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Integraed Media Association

2009
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Steps 1,2,3: Defining the Issues, the Drivers, the Matrix

Step One:  Identify Your Focal Issue or Decision

The first step is a relatively simple one, defining the question. In this session we settled on “The Future of Public Radio.”

Step Two:  Define Your Driving Forces

What are the key things we don’t know that could affect the future of public radio?  And of those, which are the most important? This group identified more than 100 uncertainties, which they distilled to this list of seven “most important, most uncertain" dynamics:

  • User’s willingness to pay for service or content either online or on air
  • Importance of “local” operation or ownership
  • Alternate delivery systems
  • Future of rights and intellectual property
  • Local/radio versus global/web
  • State of the economy
  • Emergence of new grammar/syntax (e.g. the logic of video gaming)

Step Three: Plot Two Intersecting Axes of Uncertainty & Create a Matrix That Defines Four Very Different Futures

The group then reduced these seven dynamics to just two that would be used to generate the analytical matrix (shown below).  Those two "drivers" are

  1. The Audience: The Nature of Demand. How will the audience change in its needs and behaviors?
  2. The Supply Side: Producers and Distributors.  How will the set of content and service providers change?

Each of these drivers was then placed on one of the axes.

  1. On the east/west, horizontal axis, we placed the "Audience/Nature of Demand" driver, which went from relatively slow, evolving, incremental change on the left (west) to revolutionary, radical highly disruptive change on the right (east)
  2. On the nort/south, vertical axis, they placed the "Supply Side: Producer/Distributor" driver, which went from continuity in media ownership and control among "largely traditional players"      

Crossing these two axes creates a matrix or grid, the four corners of which constitute four plausible — but very different — scenarios:

 
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