Playing the Wild Card

Abstract

Life never quite runs to plan. Just when we think that we can see the road ahead, something turns up to make a mockery of our planning. These unforeseen circumstances can be both good and bad for us. Such are the vagaries of life. These surprises can have a major impact on our lives or they can be fairly minor in effect. We tend to take the minor surprises in our stride, but the more significant ones lead us to a period of reevaluation. In futures literature, surprising events tend to be known as wild card events. They are defined as low-probability, high-impact events that have the potential to completely disrupt our plans for the future. Much of futures work is about anticipating a range of possible futures. We normally call these visions of the future scenarios. When we inject wild card events into our scenario set, we normally call the result a set of wild card scenarios. Their purpose is not to replace the original scenarios but to enhance our understanding of them. In this way, if we play our wild cards right, the future ought not to be as surprising as it could be.