infrastructure once they their use fullness has been served they are then disposable they're not there forever they're much more about reframing understanding and much more of a process of inquiry which we think is helpful if you do it several times rather than as a one-off they're not they're not a product an example of how this works was made by spencer dale who became chief economist of bp the oil company that polluted so much of your gulf waters many years ago he spencer came from the bank of england he was not an oil economist and when he um when he took the job he looked at the way oil economists look at oil and he found four assumptions that the oil economists were making which he felt were no longer helpful to him in his role oil had been basically dealt with for many years something that would eventually run out and basically as something you mine out of the ground and he looked at how shale gas was exploited and share oil and he came to the conclusion that maybe a lot of the industry was moving from mining world to a manufacturing world where the oil demand and supply curves relate to each other and respond to changes much faster he looked at how the demand for oil in the east uh changed and therefore the role of opec and what i like about this paper and why i use it here is that it surfaces assumptions that have been long held and what we would do with scenarios in the oxford approach is we would then check how those assumptions play out in different contexts so good useful scenario planning typically takes something of a of a sacred cow if one can accept that metaphor without being insulting to any religion anything that has been deeply held as a given and say under what future circumstances would that no longer be the case and why does that matter because there is a correlation between misleading prejudice and failed strategies this is a book by finkelstein and colleagues which looked at 80 failed strategies and i know it's not causality it's correlation but 82 of the 80 failed strategies also had people with highly misleading prejudgments as a result so there's lots of situations where pre-judgments and perhaps misleading experiences are not assets but liabilities and so what you want to manufacture is alternative pre-judgments to the ones that are hard so at least you can compare the one with the other so for us a definition of scenarios is that you produce you manufacture you don't choose you manufacture a small set of possible future contexts of something for somebody if you don't have a user it will be useless and you have to have a clear purpose so if i was working for dr felkner i would look at what is in her calendar what meetings has she scheduled what negotiations she has to enter what presentations she will give and i would ask her in which exact element in your schedule will the scenarios help you to be better prepared to have more options for negotiation to look smarter whatever the purpose is before i start and i would make sure that that well specified use uh interface is there so that she actually uses it and may many occasions it takes much more time to settle on what the intended use and user is than to produce the scenarios i have a rule in the class that if you have a hundred units to invest a hundred person days or a hundred thousand dollars you shouldn't spend more than a third producing the scenarios you should spend or invest two-thirds of those efforts and resources and hours making sure that the scenarios are actually going to be used and that the purpose that they're manufactured for and designed for is served so that's what i have to say here is my email contact do feel free to contact me and at the bottom is the link to the program it's a one week long program when covet allows us to meet at the moment it's a five-week program online which we run twice we are always looking for live cases where uh which people lend to us so that our students can can learn with live cases if somebody in new york has a case that they would like 15 really good participants to work on with a good method and a decent faculty guidance please get in touch thank you for your attention i'm very happy to take questions comments and so on i feel thank you so much that was um very interesting and while folks are thinking about questions that um feel free to go off mute or put the questions in the chat and we'll read them and while you're thinking about questions you might ask i wonder if you could the the pre-reads that you provided were very interesting in particular the one about scenario planning in science-centric organizations and certainly niosh shares many of the common characteristics that are identified in that in that paper in particular we have a well-developed long history with strong external stakeholder communities and they're very they include employers employees labor professional associations academia many of this the methods um in the papers that you provided are very qualitative involved interviews and workshops and a lot of discussing we've been going down a path of um looking for information that is available online in blogs and publications um stakeholder reports to try to find trends and and information and i wonder if you can speak to the um speak a little bit more about how we might engage the more qualitative piece right now we're in a process of organizing coding cataloging what we refer to as scanning hits where we've been trying to look for signals of change um that might foretell or you know give us some insight into um different futures and and i wonder if you can speak to how we might and at what point we might bring in a more qualitative process okay so thanks thanks for that that comes up quite often not only with scientists but also with economists uh um this there's a whole range of ways of answering that the first one is that the really important decisions in life uh typically are reached by qualitative rather than quantitative calculations i mean i ask senior economists did you really do a net present value discounted cash flow to figure out how many children you would have no most of them don't i mean now and then you do but in terms of can i afford the college education that they have and so on and so forth when you chose your spouse or partner did you did you do a net present value no you qualitatively thought is this a good partner for me would i be a good partner for him or her if you think that you might want to have children down the road with them would they be a good parent with me and so and so forth so part of the question is can you bring in the rest of the person rather than just the professional part of the person into the equation i've been in enough senior meetings in companies where comments like okay so those are the numbers but it doesn't feel right or let's do it find me the numbers comes up right so the reality of it is that even in number crunchy intensive places a lot of the decisions are done on gut feelings and as we know guts have as many neurons as our brains and a gut feeling is actually a neuronal activity as well a second answer to this is given by john kaye who writes collins in the financial times and wrote a very good book he might be a very good speaker for you down the road on radical uncertainty with mervin king who was the governor of the bank of england during the 2008-2009 crisis and john says that it's plausibility like we do in scenarios rather than probability that carries the day in a court of justice so you might pretend that probability informs certain things in decision making but in courts of justice it's not probability it's plausibility is the story that the defendant and her or his lawyer is giving more plausible than that of the prosecution and the jurors decide on the balance of this uh as to whether that's the case or not a third thing uh in fact i'm having this conversation this very week working with these very senior scientists who advise governments around the world and private funders on what should be priorities for funding in the future of covet 19 research one of them said this method is very uncomfortable to us because of our professional training and i responded the comfortable one has not produced results that you're comfortable with which is why you've sought out an alternative and as we know the future is something that comes towards us and that is expected to be different from us so where does the difference start at the end of the scenario uh investigation or as part of the schneider investigation and with rolls-royce they were in trouble when i started working with them they their share price was half done they had lost half of their value in the stock market an activist investor had taken a big chunk of their of their shares um uh sales were down and so on and uh when i worked with the colleagues there i said where do you want different thinking to start with because your your existing thinking hasn't given you that so scenarios are there to contest assumptions they're going to be uncomfortable uh if they're going to be useful it goes with the territory that thinking about things in a qualitative way in a very quantitative intensive organization is going to feel uncomfortable the question is not whether you're there to give them comfort the question is there are you is that alternative way of engaging proving to be useful with them just as an example of this the previous um chief medical scientist here in the uk who produces a paper she lent us a case for dame sally davis lent as a case to the scenarios program she had been doing an annual report to parliament on what she thought were medical priorities and when our students after two days of classes interviewed her she came back to me and she said these questions are really important ones and all of our experts have not yet asked them because they're just looking at it from the future they're not themselves specialists and they're looking at questions that actually are going to be very useful to my report she even quoted our students in the report because they asked different questions in a different way to the way that the usual suspects had been asking so uh i have a slide in our program uh warning people they're gonna be uncomfortable with the approach and that's part of the learning because you have to let go of certain things and think about them in a different way so this is a long long response to your question thank you very much are there questions from anyone you can either go off mute or question check hi this is joanne thank you very much this was a really great overview and a lot of what you said resonated um one of the questions i have and i'm trying to formulate it here is i'm sure you've worked with many different kinds of organizations science-based organizations non-science-based organizations i'm wondering you know what differences and approaches you might see that work or doesn't work and one of the interesting things with a lot of work cdc does in general is we're very uh analytical we're very evidence-based practice based want to be sure of our recommendations um but a lot of what we actually put forward also requires has a behavioral element to it too knowing what to do is not necessarily the same as actually doing it and i'm just curious how you've seen that play forward in in strategic foresight work you've done with different kinds of organizations and in particular science organizations uh thanks john and yes i think the professional training does make a big difference to how you go about doing this in this country lawyers in the uk i mean lawyers are trained on a tort law system which is based on precedent it's quite different than when you work in france where they have a napoleonic code and they work not from president but from the rule so if you have a combination of british lawyers and british scientists together they have been trained to go on facts and the precedent which is in the past in fact they've been trained not to go into the future and so it's not only that they that you that they have not been trained to do scenario planning they have been trained not to do scenario planning and so one thing that is very helpful is instead of saying you know what do you expect to be the future of your profession i learned this years ago doing work on the future of alzheimer's for a french foundation you don't ask especially we had some of the world's most senior alzheimer's specialists in in the workshop you don't ask person a who's a specialist on field a what's the future of your field because they don't know they're at the top they're at the leading edge and and that's why they're doing research what you say to them is what would you expect your colleague in field d to be able to do 10 years from now that would make things different for you and so if if the colleague in field d is in nanotech or in artificial intelligence and the person you're talking with is a biophysicist they would say well if ai can do this and nanotech can do that then i'll be able to do this so you get them to talk to each other and part of the art of doing this well is to convene into the room what pierre-vac who brought scenario planning to shell from the french government used to call remarkable people these are people that will have different opinions from each other but who are willing to hear and listen to somebody that they consider uh legit or or are worth listening to so you have to convene people that will hold incompatible points of view from each other uh and then help them to learn with each other about you know if x happens in in in x field what does it change for my field and then they will ask well raphael in your field if this changed what what would that open up for me that that helps a lot um so yeah british lawyers and scientists are particularly difficult to work with but not impossible if you get them to help each other figure out what the future might hold in related fields that that could change things so for example in the royal society of chemistry um scenarios there's one scenario where um biology eats chemistry i mean chemistry is moving from applied physics to applied biology so could you have chemists in the future that are not biologists question mark and another one it's robots and ai doing a lot of the work that is now done by by individuals etc etc does that help john it did it did thank you very much uh raphael we have two questions in the chat the first is do scenarios also provide insight into how much attention an organization should pay to changes that the future might bring versus how much to focus on immediate problems also might scenario analysis techniques be applied to reframing the world of the present so the first one is attention um one company i worked with many years ago uh decided to track this empirically so everybody in in a meeting was asked at the end of the meeting to assess what proportion of the meeting let's say it's an hour an hour long meeting what proportion of the time was spent on fixing yesterday's problems or problems left over from yesterday and what proportion of the of the time was invested in in considering potential future opportunities for top-line growth or challenges to it and ideally if you were to track this uh before uh during and after the scenarios you would have a bigger chunk of your time invested in the into the future than i mean that's that's the ideal whether your habits or not i mean you could even run a control group you could have a half of the people not taking the scenarios uh education that you are producing sarah and another half yes and then see if there's a difference but that that is something that can be empirically assessed and tracked and uh um i i have had a number of engagements over time when the conviction was we should be spending a bigger proportion of our week or month looking at future considerations rather than urgent ones let's let's time our meetings to to do that sorry what was the second part of the question the second part was might scenario analysis techniques be applied to reframing the world of the present yes absolutely absolutely so so um an example uh from that was from diabetes uk where uh the bulk of the senior management thought that the national health system here the national health service was going to be there forever and therefore a lot of attention needed to be engaged with them and in a couple of the scenarios for different reasons this was not going to be forthcoming in fact google which many of them considered to be the enemy was going to be better at helping diabetics than the nhs and um this is very counter-intuitive and in some ways affected the identity professional identity of of some of these people and when covet 19 happened they told me that it was not only that they had rehearsed different futures through the scenarios that helped but be because they had rehearsed leaving the present that they were in it was easier to move to an alternative track they became more agile here and now because it was not so painful to leave the track that they had been stuck on prior to doing the scenarios and rehearsing alternative futures so it was not so much the going into an alternative frame that was a challenge it was the difficulty of leaving the frame that they had been in that had been eased and that made them more agile and faster to move i think one of the examples in one of the papers you've provided was an organization that having done its scenario planning had three scenarios and insisted that any investment allocation find you know budget allocations uh support one of those three scenarios and if it didn't it wasn't going to make that allocation i don't know if they still do that but that used to be the case in shell when i worked there in 2000 2003 uh the the very big investments needed to wash themselves against the scenarios and if they didn't they were sent back until they they were edged or improved or whatever we have another question in the chat and this relates back to the example you were giving where there was um i don't i don't remember the agency but the principal of the agency mentioned that your students raised you know more important questions than they'd heard today do you remember that example and could you give us a few yeah it's in her annual report uh dame sally davis d-a-v-i-e-s and uh it's the i if i if i don't if you don't find it it's very easy to find it was the um i think it was a 2018 or 2019 um annual report that the chief medical officer provides to the government great other questions either people are very zoomed out or i've been incredibly clear i'm sure it's the latter okay so i have a question for you as as i've mentioned in our previous discussions niosh is uh nascent in this effort and we're finding our way um do you do do you think there's a difference in the quality or impact of scenario planning if it's done by an external consultant or if it's done by internal staff capacity i don't know of any empirical research that's that settles that either way so so my my what i'm gonna give you is an opinion based on having done this since since uh 1980 and i'm still learning myself so we're i may have more hours on the clock but you and i are still learning uh the methodology um i think it depends more on who you hire as to whether they are you know a contractor or an employee one of the things that i think is correct is that the sooner you start engaging with your quote unquote nascent scenario planning with outside parties the better my boss at shell got shell involved in the unaids work partly because africa is important to shell but also because by engaging with very demanding conditions on on aids which was you know priority number one two and three for many of these countries at the time uh he thought that the skills that we would have in shell would be world class so if you in neo should not not only work with your own internal challenges but partner with other parties that are facing you know thornier issues that would perhaps be a way of making sure that your game is as good as it could be so i i would think that if you if you think of your practice as a service to the community not just as the function uh support to your own uh activities and that you engage perhaps beyond the u.s if your remit allows you to do that with tricky issues and tricky problems elsewhere you will increase your learning if you have enough variety internally to do that and you have good people you don't really need external parties but you might want to bring in external views to your workshops okay thank you that's very helpful um we're just about at the hour we would have time i see there's a thank you um for the interesting presentation we'll make sure that you get this information any other questions or comment before we wrap it up i would be very interested to know uh if you're going to do work on the future of the industrial accident i think that that would be a really interesting piece of work i was just talking earlier this afternoon with somebody in the mining industry which according to a report from your own organization is the most dangerous and most accident-prone industry in the united states this company itself has had two years of no accidents at all i'd be really interested to know if you think that the horrid rates i showed earlier on will continue and persist or well will they somehow have or will they become even worse uh that would be i think a great service to those of us that have suffered an industrial accident or or occupational health maybe we can engage your students in a joint well if you if you do have a live case to send to us we run this program twice uh this this um last time we had a water aid uh we've had a number of different organizations uh so if you have one uh we're game wonderful this is the beginning of a long and productive collaboration i hope so um well with that i want to thank everyone for joining especially our colleagues from across cdc who've been able to join us today um jessica do you want to um give us the last slide with some updates on um our upcoming foresight friday in may and raphael um many thanks um and uh best wishes thank you for having me bye bye have a good weekend thank you jessica thank you sarah um and thank you to everyone not only to our presenter dr ramirez but also to all of our attendees for today's rich session we hope you enjoyed the hour that we've spent together the office of research integration greatly values attendee feedback on foresight fridays in the chat we've provided a link to a brief evaluation of today's event that evaluation form actually also has space where you can suggest topics and speakers for future foresight friday offerings so we look forward to receiving your input next month we are excited to host colleagues from the cdc strategic foresight learning and action network as our may 2021 foresight friday speakers they will join us to provide updates and insights on two high-impact strategic foresight projects that they currently have underway so please stay tuned for future communications and registration information for that may foresight friday this concludes our april 2021 foresight friday thank you once again for your attendance stay safe and healthy and have a wonderful day

2021-05-10 16:09

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