by A truly brilliant article title (and article) from Elina Hiltunen, “Was It a Wild Card or Just Our Blindness to Gradual Change?” She makes the point that “Most often the wild card is defined as a surprising event that has significant consequences. Let’s look at the “surprise” aspect first. Wikipedia has a useful definition, describing surprise as an emotion; “a brief mental and physiological state, a startle response experienced by animals and humans as the result of an unexpected event.” So, the key feature is the audience is startled and has a brief emotional reaction. The observer or audience is caught unaware such that they have an emotional reaction surprise. As the article title points out, it could be that our own blindness is what’s responsible for this reaction, i.e. we’re surprised because we weren’t paying attention.
Indeed, Hiltunen reviewed the literature and found that the examples labelled as wild cards do not always meet the test of “surprise.” She found that a large number of “wildcards” are actually gradual changes. At Houston Foresight, we agree with this distinction that “gradual changes” are indeed not wildcards and would agree with the “blindness” charge being applicable. We use Hiltunen’s definition of: “weak signals are currently existing small and seemingly insignificant issues that can tell us about the changes in the future….they are today’s clues and signs providing us with hints of the possible events and trends in the future.” Weak signals are seen as “far off” and thus do not generate the emotion of surprise.
Wildcards thus seem to come “out of the blue. ” There are no indicators or weak signals to track. Of course, the longstanding text on wildcards — Petersen’s “Out of the Blue” — suggested that wildcards “generally surprise everyone, because they materialize so quickly that the underlying social systems cannot effectively respond to them.” Here’s a key point….”surprise everyone.” For me it seems that surprise is a relative term. By the strict definition of “everyone,” are the really any wildcards at all? Let’s look at that next time. Andy Hines
[…] One more entry in the wildcard series (for now, at least). In the last piece we raised the point about wildcards not really being wildcards upon further inspections. Hiltunen found that a large number of “wildcards” are actually gradual changes. One further piece of ammunition comes from Houston Foresight Professor Emeritus Oliver Markley — he added a third criterion — credibility — to the standard probability and impact for characterizing wildcards. His point in his piece “A New Methodology for Anticipating STEEP Surprises,” was that in retrospectively analyzing wildcards, there was a point in time at which experts became persuaded it was viable, but that mainstream remained unaware or unconvinced — global warming was used an example. He adds further ammunition to the argument raised last time that wildcard is a relative term. […]