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People from a variety of
professional backgrounds have attended Art of the Future's Introduction
to
Structural Dynamics workshops. Representatives
from health care, higher education,
financial services,
automotive manufacturing, management consulting, international liaison
builders, spiritual and
environmental NGO's, public schools and others have gotten behind the
headlines of their field in order to
understand
the deep structure beneath the surface of current events.
In a day packed with exercises, conversations
and concepts, the participants use facts from a case study as
a springboard to discover and live in plausible future
worlds
in order to select strategies to begin to implement in the present.
The workshop is comprised of three space, each representing several
steps in the Structural Dynamics process:
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The Vistico Case
study provides participants with a common focus: a
company whose growth has been
leveling off somewhat wanted to understand why this was happening and
what
strategies it should adopt to insure continued growth over the next ten
years
regardless of what the future might bring.
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Groups brainstorm a range of events that
might drive
change in Vistico’s situation ranging from disruption in the flow of
materials
for manufacturing to a growing level of organizational agility in
Vistico’s
industry generally to the demand that all organizations communicate in
more
than one language, e.g., Chinese and English.
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After discussing the distinction between
uncertainty and
criticality, the entire group identifies several Critical Uncertainties
(Organizational Agility, Supply Chain Resilience and Strength of
Intellectual
Property Protections). Small groups
track the recent history of each of these forces. Some
counter-intuitive insights provoke useful discussion. For
example, one
group
concluded that, as the world becomes a more global economy and more
players
want to remove uncertainty, disruptions in supply chains are actually
decreasing in spite of headlines that scream about problems in the flow
of
goods and services.
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Groups use systems
thinking to find
causal connections between a few driving forces and the critical
uncertainty
they were analyzing.
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Then, the groups looked for linkages
between the set
of connections they mapped separately and--Viola!—they produce a basic
Structural Dynamics Model (SDM).
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Using the SDM, they generate a set of
scenario worlds
and elaborated them into initial plot lines using a scenario
blueprinting
tool. After narrowing the scenario set
down to the most distinct, they live in their
worlds, exploring what life is like in their scenario world
and what sort of business prospects Vistico might have in their world.
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Using this analysis, they generate a set
of strategies that
work for Vistico in their particular world and then they stress test
those
strategies by visiting other worlds to see how they work there. The results are intriguing.
For example, the idea of the democratic
workplace, which has immediate appeal to many, clearly doesn't work in
some
possible future worlds. Thus, some
strategies
are robust and work across a wide variety of worlds, while others are
contingent
and work only in some possible future worlds.
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With robust and
contingent strategies in
hand, participants are able to think about how Vistico might implement
and monitor
action
plans.
  
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