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/ The 4th International Seville Conference on Future-Oriented Technology Analysis (FTA):12 & 13 May 2011
FTA and Grand Societal Challenges:
Shaping and Driving Structural and Systemic Transformations
Foresight scenarios as tools for the creation of a security strategy
Authors: / Dr. Michaela SchaschkeDr. Martin Hellmann
Sponsors: / DLR
Type: / National FTA Exercise
Geographic Coverage: / Germany, EU
Scope: / security research
Applied Methods: / Core Competences Analysis; Key Success Factors; PEST Analysis; Resource-based Analysis; Scenario Planning; SWOT, Trend Analysis
Evaluation: Impacts: / A roadmap for German Aerospace Center (DLR); Security research strategy has been outlined
Organiser: / German Aerospace Center (DLR – Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V.),
Dr. Michaela Schaschke, VO-ST-SV, Linder Hoehe, 51147 Koeln,
Duration: / 2011-2013 / Budget: / none / Time Horizon: / 2012+ / Date of Brief: / 08.04.2011
Keywords: / research and technology, security strategy, roadmap, SWOT
Purpose
Over the last few decades, the architecture of global security and the security threats faced by our society have altered fundamentally. To meet these new requirements in the near future, science and research begin to play a decisive role, along with politics and business. DLR's fifth research programme is an interdisciplinary one, encompassing security-related aspects of its four main research programs. The strategic impetus of security research is delivered against a backdrop of future security and defence policy within Europe and, at an international level, taking proper account of defined capability profiles aimed at protecting its population and safeguarding peace.
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Defence & Security research at DLR
Over the last few decades, the architecture of global security and the security threats faced by our society have altered fundamentally. Direct and indirect threats, such as terrorism, organised crime and piracy or the growing shortages of raw materials and energy, climate change and its associated catastrophes pose new challenges to national security and defence.
To meet these new requirements in the near future, science and research begin to play a decisive role, along with politics and business. Highly-developed technologies, systems, concepts and expertise that originate in the world of science are already helping to ensure that capability profiles derived from various different scenarios are well served, thereby assisting with the resolution of conflicts and crises. The ability to forecast possible future scenarios is constantly confronted by its inherent limitations – terrorism and natural catastrophes being good examples. This makes civilian and defence-related security research especially important.
The German Aerospace Center (DLR) is one of Europe's leading public research institutions, setting trends in its four main research programs aeronautics, space, transport and energy. Approximately 6.900 people work for DLR at 33 research institutes and facilities. The DLR budget for in-house research and development work and other internal operations amounts to approximately €770 million (2010), of which round about half comes from revenues earned by DLR. DLR also administers the space budget of the German government, which totals some €1.047 million (2009). Thereby, DLR bridges the gap between basic research and innovative applications and transfers knowledge and research results to the industry and the political sphere through mediation, consultation and studies as well as through the provision of services. The research activities are managed in collaboration with partners in government, academia and industry. DLR's field of research is most central coined from networking and results in projects which have a great amount of multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity.
DLR's fifth research programme is an interdisciplinary one, encompassing security-related aspects of its four main research programs. The security-related research work delivers services for development, testing and evaluation of technologies. In regards to supporting and protection the population the objective is assessment and consultancy for security-related applications.
Therefore, DLR integrates results and further research activities from the areas of airport security (aeronautics and transport), satellite-assisted crisis management (space), remote or 'decentralised' energy supply (energy) and transportation management for major events as well as catastrophe management (space and transport). The strategic impetus of security research is delivered against a backdrop of future security and defence policy within Europe and, at an international level, taking proper account of defined capability profiles aimed at protecting its population and safeguarding peace.
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FTA Process
The general overall strategy of DLR is generated from the central strategy department in coordination with the chairman of the board of management who is the process owner. It is generated top-down, and replenished bottom-up by inputs from the employees and other bodies: employees are integrated through annual chairman roadshows at the 15 national locations, where the strategy is discussed and aligned; additional, inquiries of customers, clients, politics and other bodies and panels are integrated. The intent is to generate an overall strategy that is greater than the sum of its partial strategies which are generated in the administrative area as well as research and technology areas.
The overall strategy of DLR is decisive for all partial strategies and strategic goals: both DLR's administrative strategy (i.e. in human resource management, infrastructure management) and – as a result – DLR's strategic goals as well as the strategies and strategic goals of the four research and technology areas. The process owners of the partial strategies are the board members in aeronautics, space, energy and transport while the process owner for the administrative strategy is the DLR chairman. All the process owners are responsive of specifying and substantiating the overall strategy. A very special case is the security strategy which is on the one hand based on the strategies of the four main research and technology areas and on the other hand dedicated to special security purposes. On this basis a security strategy – as much as the other four research field strategies – is top-down restricted and has to fit from bottom-up. How the strategy formation process based on a FTA-process is proceeded and the strategy is derived is shown below.
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Overall FTA process – Step 1: Gathering of information
The strategy forming process starts with an analysis of the environment to set the context. The environmental scanning comprises various systemic, but omnidirectional analysis, e.g. the
- scanning of given environmental determinants encompassing global and specific elements of political, economic, social and technological issues,
- analysis of the competitor's strategy (e.g. current and future research topics) and customer needs (in order to deliver applicationally suitable value for industrial research and producers), and
- survey of major national and international challenges (societal needs and research-based technical specifications).
From all these fields the key factors and the moderating driving forces were extracted and evaluated by risk-coordinators. DLR's risk-coordinators are representatives from various divisions (research and technology areas, management, and administrative departments). They were involved to avoid personal biases related to a specific area of responsibility. Afterwards the risk-coordinators and the DLR strategy department rate the influencing factors' and the moderating drivers' probability from a range of total certainty (for prognosis), to subjective risks (for prevision) and vague future prospects of uncertainty (for projections).
These input factors are combined with results from trend analysis. Trend analysis is focused on three time horizons: ten, twenty and fifty years. This broad time span is mandatory because of the research areas of DLR: research progress and innovations in the four research areas have different development periods, e.g. transport with short and space with long development periods ranging from twenty up to more than fifty years.
Based on this information a roadmap is generated, containing the context of:
- identified politics-, economic-, society- and technology-based paradigms and paradigm shifts,
- leading indicators and driving forces extracted from grouped trends, based on continued current conditions and
- wildcards and uncertainty to integrate important assumptions, which give a glimpse of unexpected events that could have a big impact.
Overall FTA process – Step 2: Clustering and ranking
The next step is to build significant blocks for scenario developing that predicts present-day technical standards into the future by charting the trajectories of research and the risk or threat potentials inherent in them.
Relevant paradigms were selected and used as an overall guide. Supposed mobility or energy supplies are good examples. They can be thought of as the force behind the unwritten rules of society or a particular research. When paradigm shifts occur, there are movements from the accepted background issue, to a new one. It calls the prevailing wisdom into question, and when there is sufficient evidence to stimulate a wide debate on a topic, e.g. discussions about increasing terrorism caused by 9/11, a paradigm shift is likely underway. There is a close relation between paradigms, paradigm shifts and trends. Trends as patterns from bygone events can be extrapolated into the future respecting research topics or time horizons. Clustering trends into significant groups and identifying few distinctive driving forces is useful to better understand the subject under review as well as to estimate near-term future events. Marker of potential trend reversals and discontinuities in politics, economics, society and technology that may happen, complete the roadmap focus on determinants.
Overall FTA process – Step 3: Developing scenarios
Firstly, the focal issue or decision has to be identified: especially in the research area there is too much uncertainty and potentially new occurrences to develop a scenario that suits all situations. Generally, it is better to define larger scale scenarios and allow for specific choices closer to the time in question.
After omnidirectional information gathering and roadmap development, this step is the first one that is focused on specific research area related purposes. A single approach concerning a specific issue or decision includes:
- knowledge about DLR's current competences and value chains in aeronautics, space, energy and transport research and technology,
- ranking of relevant influencing key factors and driving forces (from partial roadmap) on the degree of importance and the degree of uncertainty for the specific issue. They are plotted in a coordinate system with importance vs. uncertainty. Those key factors or driving forces that fall in the quadrant high importance and high uncertainty should be looked at carefully as they are more critical to providing different scenarios that are important.
After vigilant assessment of these internal and external inputs, scenarios are fleshed out by using all possible combinations of key factors and driving forces that can be built into a narrative about the scenarios. Narratives give an abstract model-based view of things that could happen. To open the scenario, the scenario narratives are not only based on relevant aspects of the considered research area environment and the implications that could happen if different possibilities occur.
All generated scenarios are hypothetical. They are interspersed with expected extrapolations to list a combination of events that describe how a future situation might occur. Hence, building scenarios is rather more useful for understanding the options and dealing with uncertainty than in predicting specific situations. Scenarios can be built on the assumption of incremental change that is based on a current, near term view of the environment. They can also be built on various factors pointing to accelerating change or deal with trend reversals.
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Partial FTA process: Security
The process to generate the security strategy follows the process which is used to generate the overall strategy of DLR. The special challenge to generate the security strategy is the use of a multi- and interdisciplinary approach to address future public needs.
Moreover, security research by definition is mission- or rather thread-oriented. It is a field of application combining various disciplines with focus on societal challenge to serve societal solutions: It is not only focused on improving the understanding of existing principles. The confrontation with 'sapient opponents' that use a broad variety of options, requires research methodologies that are not only based on existing public needs and challenges, but also based on analysis of potential uncertainties and use of various context interpretations to create forecast scenarios and technological security tools.
Focussing on the generation of the strategy on multidisciplinarity means that all basic research fields are integrated: aeronautics, space, energy and transport. Interdisciplinarity means that also results from cooperational projects focussing specific targets, such as airport security, are integrated. Combining all these requirements, the generation of the security strategy and security strategic goals has to be balanced between omnidirectional and directional analysis as well as between the research strategies of DLR and its four partial strategies.
Gathering of information
The special focus of security research and technology involves a broad integration of different challenges: coming from supposed non-military, military and dual use as well as national and international political regulations or intentions and public needs. Development periods on the one hand are dependent on development periods of the other four research and technology areas and on the other hand have to be emergent. Security, dealing with acts perpetrated by intentional adversaries or with rare natural or man-made accidents with major consequences, is a domain where broad qualitative uncertainty is relevant even within the most near-sighted time horizon. A general conspectus in terms of a roadmap of current and potential surrounding conditions is therefore very much needed in the security domain by virtue of addressing security challenges.
Clustering and ranking
The extracted area-related key factors and driving forces are now sighted from a security-relevant view. While paradigms and trends are only based on assumptions and variables that will continue to behave as they have in the past, there is a special need for security scenarios to consider situations one can not imagine yet (like the activities a “sapient opponent” could bear). Like paradigm shifts or trend reversals, some wildcards with major impact have to be identified or extrapolated on the basis of exposed experiences in the past. Furthermore there is a broader focus on uncertainties, which are analyzed on the basis of game theory tools handling with incomplete information or evolutionary concepts.