To get a better feel for the way-out nature of wild cards, let’s return to the cosmos and ask “what happened before the Big Bang?” For, given the expansion of the universe, it is a fair assumption that something happened and that there was some form of starting point from which the universe originated. Modern science has arrived, through our knowledge of the nature of space, time and gravitation, at the same conclusion as the fifth-century Christian saint, Augustine of Hippo (don’t ask), who claimed that the world was made “not in time, but simultaneously with time”. In plain speaking: nothing happened before the Big Bang because there was no “before”. Time only started with the Big Bang. Thus speculation on the causes of the Big Bang and what happened preceding it can only produce the wildest of wild cards. We have to accept the unanswerability of some questions, even though our imagination impels us to explore for an answer.
A mid-1980s global scenario study incorporated the following wild card: “Surprisingly, the one thing that terrifies Japan is the possibility of a devastating earthquake during the scenario period.” The earthquake happened at Kobe in early 1995 and proved that natural disasters are an everpresent danger. However, you can have wild cards on a more personal basis. Think of the strain of planning your young son’s birthday party. He wants to invite twenty of his friends to play a series of games in a public park. What are the key uncertainties in determining the success of the party – those factors you know you don’t know? Will it rain? How many of his friends will arrive on the day? Will you have enough food and drink when you have in fact bought enough provisions for an army? But the wild card you don’t know you don’t know is that the public park has been selected by a visiting chapter of the Hell’s Angels as a stopover for their breakfast run. And that’s really wild.
WOW, that was close!
We move from screaming unruly children in a public park to the screams of men on the fields of battle. Key uncertainties are an integral part of warfare. In his thoughtful treatise on military science, Strategy and Compromise, the distinguished naval historian Admiral Samuel Elliot Morrison makes the point that in the quest to know as much as possible about the enemy, military advisers and strategists employ intelligence gathering that is never complete and is often misleading. For example, the information of an enemy’s strength and intentions may well be incorrect. The generals who play scenarios of the battle that lies ahead and make the final decisions know that the information at hand has tremendous gaps, but anything is better than nothing. Military decisions are therefore based on what is known and what is known to be unknown. If a wild card then emerges out of the blue – like the enemy having a new and vastly superior weapon – then the general who has a sixth sense, or a fox’s instinct, might still snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. In warfare, admits Admiral Morrison, mistakes which the top brass like to call “strategic errors” are inevitable. He says: “Other things being equal, the side that makes the fewer strategic errors wins the war.”
Historians only now tell us how close we came to an all out nuclear war in October 1962 because America and Russia at times completely misread the other’s position. Earlier that year Cuba, convinced that the Americans were about to attack them, had asked for extra military aid from the Russians. The latter responded by sending missiles and building missile bases on the island capable of launching nuclear strikes on American cities. In October, President John Kennedy learnt about this and ordered a naval blockade to stop further shipment of Russian arms. He then demanded that all missiles and missile bases be removed from the island. The world held its breath for a week before Russian Premier Nikita Krushchev agreed to the demand in return for an American pledge that they wouldn’t attack Cuba. The blockade was then lifted. What recent analysis of the archival material has shown is that, despite both sides having formidable intelligence networks, each leader was being given woefully incorrect information on how his counterpart was thinking. So we nearly blundered into a nuclear war. But ask yourself: how often do you make decisions based on a perfect knowledge of all the facts? Admit it – the answer is seldom, if ever. Uncertainties are woven into life and weighing them up should be second nature to anybody who wants to make the best of a situation. The second quadrant of the matrix cannot be sidestepped.
We have now come full circle back to the question of the fate of the crew of the Apollo 13. Did the combined problemsolving talents of the team on the ground and in space steer the astronauts through the stormy seas of uncertainty back to dry land? Were the craft and the crew destroyed by the crushing deceleration forces and searing heat during re-entry? Or would they skip off the atmosphere and out into space to become, in Commander Jim Lovell’s words, “a monument to the US space programme”? The answer to these questions depends on whether or not the key uncertainties that they identified helped them paint useful scenarios which ultimately led them to consider the most likely options and make the most effective decisions. No offence: you’ll have to read on to see if there was a happy ending.
Scenarios
The Grimm Reality
If they were still alive today, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm would have been brilliant at writing scenarios. You may recall from your childhood that these two German brothers produced a collection of some of the most colourful and enduring fairy tales of all time – notably Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Little Red Riding Hood. In the early part of the nineteenth century when they wrote these tales, multinational companies did not exist and scenario planning was not a paid occupation. Now they would be wined and dined by some of the most powerful foxes in business, looking for stories to enthral the young and old alike in their organisations; or maybe J. K. Rowling would be author of choice because of Harry Potter’s rise to fame. It is not a coincidence that the book that has recently topped the New York nonfiction bestsellers’ list for a long time employs the Grimm technique. It is entitled Who Moved My Cheese? by Dr Spencer Johnson. The story is about mice and little people and their different behaviour when their current stockpile of cheese in a maze is exhausted and they have to go in search of new cheese. It is just as enchanting as Cinderella but delivers a powerful message of how to view change as an opportunity rather than a threat.
Scenarios are stories about possible futures. Many hedgehogs in business confuse the term “scenario” with a forecast or prediction of a single future. Nothing could be further from the truth. Scenarios are, in fact, multiple pathways into a future that is unknown. While constrained by the rules of the game and driven by the key uncertainties, they should evoke the same feelings as a really good novel. Each scenario must have a simple, vivid theme which is logically consistent in itself, but differs materially from the other scenarios in the set. It must have a compelling title which enters the common vocabulary of the audience being addressed. The title should conjure up the image of the scenario without the need for the text to be read. There must not be too many scenarios, as the human mind is only capable of thinking in three dimensions. For this reason and because a prime objective of scenario work is to reduce the complex to the easily understandable, we advocate two or three scenarios (four at the very outside) for any particular situation. Only pure mathematicians can think in four or more dimensions!
However, let’s go back to first principles and the Oxford English Dictionary. It defines a scenario as “a sketch or outline of the plot of a play, giving particulars of the scenes, situations, etc.”. An alternative meaning taken from a dictionary of music is “an Italian term, meaning a sketch of the scenes and main points of an opera libretto, drawn up and settled preliminary to filling in the detail”. Obviously, Italian composers used to peddle scenarios around well-heeled, music-loving bankers in the hope of raising money for a full production before they wasted too much effort on the score. The first known use of scenarios in a connection outside the creative arts and inside the more clinical world of science came from the sociologist, novelist and screenwriter Leo Roysten. He suggested to a group of physicists, who were searching for a name for alternative descriptions of how satellites might behave, that they call them “scenarios”. He explained that this was the term used in the film industry to describe the outlines of future films. It seems fitting, therefore, to examine the scenarios that must have been playing