by 
The pandemic has generated a fair bit of discussion about wildcards. It raises the very fair policy question for futurists about what our coverage is regarding wildcards? Do we cover all of them? None? From my experience as a consulting futurist, I can relay that we had very little success over the years in selling services relating to wildcards (we tried). In projects, I have occasionally worked wildcards into some of the exercises we’ve done with clients. But, I have not featured them as a deliverable, with the exception of thought pieces in books or multi-client reports.
Where I’m netting out is that we have two responsibilities regarding wildcards:
- Identify domain-specific wildcards to be monitored.
- Encourage clients to have a general “disaster response” contingency plan that applies to a wide range of potential disasters.
Let’s look at domain-specific wildcards. This means that if you are a bank, you are watching for a global financial meltdown. If you’re a hospital, you are watching for pandemics. If you’re a forest service, you are watching for wildfires. And so on. To drill the point home, banks don’t need a pandemic contingency plans, and hospitals don’t need to be monitoring wildfires. Granted, they each could be indirectly affected, but see #2 above (“general disaster response”).
The point is that I think this two-item policy is a fair and wise use of always precious and limited time, attention, and resources. It is unreasonable to expect organization to prepare for every single potential wildcard. So, come see us at Houston Foresight if you need a wildcard insurance policy 🙂 – Andy Hines
[…] night we had a class in World Futures on wildcards in which we reviewed Oliver Markley’s wonderful piece that includes sources of resistance to […]