Spoiled Fruit: BlackBerry’s Failure to Scenario Plan

Introduction

Research in Motion (RIM), founded in 1984 by Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin in Waterloo, Ontario, was a transformative part of the revolutionary changes in the growth and usage of wireless telecommunications services (Seth, 2023). RIM released its first mobile device in 1998, which featured keyboard buttons and a first-of-its-kind trackball device, enabling wireless and remote use of corporate email, a technology rapidly growing in its own right. Throughout the early 2000s Blackberry continued to release increasingly capable mobile devices, and at its peak counted more than 85 million global subscribers to its proprietary services. Importantly, these subscribers were heavily skewed towards corporate professionals and company leaders, based on the successful integration with corporate information technology (IT) systems and the enhanced security controls provided within the BlackBerry ecosystem. During this period BlackBerrys were status symbols with upwardly mobile professionals using them to stay constantly connected to their companies (Abdullah, 2022). After peaking at an all time high stock price of $147.55 in mid-2008, the company’s value fell precipitously over the ensuing six months, hitting a low of just $36.31 before the end of 2008, a decline of more than 70% from the peak (Bharath et al., 2023). While many factors contributed to the fall of RIM, the story is not as simple as the commonly held belief that the introduction of the iPhone, with its touchscreen technology, was the cause. In fact, RIM’s lack of scenario planning, including their failure to critically evaluate potential changes in the environment that enabled their key drivers of success, was the most important contributor to their rapid decline in market share and value.

Foundations of Success

RIM’s market share growth was most clearly associated with the enterprise market, with various BlackBerry models being the device of choice for nearly every white collar professional and corporate IT department, based on the ability to send complete emails as opposed to short text messages with complex text entry schemes, along with the corporate environment security controls enabled by BlackBerry’s required implementation architecture. This was a symbiotic relationship, with RIM’s devices being seen as cool and trendy and essential because they enabled easy constant access to email, and the email connectivity was seen as easily configured and effectively secured by corporate IT departments who supported the device ecosystem. During the ascendance of the BlackBerry device families, most consumers continued to use simple flip phones with number keypads and various software attempts to enable alphabet typing through multiple taps of the number keys. The tiny keyboards on BlackBerrys were transformational in how they enabled consumers, primarily business professionals, to write emails or texts almost as fast as they could on a full size keyboard. This technology came to prominence at the same time as the evolving capabilities of third-generation wireless networks, which were developed primarily to support mobile data services rather than acting primarily in service of voice calls. These factors created a generative cycle for RIM, with mobile technology growing more capable at delivering data services, corporate IT departments supporting easily integrated and secured BlackBerry email services, and professionals demanding constant email connectivity. These factors also sowed the seeds of RIM’s downfall just a few short years later. This implosion might have been mitigated or prevented if RIM’s leaders engaged in the practice of scenario planning.

On Scenario Planning

The process of scenario planning produces “a portfolio of future scenarios, each representing a different way your … landscape could look in a few years” (Wade, 2012). This approach does not attempt to evolve the current environment along known axes, rather it identifies a range of potential scenarios which might plausibly emerge given the current state of a situation and the context of trends which might affect that situation. The practice of scenario planning involves the principles of taking the long view, using outside in thinking, and engaging multiple perspectives, each of which helps to broaden the aperture of visible future states (TEDx, 2019). The advantage of scenario planning is that it casts a wide net and thus exposes the wide variety of potential future states with little regard to details such as probability or likelihood. The primary disadvantage of scenario planning is that is not predictive in nature based in part on the willful ignorance of considering probabilities.

Scenario planning efforts, and similar broad-aperture approaches to envisioning possible future states, support planning and innovating to prepare for change in several ways. First, scenario planning incorporates the fundamental assumption that big changes might happen and takes it as a given that some possible future states will look almost unimaginably different that the current state. Second, the scenario planning approach forces individuals and businesses to consider how they might prepare for future states that have a low likelihood but high impact, and at the very least suggests that organizations find ways to identify the precursors of worrisome future states. However, scenario planning effectively requires that organizations have a deep understanding of their own strengths, weaknesses, and assumptions about the current environment. A number of forces act to support or hinder organizational willingness to engage in scenario planning, including technological uncertainty, an organization’s cultural tolerance for innovative thinking, and behavioral unwillingness on the part of individuals to engage in speculation. Technological uncertainty makes scenario planning difficult due to the difficulty envisioning the ways that technology will develop and potentially revolutionize entire industries (e.g., Uber and taxis, AirBNB and hotels). Organizational culture impacts scenario planning based on the degree to which each organization has an expectation of innovative or blue-sky thinking. Individual behavioral preferences can support scenario planning when led by visionaries or halt the process if led by individuals focused on mechanical trending processes.

Scenarios Impacting RIM

RIM’s downfall was ultimately caused by their failure to consider a potential scenario where consumers selected their own devices, rather than corporate IT departments issuing approved devices (Bharath et al., 2023). RIM focused their customer engagement on the enterprise, viewing users of their devices as natural outcomes of the security and integration capabilities developed for enterprise connectivity. As consumer options for mobile devices evolved, including the touchscreen Apple iPhone in 2007 and the Google Android operating system adopted by several device manufacturers, corporate IT departments were forced to adapt to the devices their employees were purchasing rather than dictating the devices employees were allowed to use (Abdullah, 2022; Seth, 2023).

Scenario planning would have helped RIM to consider alternate outcomes, for example a world where consumers were the primary customer rather than enterprises. In considering that potential future state the leaders at RIM might have monitored the marketplace for indications of change in this direction, or they might have used their success to develop consumer-focused mobile devices as a defense against potential changes in the industry. Instead, even a year after the iPhone launch, RIM continued to focus solely on the enterprise space using technology that had become outdated in the eyes of their real customers.

Applying Scenario Planning

I use concepts of scenario planning at work by asking simple questions to better understand possibilities, rather than solely focusing on probabilities. In the network engineering part of my organization I ask, “what if technology x doesn’t work the way you think it does?” and “what could cause this solution to fail?”. Technology experts often don’t want to consider outcomes suggesting that they might be wrong, or might not have all the answers, and as the leader of the department it’s often my role to press for those plausible outcomes.

 

 

 

References

Abdullah, S. (2022, September 9). Lessons from Blackberry’s failure. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lessons-from-blackberrys-failure-sammy-abdullah/

Bharath, P., Damodhar, D. B., Venkatesh, M., Shetty, P. K., & Ahmed, S. T. (2023). From leader to laggard: An analysis of Blackberry’s UI/UX missteps and the decline of a tech giant. Transactions on Federated Engineering and Systems, 1(1), 1–12.

Seth, S. (2023, March 17). BlackBerry: A story of constant success & failure. Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/062315/blackberry-story-constant-success-failure.asp

TEDx. (2019, June 21). Scenario planning - the future of work and place | Oliver Baxter | TEDxALC [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/XAFGRGm2WxY

Wade, W. (2012). Scenario Planning. Wiley Professional, Reference & Trade (Wiley K&L).