Future Proofing with Shell at Online Educa

Topics: Learning Excellence, Capability Planning, Strategy Integration, Business Outcomes, Cultural Outcomes

Contents

"Preparing Together for the Future of Online Learning" | Online Educa Conference | Berlin, November 30, 2011.

December is a magical month for many reasons, but one that tends to stick out is the annual tradition of prophesying the future: fantastic declarations of flying cars, personal jetpacks, the death of the LMS, and other evidence from the intersection of wish fulfillment and magical thinking. Considering the future, however, should not require mastery of a ouija board, particularly if the reason for prognosis is to offer ways to conceive and prepare for a better tomorrow. Participants of the pre-conference workshop "Preparing Together for the Future of Online Learning" at the world's largest technology-supported learning conference learned how to consider the future by applying Royal Dutch Shell's scenario planning. 

The workshop design was stunningly effective:

• establish the structure of scenarios
  "Scenarios are stories about the future, but their purpose is to make better decisions in the present"
• set rules for participation
• define terms for understanding how corporate learning fits into the larger geopolitical, time-bound context
  (as "actor", "transactional environment", and "contextual environment" ; see image below)
• refresh systems thinking by presenting Peter Senge's system iceberg
  (where you can see the events, but but you need to consider the patterns of system behavior and the driving trends beneath these patterns)
• structure three linked discussions to
  (1) brainstorm key trends, uncertainties, and extreme outcomes;
  (2) intersect two unrelated uncertainties to create four quadrants ("scenarios"); and
  (3) establish an ongoing dialogue, over twitter throughout the conference, to consider these scenarios in the presentations 

Shell invited CorpU to participate in this workshop, and the discussion offered a fruitful consideration of the way that changes in technology, workforce attributes, and economics will affect the way work is organized and done, and its impact on what learning and development planners should consider when thinking through their budgets and plans. The four scenarios present interesting alternative futures, and reminded participants to  

• embrace the inevitability of change
• prepare for multiple future scenarios
• understand the inherent capabilities and needs of the organization
  (in order to help to make the mapping of strategy to action much easier for the business), and 
• identify how to act on possible futures by making strategic bets
  (based on the hypotheses about the future and the capabilities needed to achieve them)