5.3 Introduction to Islands in the Sky

Islands in the Sky is a situational awareness and scenario-based strategic planning tool that is especially useful for managing uncertainty. It is designed for structuring conversations about the future business environment to inform decision-making in the present. This allows a voice for everyone and for things to get done quickly. It might not be perfect, but it helps form a base from which we can learn and iteratively develop.

The approach encourages you to bring a range of voices into the conversation and to consider different cultural and social values. Different lived experiences and perceptions of reality are all considered to navigate what the most important things are in a culture, society or organisation.

Individuals and/or teams are brought together to explore the environment and consider the future. This normally takes place in a workshop, and it is recommended that you either do this remotely or face to face, rather than hybrid. You then work through a series of stages, using collaboration tools to input into the sessions.

Activity 16 Riding a bicycle

Timing: 15 minutes

In the video below, Dr Matt Finch (Associate Fellow, Saïd Business School) explains the Islands in the Sky approach and how it can help with navigating uncertain futures and understanding your transactional relationships with an introduction from Professor Rafael Ramírez.

1. As you watch the video, think about the following question posed by Matt at the end of the video:

How do I go beyond expectation and the things I currently anticipate – even beyond my hopes and fears – to really see how the future could be different, in ways that previously lay in my blind spot? (Extract from Video 14)

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Transcript: Video 14 Introduction to Islands in the Sky

RAFAEL RAMÍREZ:

Islands in the Sky has taken the principles of the methodology and adapted them to the specifics of the project, as has been done by many, many organisations and fields of inquiry around the world. And we're delighted that this is one more proof that the methodology can be adapted, adopted, and rendered useful.

The approach that we have been developing in Oxford and are still developing. It is an unfolding story of inquiry. There's a wonderful book by the late Wes Churchman called The Design of Inquiring Systems. And we very much think of the approach as a designed inquiring system, where different people play different roles in developing inquiry and in redesigning it, as has been the case with the Islands in the Sky project, which has redesigned aspects of the methodology and adapted them for the specific uses that you have had in mind.

The methodology also is an action-learning one, where you have to give it a try and perhaps make a few mistakes until you master the approach. It's a bit like riding a bicycle. I'm a pretty decent lecturer, but I would never be able to succeed in teaching somebody to ride a bicycle if they did not get on the bike and try it and fall and try and so on. So, it's a learning-by-doing methodology. And there's a lot happening in the field of scenario planning these days as well as in strategy.

MATT FINCH:

During the pandemic, it became clear that there was a great need for people to think differently about what was going on, to understand how an uncertain future might play out, and that had to be done very swiftly, often, at very short notice.

So, Islands in the Sky began as a way of taking one of the fundamental insights of the Oxford scenario planning approach, which is that there's a difference between the transactional islands of relationships which we perceive we can influence directly, of entities that we interact with in the real world. And then a wider sea of contextual uncertainties, forces like climate change, the environment, the economy, demographics, social values, all of which have the power to come ashore and redraw that island in the present day.

So, what we tried to do was find a way that even in a short period of time, groups could come together and explore that fundamental difference and see what it might mean for them. So, it isn't full scenario planning. It doesn't go through that process of completely building future visions of iterating and exploring them in depth.

But it allows people to have that first moment of potential insight. If I can't really see what tomorrow's going to hold, can I at least explore the way that different uncertainties might play out? And what that means for us in the here and now if we get a vision of a tomorrow that challenges our assumptions.

Essentially, with Islands in the Sky, what we do is look, first of all, at the islands that we inhabit. That set of transactional relationships, all of the different entities and actors we interact with, and we look at those relationships where we perceive we have an influence. And that's like looking at the other people who live on the same island with our institution as it goes about its business.

And then we consider the sea around that island. And what we look for is the uncertainties and the forces which drive the decisions of the other actors that are on that island with us. So, it might be an uncertainty that just drives the decision of one actor. It might be an uncertainty that drives the decisions of two or three. Or it might be a wider uncertainty that affects everyone, something like climate change, or macroeconomics, or geopolitics.

And then, by exploring how those forces in the sea could come together in different combinations, could play out in different ways, and could redraw the map of our island. Maybe bringing on new actors, removing old ones, changing relationships, changing what is valued or how value is created on that island, we get to see how the world could be different. And that creates a discussion which can inform the decisions we have to make today.

So, Islands in the Sky arose out of an attempt to take some of the key insights of the Oxford scenario approach and find ways to apply them as swiftly as possible. It doesn't do the complete job of scenarios which take time to be built out, which require reflection and iteration. It's an ongoing process much more than just an away day or a workshop.

But even by simply mapping what are the relationships we perceive we can control and influence now, and what are the uncertainties that have the potential to redraw that ecosystem, that act of mapping in itself can already yield insights and get us to step out of the perspective that we use in the day-to-day and see things more strategically.

To maybe have a moment where we look at the world and we think, I hadn't seen that before. And really, I've never looked at my situation from that angle. And that moment of surprise can actually form the basis for wise decision-making, even in those moments where there's complete pressure, complete uncertainty, and the pace of things seems hectic.

So, you step back. You almost take a breath. And you survey the terrain, and you willingly engage your imagination to say, actually, what are the things that normally I think well, that could never happen? How do I go beyond expectation and the things I currently anticipate, even beyond my hopes and fears, to really see how the future could be different in ways that previously lay in my blind spot?

End transcript: Video 14 Introduction to Islands in the Sky

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Video 14 Introduction to Islands in the Sky

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Answer

Rafael states that this methodology expects action learning, where you give it a try and make a few mistakes, using the riding a bicycle analogy that is similar to this kind of learning – if you fall off, you get back on and try again.

2. Think about the statement by Rafael and the bicycle analogy, and how might this help you be aware of your blind spots. Consider how open to action learning for uncertain futures you are. Then vote in poll below:

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How comfortable you feel with this approach will depend on your experience of managing uncertainty and change. In an organisational setting where we often have little control over the strategic direction and organisational objectives, uncertainty can be a common feeling.

This approach can help with managing your feelings towards uncertainty by reframing the context and helping you feel more comfortable with the unknown. Similar to if you learned to ride a bicycle – the first time you tried you had no idea what it would feel like, but as your ability and confidence grows, you are willing to try new things. How many of you tried this as a child, or are even now still trying, to ride your bike with no hands?

In the introduction to Islands in the Sky, Matt and Rafael discuss the need to consider your transactional relationships, against a backdrop of rapid change and uncertainty, where you can’t see what tomorrow is going to hold. They refer to ‘TUNA’ conditions – turbulence, uncertainty, novelty and ambiguity. You started thinking about these in Activity 16. Below, Table 6 provides more information about TUNA conditions. These conditions take a systems thinking approach and can enable teams/organisations to develop their situational awareness, and better understand the context they are operating in to create a better future.

In Video 15 ‘Working with uncertainty’, Dr Matt Finch explains that when we are operating in times of unpredictable uncertainty, and we cannot draw on data or our experience of similar situations, then we have to find vantage points from which to draw.

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Transcript: Video 15 Working with uncertainty

MATT FINCH:

The issue of working with uncertainty is really at the heart of both the Oxford Scenarios Approach and the Islands in the Sky tool as well because both of these approaches are designed to cope with times of unpredictable uncertainty or what some people call TUNA conditions, which is an acronym standing for Turbulence, Uncertainty, Novelty, and Ambiguity.

So if it feels as if the ground beneath our feet is unstable, if it feels like we simply can't forecast what tomorrow will hold, if situations seem to be arising which we've never seen before in our experience or our frame of reference, or if the situation is ambiguous and you can read it more than one way, then it's very, very difficult to get firm purchase on what's going on around us.

And if we can't trust experience, and if we can't use a predictive model based on what we know has happened in the past, then we have to manufacture future contexts to give us a frame of reference that we can think about what's going on. So, in a way, we give ourselves firm ground by imagining things from times which haven't happened yet because the truth is you can't gather one jot of data, one jot of evidence from an event which haven't happened yet.

So essentially, we're always dependent on the idea that we're projecting something forwards into the unknown. No one has been to the future yet. But when conditions are stable, then we can predict, well, I need to do this tomorrow because I know how things were yesterday.

But when we're in these times of uncertainty-- and the 21st century has been full of these shocks and surprises. They weren't things that couldn't be predicted. They weren't things that no expert had anticipated. But whether it is the pandemic, whether it is some of the political upsets that we've seen domestically and internationally, whether it's COVID-19 or the Ukraine invasion, all of these things have surprised us. It feels like something has come ashore from the sea of uncertainty and changed the map that we operate on.

We live in an age with a great vogue for data-driven decision-making. And of course, sound judgment is often based on evidence. It's based on information that we've gathered and processed. But the challenge is that data always comes from the past. And how we value and interpret and make sense of that is also something that happens within a particular frame of reference.

So actually, because there is no data yet from the future, we have to find different vantage points, especially in times which are characterised by uncertainty. So doing scenarios work, it's not just about a game of make-believe. A great scenario planner called Pierre Wack said, "It's like standing, looking at rain clouds on a mountain, and trying to think if that means there's going to be floods in the valley below in three days' time."

It's still about thinking about the situation we might have to inhabit. It's still very much about sense-making and obtaining whatever information we can from the world around us. In many ways, it is, in fact, a map of the present.

It's looking at the relationships which already exist and the uncertainties, forces, and factors which might drive those relationships in times to come. And one of the things scenarios can do and that the Islands in the Sky approach can do is complement data-driven decision-making by letting us see the world from a new angle and see things afresh.

End transcript: Video 15 Working with uncertainty

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Video 15 Working with uncertainty