Interactive Scenario Building: The Future of Higher Education

Sunday, July 9, 2006

Goal: Learn Scenario Building

• Identify major issues that will be driving forces in the future of your institutional type

• Develop scenarios for bringing the driving forces to life

• Receive a report on the scenarios created by all participants

• Follow-up and apply what you’ve learned back at your institution

Agenda

• Introductions (10 minutes)• Name, organization, position AND one

expectation for this conference• Select a recorder

• Driving Forces (20 minutes)• Add to the list provided• Select two forces

• Scenario Building (40 minutes)• Next Steps (10 minutes)

Instructions and Introductions

• Introduce yourself to your group• Name, position, and organization • One expectation for the conference

• Find a volunteer with clear handwriting to act as a recorder for your group

• Find the master sheet on your table for recording your group’s work

Driving Forces

• What is the future of higher education in the next five to seven years?

• What forces/issues that are both important and uncertain?• ‘Certain’ forces will be likely in all possible

futures (declining resources)• ‘Uncertain’ forces are the ones that require

scenarios for deeper understanding.

Driving Forces

• Definitions on the handout• Review the list of driving forces provided and add to

the list, individually and as a group• Discuss the forces most important to institutions

like yours• How likely or unlikely (certain or uncertain) are the

forces?

• Select two key forces, with an uncertain outcome, driving change for institutions like yours

Scenarios

• Sample scenarios in your handout• Looks at the forces (uncertain) of a global

pandemic and ubiquitous access to the Internet.

• Briefly review the sample scenarios

Driving Force #1: PandemicDriving Force #2: Access to the Internet

Scenario A

Pandemic Happens

Pandemic Doesn’t Happen

Ubiquitous Access

Limited Access

Scenario B

Scenario C Scenario D

Scenario A

The pandemic hits those born after 1990 particularly hard, with deaths closer to 35 of the population. Colleges and universities have to rely on distance learning and internet access, which is spotty at best, to reach students. This greatly limits economic and social recovery and higher education enrollments plummet.

Scenario B

Higher education institutions across the globe have worked to ensure that even remote places can access the Internet. Pandemic containment is effective, partly due to rapid communication, and only 10% of the world’s population succumbs to it. In addition, economic and social recovery is speedy because everyone has access to the knowledge they need. Enrollments rapidly return to pre-pandemic levels and then expand through distance learning options.

Scenario C

Higher education continues its slow adoption of the internet as a means of distributing knowledge. Enrollment remains flat across much of the world and even drops in some places. There is no impetus to push the need for education.

Scenario D

• Ubiquitous access to the internet, instead of reducing the desire of people to attend college, increases it. The realization that pandemics can be eliminated or controlled most effectively through education, fuels a push to ensure that distance education is available globally. Credentialing via the internet gains acceptance and the world sees a general renaissance of ideas and prosperity.

Building Your Scenarios

• Write your group’s driving forces on the blank scenario building worksheet

• As a group, discuss the characteristics of each quadrant of your matrix• How would higher education institutions like yours be

affected by the intersection of those two forces?

• Agree on 2-3 sentences for each scenario that describe a possible future for higher education

• Identify the one scenario that is most likely to occur for institutions like yours

Next Steps

• All scenarios will be collected

• Report on scenario building at the end of the conference

• Masters of materials and the report posted for participants after the conference

• Introduce scenario building in your home institution

Why Use Scenarios Back Home?

• We all respond to stories and the pictures they paint• Emotionally• Creatively

• Allows people to flex/expand their mental models and begin to consider alternative futures

• Easily integrated into strategy discussions

Strategy and Scenario Building

• What scenario do we think is most likely to occur?• What actions should we take now?• For which contingencies must we plan?• Do we want to make any part of the scenario

happen? Does it advantage us to create this future?

Strategy and Scenario Building

• Identify strategies that would steer the organization successfully through each of the possible scenarios

• What commonalities are found in the strategies across the scenarios?• Reflective of core competencies/strengths?• Weaknesses that must be addressed?