This week's theme is the future of the music industry. A major impetus is David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard's The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution.
A major purpose of scenario planning is to empower people, organizations, and industries to evaluate a diverse set of possible futures, decide which future they prefer, and to identify those key milestones or Events that lead logically to the desired outcome. In short, scenario planning provides a structured framework for strategy determination and implementation.
Participants can then monitor the environment using War Rooms and similar techniques to identify counter and confirming Events and trends. More importantly, participants can also organize and utilize available resources to pursue the Events that are key to the desired outcome.
We've considered four alternative futures for the music industry:
In a Future of Music scenario planning meeting, participants vote on
the likelihood and desirability of each Endstate coming to pass. They
also select those Events that must or must not happen if each Endstate
is to become a reality. Comparing Event sequences (scenarios) will
indicate those events that are Common to multiple Endstates and those
that are Unique to a particular Endstate. Generally speaking, Common
Events are more likely to occur since more stakeholders have an
interest in those Events.
When done as a public workshop, participants typically enhance their
understanding of industry dynamics and key Events. They can use this
information in their organization to help set strategy and organize
action.
When done for a specific organization, The Future of Music will help
that organization set goals and strategies for achieving them and to
assign resources to strategy implementation.
Finally, the Endstates discussed this week for the Music industry are, of course, not the only possibilities.
Here are some pointers to addition thoughts from Gerd Leonhard and David Kusek:
Check out the interview on IT Conversations here.
Gerd's blog is here.
The web site for the Future of Music book is here.
The Future of Music Coalition can be found here.
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