CEO of Easygenerator

At the online Educa in Berlin Willem Manders and Hans de Zwart facilitated a workshop on the future of learning organizations. They both work For Shell. Shell uses scenarios to investigate the future to assess its current strategy. We applied this method to investigate the future of learning and learning organizations. We started out by brainstorming about general trends, from the outcome we choose two. Then we determined two extremes per trend, with this result:

  1. How work is done?
    Relationship driven vs data driven
  2. How work is organized?
    Structured, regulated and managed vs flexible, individualistic and enabled

If you put these trends on two axes, with the extremes attached to them, you get four quadrants with four possible scenario’s. We brainstormed about their characteristics and came up with four names:

  1. Old boy network
  2. In-crowd
  3. Big data
  4. Quantified self

The image shows the four scenario’s and their characteristic.

The four Learning scenario's

Last week we had a webinar to follow-up and to discuss each scenario. It was an interesting exercise. For starters it was the most complex online setup I ever participated in, with a central part and four separate groups. I was one of the moderators of a sub-group. It was a bit of a technical struggle, but despite of that we had very interesting discussions and outcomes. The results of these sessions will come available at the website learningscenarios.org. A very interesting process and outcomes. You can participate via learningscenarios.org!

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