A team of five master’s students took this year’s top spot with a Netflix-inspired presentation of three very different Arctic futures.
What will the Arctic look like in 2050?
43 students from 13 countries took on that question this year. One team of five walked away with the winning scenario, earning a spot on the High North Dialogue stage in Bodø last week.
Josefine Maximiliane Boeckeluehr, Vera Gulbrandsen, Monika Ivanauskaite, Angelica Jeanet Skarding Remen and Wenxin Wang, all students at Nord University Business School, were selected by an international expert jury as the top team in this year’s scenario exercise.
The master course, led by Dr. Elena Dybtsyna-Olsen at the High North Center for Business and Governance, is an important part of the High North Dialogue academic program. It trains students in foresight and strategic thinking by having them explore plausible futures for the Arctic region.
– There are relatively few business schools that systematically teach students how to think about the future in this way. Here in Bodø, we have done it for several years, says Dybtsyna-Olsen.
A Netflix approach to the future
The winning team opened their presentation with a familiar screen.
Choose your preferences, scroll through the trailers, pick your future. Each of their three scenarios came with its own short film, built to pull the audience into the world before the analysis began.
Behind the visuals sat months of work. Five assumptions the students treated as near-certainties. Nine uncertainties. Three wild cards, meant to stress-test everything they had built.
– Our wild cards are not predictions. They are just stress tests of whether the strategies we have already developed hold up when the conditions shift, the team told the audience.
Picked from 11 groups
The scenario exercise concluded earlier in the week with a marathon of presentations from 11 student groups. An international expert jury, with members from Spain, Norway and France, evaluated each one on analytical quality, creativity, internal consistency and relevance for Arctic society and business.
The winning team distinguished itself through particularly clear analysis, strategic insight and creativity.
– Scenario planning does not try to predict what will happen. It helps participants think deeply about what could happen, Dybtsyna-Olsen said.
The future isn’t set
The three futures the student shared point in different directions. In one, big tech takes over and weakens governments. In another, conflict grows and the Arctic becomes militarised. In the third, the region leads the green transition, with new tensions over who benefits.
The students also proposed strategies meant to hold up across all three. Governance frameworks for AI and data, built for Arctic conditions. Binding co-governance bodies with Sámi representation on energy and land use. Policies that keep the value created in the north invested in the north.
As the team reminded the audience at the end of their presentation:
– The future depends on the strategies and our behaviour today. We are still capable of shaping the future the way we want to.
Watch a recording of the full session: