2024:
From worshipping Tyche to playing with wild cards
In his Physics, Aristotle acknowledges the role of Tyche, the Greek equivalent of contingency. His home, the Greek peninsula, was, and is today, regularly struck by natural hazards. Ancient records document that they wrought substantial damage to the infrastructure and political integrity of communities. Lacking reliable forecasting systems, for the ancient Greeks any of these hazards was contingent, even though there existed accepted interpretations of what (or who) caused these phenomena. Roughly 2.500 years later, future studies call sudden, unpredictable events like these ‘wild cards’. Occurring with a low probability but a substantial impact, wild cards pose challenges to social, political, and economic stability. Just as natural hazards unexpectedly interrupted and transformed social, political, and economical life in ancient communities, wild cards have the potential to disrupt current and future societies and economies. With the modern world increasingly complex and interconnected, wild cards will increase in frequency, likelihood, and impact. More than ever, local calamities will show global effects. To mitigate these effects and enable a fast recovery, creative approaches are needed. A gaze into how the societies of the distant past successfully coped with the wild cards that hit them, may thus yield inspiration for disaster risk reduction in the Anthropocene.
Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5973.12543
2022:
Old answers to new questions: using past disaster narratives to make today’s organisations more resilient to the challenges of the Anthropocene
The Anthropocene will see a significant increase in the likelihood, frequency, and intensity of natural hazards. This altered context poses new challenges for global societies and economies. In addition to sustainability efforts, building resilience and reducing disaster risk thus become increasingly important strategic topics. This paper proposes that inspiration for how to respond to these challenges, and even use them for transformation and sustainable innovation, may lie in the distant past. By applying insights from sociological disaster studies and discourse analysis to earthquake narratives from ancient Greece, it will be shown how extreme natural events may, or may not, trigger disaster. Subsequently, implications for organisational resilience and disaster risk reduction in the Anthropocene will be derived.
International Journal of Innovation and Sustainable Development
DOI: 10.1504/IJISD.2022.123907
2022:
Welcome to the vucca world! Why the Future is not just vuca but vucca
Faced with the challenges of climatic change, the ever-accelerating, hyperconnected, digitalised, and highly fragile vuca world acquires another dimension: it becomes vucca: volatile, uncertain, complex, catastrophic, and ambiguous. Tackling this situation requires a novel understanding of what catastrophes are, how they emerge, and what potential lies in them. Once this understanding is established, Futures Studies and Foresight can facilitate the creation of innovative ways to lead, plan, educate and design.
Human Futures Magazine, pp. 22-29
2020:
Using Creativity, Diversity, and Iterative Ways of Working to Send the Virus to Lockdown: How to Beat Wild-Card Events by Their Own Means
The novel Covid-19 causing virus has caused major disruptions to individuals, societies, and economies worldwide. No single country has been left unaffected, and many societies have taken severe measures, including complete lockdowns of huge metropolitan areas, to limit the further spread of the virus. As a result, international trade and traveling have virtually come to a halt, enterprises struggle to survive, and both individuals and entire societies face an uncertain future. The Covid-19 pandemic thus represents a wild-card event that disrupts predictions of future developments and confronts researchers, policymakers, and decision-makers in organisations with a wicked problem. This chapter proposes that lateral collaboration, shorter iteration loops, and diversity will enable organisations to cope with future wild cards more effectively. Applying the same principles to research bears the potential to generate creative solutions to the wicked problem of pandemic disease control faster.
Handbook of Research on Using Global Collective Intelligence and Creativity to Solve Wicked Problems
