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Oxford Futures Forum 2008
Background |
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In October 2002, in celebration of 30 years of scenario practice within the Royal Dutch Shell, a meeting was convened in London to enable reflection on evolving practices in scenario thinking and planning and to look forward at scenarios and scenario practices for the next 30 years. Participants included some 110 practitioners from around the world and included a mix of ‘old hands’ and ‘new blood’ – the latter through representatives of the next generation of practice.
Picking up on the demand for an international home for scenario thinking and planning expressed by many participants during the Shell Anniversary event, and in light of the persistent practice of and renewed interest in scenarios an Oxford-led group of “futures” practitioners and researchers decided to establish a bi-annual event aimed at clarifying theory of what works, when and why, in order to extending the effectiveness of scenario thinking and practice. The 1st Oxford Futures Forum (OFF2005) The first Oxford Forum, which was held in October 2005, was anchored on the 40th anniversary of the publication of Emery and Trist’s seminal paper, ‘The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments,’ in Human Relations. In that paper Emery and Trist laid out the concept of the turbulent field as a distinctive texture of the environment that depicted its most complex causality. They were also the first to offer field-referenced collaborative endeavours as a likely adaptive response to it. Their paper has been one of the most widely cited in the organizational sciences, and has been used in many different ways by a wide variety of scholars. The first Oxford Futures Forum was successful in producing a lively two-day ‘strategic conversation’ among 70 participants from the communities of social ecologists and scenario thinkers. The outputs of OFF 2005 have been two books: (1) Scenarios for Success, published by Wiley in 2007, and (2) Business Planning for Turbulent Environments (tentative title), to be published by Earthscan in 2008. The 2nd Oxford Futures Forum (OFF2008) We are aiming for similar effective and quality outcomes from the second Forum (OFF2008) which will take place in April 2008, in Oxford, and is themed on ‘scenarios and sensemaking’. Potential outcomes may be in the form of research questions, joint publications and further networking and community building. Our intention is to make this 2nd event highly interactive, in the nature of a “strategic conversation”. The forum’s organizing committee members are Angela Wilkinson, Rafael Ramírez, John Selsky , and Kathleen Sutcliffe. The Organising Committee for the OFF2008 Dr. Angela Wilkinson (Director of Scenario Planning and Futures Research James Martin Institute for Science and Civilisation, University of Oxford) Prof. Rafael Ramirez (Professor HEC Paris, Senior Research Fellow James Martin Institute and Fellow in Strategy Templeton College, University of Oxford) Prof. John Selsky (Associate Professor Management, University of South Florida Lakeland) Prof. Kathleen Sutcliffe (Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Research Gilbert and Ruth Whitaker Professor of Business Administration and Professor of Management and Organizations University of Michigan Ross School of Business) |
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Templeton College 2008 |