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Scenario thinking – only for the wise and brave?

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Scenario thinking – only for the wise and brave?

In the thought provoking article ‘The end of the university as we know it‘, author Nathan Harden paints a scenario picture of the future of universities in the USA, that could be real within 50 years. And it is a landslide! “Half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist… Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their job; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.”

When one reads this short summary it may sound far fetched. How can something so respectable and so old vanish so soon? But Nathan gives plenty of arguments to support his case.

Now a wise man will ask the question: ‘what if?’ What if it were true? Let’s think this through what it would mean for my University or my company. A fearful manager will quickly find arguments why the scenario can not be true. “This part of the argument does not hold in that situation… and the government will not allow for that part.” Etc. You see the intellectual challenge and the potential fruits are being killed before it even started.

Nicholas Taleb teaches us in his excellent book ‘The Black Swan’ that the future is utterly unpredictable – if you still needed convincing. And in a world full of uncertainty, where nothing is forever, not even universities, not even… your company… it is only wise to ask these questions: ‘what if?’.

What is holding you from discussing just a few stretching future scenarios with your management team? What if… you did? What if… you asked us to coordinate that conversation? What if… that was the most important decision you made this year?