BUS602: Marketing Management

Starbursting is a second method that generates questions on how an issue may evolve by taking the perspectives below: 

• Who? (list potential key actors) 
• What? (describe alternative futures) 
• When? (when might these futures happen?) 
• Where? (describe geographic impacts significant to these futures?) 
• Why? (what would cause these alternative futures to happen?) 
• How? (might these alternative futures emerge?) 

Both Brainstorming and Starbursting are two great ways, among several others for an individual (or a team) to tell stories about the future they see emerging. 

Other methods include: 

• Snapshot – extracts key information from an Insight 
• Deception – identifies false information 
• Devil's Advocate – critiques someone else's analysis 
• Ideation (including McCluhan's Tetrad) – helps understand change possibilities 
• Lifestyle – examines societal impacts 
• Post-Implementation Review – determines the underlying causes of an event 

Each presents an individual or team with different vantage points and choices of perspective on the same issue. 

Through co-created storytelling and narrative fragments we turn ideas and visions into the actions that form the pattern we regard as our strategy, to generate future scenarios and for use with other foresight methods. 

We can represent these thinking tools as basic shared analyses like the ones in Figures 25 and 26 above or through visual analysis diagramming and narrative analysis. 

For instance, Southbeach Modeller (Figure 28) allows the iteration of the initial set of Brainstorm and Starburst questions and facilitates the development of further layers of questioning through its visual analysis diagramming. 

If used in a workshop, for example, the facilitator enters the subject of the workshop in the center. Clicking around the model generates the Starburst questions. These questions can be captured in the notes panel or used to create rules that trigger and generate additional prompts as the user clicks around the model they are developing. 

Diagrammatic models using notations like this can be used to generate multiple scenarios in visual form. 

Figure 28. Southbeach

Cognitive Edge provides a decision maker with the ability to see the world through others eyes using its narrative analysis 'Sense-maker' software. 'Sense-maker' has specific applications in Horizon Scanning and Risk Assessment: 

• Helps decision-makers see the world through others eyes by utilizing collective wisdom 
• Complements traditional scenario planning tools 
• Provides weak signal monitoring and alerts 
• Measures complex issues without allowing participants to game the outcome