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Case Study: Imaginative Thinking in Action 139

business unit executives to map and begin to make sense of their consider-
able stress-causing anxieties. It also provided a risk-free forum to finally
discuss some of the what-ifs in these “distant” scenarios. And scenario
planning at its best is an engaging process; executives spent considerable
time “rolling around” in the scenarios and absorbing their implications.
One of the scenarios developed for the consumer services division focused
on the likely outcomes of the commoditization of long-distance service, at
the time in its early stages. In the scenario, long distance was positioned as
an unbranded component of a larger suite of communications products or
services. Seeing the AT&T brand “disappear” was of great concern to the
executives.
The ODDsters of course used a variety of tools and tricks besides
scenario planning. The group’s goal was to make a focal issue deeply under-
stood and deeply felt—no mere talk here. The issue was surrounded from
every angle using every technique the group could find. The emergence of
the Internet, naturally, was one of the main issues the group tackled. In a
quest to bring corporate recognition to the transformational role of the
Internet, the group’s members did all the traditional things any researcher
worth his or her salt would do: they constructed and publicized scenarios,
did global field work to examine the emerging impact of the Internet on
businesses and work, wrote white papers, and held workshops to explore
question like, “What If Minutes Were Free?” (This was foresightful as no
Skype yet existed.) In addition to providing expertise and “free consulting,”
ODD researched complex but strategically important issues as well.
Moreover, it translated their significance into language that strategists could
understand. For example, Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) is a technical
standard that defined how computers talk to each other over the Internet.
A key difference between IPv6 and the existing Internet protocol was
resource reservation—new circuitlike functionality that largely overcame
the existing protocol’s inability to support high-quality voice telephony.
ODD understood that IPv6 could have profound implications for
AT&T’s telephony business, which relied on a traditional circuit-switched
network. But few people employed as “corporate strategists” even knew
what the standard stood for. Fortunately, ODD, which combined commer-
cial awareness and strength in technology that derived from its roots in Bell
Laboratories, could demystify even the most obtuse technology and explain