ATWG Scenario Planning Workshop

The Aerospace Technology Working Group
An Industry-NASA-Academia Technical Forum

National Meeting Theme:
Creating the Future in Space

Hosted by the University of Houston Clear Lake
Houston, Texas
4-7 November, 2002

Collaborative Scenario-Based Planning Workshop
An InnovationLabs Solutions Workshop (TM)

On Monday, November 3, 2002 a groups of about 30 attendees of the ATWG conference participated in a dense 4 hour scenario planning workshop faciliated by Langdon Morris of InnovationLabs. Building on work that had been done at the two prior ATWG meetings (May 2002 and November 2001). This web site is a detailed record of their work, organized chronologically in the sequence of the workshop.

The workshop was structured as follows:

1. Questions Gallery: 18 questions to which each of the participants was invited to respond.
2. Welcome and Introduction
3. Synthesis of the responses to the questions
4. Scenarios and Strategies - 6 teams
5. Report and Conversation

To broaden the scope of the work, each of the 6 scenario-building teams was given a different scenario matrix to work with. In spite of these differences, a general consensus emerged among the participants, reflecting a general belief that unless or until there is a significant threat ("fear") that can be countered by the development of space, or until there is significant commerical opportunitiy in space ("greed"), the space movement will see slow progress.

In contrast, two other possible developments could significantly alter this situation, namely the development of significantly lower cost propulsion, or development of significant space-based power generation technology.

Langdon then presented a summary of the workshop at the Thursday morning general ATWG session. In addition to summarizing the outomces of the workshop, he presented two additional observations. First, it appears that NASA itself is undergoing a "restart," a serious re-invention of itself. Secondly, such a restart involves recreating the organizational culture, and this is a difficult and stressful thing to do when you're inside.

Click here to download a copy of this presentation (888KB PowerPoint file).

This scenario process is continuing, and work between now and the May 2003 ATWG meeting will be done online using the ATWG web site and intranet. You're welcome to contact Langdon Morris at LMorris@innovationlabs.com for more information.

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Please note that the reports and conversations as recorded here are not literal transcripts, but edited summaries.