Result!

Last night I attended a Consequence Scanning workshop at the Cambridge Tester Meetup. In it, Drew Pontikis walked us through the basics of an approach for identifying opportunities and risks and selecting which ones to target for exploitation or mitigation.

The originators of Consequence Scanning recommend that it's run as part of planning and design activities with the outcomes being specific actions added to a backlog and a record of all of the suggested consequences for later review. So, acting as a product team for the Facebook Portal pre-launch, we

listed potential intended and unintended consequences
sorted them into action categories (control, influence, or monitor)
chose several consequences to work on
explored possible approaches for the action assigned to each selected consequence

In the manual there are various resources for prompting participants to think broadly and laterally about consequences. For example, a product can have an effect on people other than its users, in areas far removed from its usage, and on behaviours quite unlike those it was designed for.

If you're wondering where this differs from the kind of risk assessments you might already do, I'd say (based only on this short, artificial, experience) I can think of a couple of ways:

it combines positive and negative outcomes into one exercise
it can expose unintended positive outcomes and intended negative outcomes

One piece that I felt was missing was an explicit recording of who the consequence fell on. When thinking about risk my mantra, learned from Fiona Charles, is "risk, of what, to who, when?"

In this exercise I think I'd want to record something like "consequence affects who, how, when?" Even the suggested consequence log (which archives all suggestions for later review) does not have an entry for that.

Consequence Scanning has similarities to other approaches for generating ideas from multiple perspectives in collaboration with colleagues. In a hand-wavy way, it fits somewhere between the generality of Six Thinking Hats and the tight lens of Riskstorming. It also shares the insight that making space to stop and think is a good way to find things out, irrespective of the level of structure and facilitation.

So, would I run a Consequence Scanning session at work based on this experience? For sure, it looks focussed and lightweight and the workshop was fun to do. I'd say that's a positive, and intended, result!

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