Using news reports can be a useful foundation on which to develop scenarios and generate different options. It is also a useful background in preparing a PESTLE analysis by scanning external influences.
Depending on your starting point and scope this could vary from looking at global press, national press, regional influences or sector-specific pieces (for example, using the Times Education Supplement or the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) and could also comprise printed or web-based materials, or a mixture of both.
For use in constructing your PESTLE analysis, look for major stories or common threads throughout your collated materials – for example, news of forthcoming or proposed legislation that may impact your operating environment, either directly or indirectly.
You can use news headlines with the scenarios themselves in a workshop environment (or perhaps online by means of wiki or blog-based technologies) by asking participants to address a particular scenario, scanning news items to provide ‘evidence’ of the plausibility of that particular scenario.
An outline suggestion for such an activity is given here. For best results (depending on scope of the exercise and number of participants involved) it is advisable to run this as a ‘pre-workshop’ activity so that material can be collated over a period of time beforehand, say a week – this has the added advantage of encouraging engagement with the scenarios as well as familiarisation with the overall concepts and process.
Activity plan
- Pre-allocate different scenarios to workshop participants
- Ask participants to collect five to to ten news items that support the influences present in their given scenario
- Ask them to bring these items (printed if from web) to the workshop
- Ask participants to gather the news headlines together within their scenario groups and display the headlines on a wall or appropriate surface (ten to 15 minutes)
- Participants then choose a couple of the headlines and share their thoughts on what they found remarkable about them, what touched them most, and why (ten-15 minutes)
- Ask the group to step back in order to get an overview of the display and then asked the questions, ‘what are your blind spots?’ and ‘what was new and surprises you?’ (five minutes)
- Ask group participants to use their imaginations and suggest intriguing headlines for ten -15 years in the future (ten minutes)
An optional follow on to this would be that the group then selects three of the headlines to develop further and make even more ‘colourful’ and imaginative (ten minutes).