Clement is founder and chairman of the Institute for Alternative Futures. He established IAF in 1977 and in 1982 he startedIAF’s for-profit subsidiary, Alternative Futures Associates, to assist corporations in their strategic planning using futuresmethods. He has been a major developer of foresight techniques, applying futures research and strategic planning methods inboth the public and private sectors. As a consultant, Clement has worked with many Fortune 500 companies along with majororganizations, including the World Health Organization, the National Institutes of Health, the Rockefeller Foundation, AARP andthe American Cancer Society.

Are you working with wild cards and weak signals?Do you use these concepts in your work?

What is the difference between a wild card and a black swan?Interestingly, the black swan concept came up in an earlier interview.Essentially, there are wild cards that you recognise as unpredictable.So you keep seeking them and you recognise that the probabilityis low enough that you are only making yourself more resilient. Youmight not do anything about it until after it happens. Black swanshave more currency and I consider them to be virtually the samethings as wild cards.My comment on weak signals is that the signal is related to yourinterpretation of something important to your model of change.So whether or not it is a signal or a weak signal depends on ananalytical frame I have that tells me it will be important. In thatanalytical frame, I would argue that you should understand whetherit is visionary or not, whether it is normative or not; or, even if itis not normative, you should recognise that it is a business-asusualextrapolative frame and is in fact normative. In other words,everything is normative. So there is a form of weak signal analysisthat will affect what I will tell you when we ask what are visionaryopportunities? We argue that futures and foresight have to dealexplosively with visionary, as well as challenging, possibilities.

So would visionary be more positive rather thanchallenging? What do you mean by visionary?

We have a concept of visionary scenarios similar to LukeGeorghiou’s concept of success scenarios. The way we phrase itis: if a critical mass of stakeholders successfully pursue visionaryoptions, what would it look like? Earlier this decade we did fourrounds of scenario futuring with Luke, Ian Miles, Rafael Popper andcompany. Our work used an approach where we develop expectable,business-as-usual and transformational forecasts that ask whatcould go wrong, and visionary ones. We call them alpha, beta anddelta. So the future is in looking for weak signals. There is thequestion of whether they are positive, negative and whether you canactually find positive weak signals?This has come up in our work – the question of positive andnegative weak signals and wild cards, because people tend tostray towards the negative in the future.That gets particularly intense in the concept of defence and militaryanalysis.

Can you envisage any major positive or negative wildcards, in research, science and technology, that mayoccur in the next 20 years?

I would say it is breakthroughs. One is a set of issues in automatedresearch, and whether we are going to have robots and AI thatcan figure out and invent things. I think we will. I am not sure howsignificant this will be.The bigger issue is: will we have science and technology that inventsproducts and services that increase sustainability and equity? Thereis a line of thought that we should cater to and market to the poorestbillion in the planet and meet their needs and sell to them, turnthem into consumers. Business Professor Coimbatore KrishnaraoPrahalad has studied this, and it is evident in the Grand Challengesfunded by the Gates Foundation. Should we be developing targetslike a desktop manufacturing device that manufactures all the thingsa household would need, and a desktop bio-manufacturing devicewhich generates food? Can we invent something that would providemost of the stuff that families pursue? You need an iPad and tomanufacture the $100 computer – in 20 years will we be able tomanufacture that, either in the home or locally, at virtually no cost?Nano technology has implied that it will get to that point, butI am talking about particularly positive applications of it. Formanufacturers like GE or Siemens, that may not be a positive. But itmight be good for those people looking to buy these products.The bigger issue is the breakthroughs that we can use to developsustainable and equitable food growth. So the wild card is: ‘willscience, technology and innovation be directed towards relativelyradical, sustainable and equity enhancing innovation?


If that were to happen, what would you imagine wouldbe the dramatic impacts or implications from that?

We end poverty as we know it. It is more complex than that, becausethere is poverty of mind and poverty of spirit and poverty of physicalthings. This could end poverty of physical/material things over20 years, if we focused research and development appropriately.If there are weak signals of this radical turn, I would say look atthe actors on the building rung of the pyramid movement and theinnovation there. For example, there is a prosthetic foot called theJaipur Foot. Students at Stanford got together with the makers ofthe Jaipur Foot and made a prosthetic leg. Legs can cost $5,000-30,000 and they developed a leg that cost $100-200. That is anexample of the kind of potential for building and inventing.

Where would you like to see research that wouldadvocate this change or drive it forward? Would yousay one field is more important than another, or is itmultidisciplinary? Which fields do you think would bemost prominent?

It is multidisciplinary, definitely. The non-biological and food stufffrom the more physical stuff. It would be nano and electricalengineering, computer AI manufacturing materials. All of that wouldneed to be checked out in terms of the precautionary principle.What would it take, in whatever discipline is involved in doing thetechnology assessments, to make the precautionary principleappropriate?

Can you imagine any negative impact from thiswild card?

It could dramatically impact on the workforce structure. It could leadto shifts in the economy that affected the workforce structure andfurther disrupted middle-class jobs. In other words, it could be asignificant eliminator of jobs. If the food part of it were successful, itcould reduce the need for agriculture products. On the other hand,one of the other projects we did with Ian Miles and his colleagueswas on the UK rural economy. We found you could turn those intogreenhouse gas absorbers, even if they were not in agriculture,so there were alternative possibilities. You might call this R&D onshared abundance and on what it would take to bring it about and tomake society work in that context.

You mentioned a few wild cards: the automatedresearch robots and AI and then the food andsustainable method of distribution. Do you think theseare in any way linked together?

They could be and should be. The weak signal for me on apositive side is that this is being done in ways that would increasesustainability and equity and eliminate poverty. Admittedly, this isone-sided but it is my contribution.

Looking ahead to the future of research, which is yourmost pressing wild card or weak signal that you thinkdeserves very focused research at this moment?

The possibilities for equity and sustainability enhancing advancesdeserves priority. There are some related issues as we increasinglydigitise and move to wireless, and we come to understand thedifferential effects of wireless on health. Some people will be moresusceptible than others and we do not understand that.We need to, as the advances that I would see as sustainable andequitable carry with them wifi and other kinds of risks. There is awhole line of health-enhancing breakthroughs. We are mappingthe genome, which will be very low cost to do that ultimately. Wewill have a better understanding of genetics including a raft ofother factors influencing our genetic structure. The question ofpersonalised nutrition and personalised medicine for all could beimportant. There are some limits on that and poverty is one of themajor limits. So if we can deal with that and with poverty, we canmake some of the other revolutions more effective.

You can see that kind of lying at the bases hinderingadvancing in other research areas?

It is making advances apply – such as many of the advanceswe watch in biotechnology. Genomics was one of the four ESRCstudies we did with Ian Miles and his colleagues ten years ago, andwe focused on the equity component. There is clearly a variety ofquestions about how genomics and health research will evolve. Mostof the energy and direction for research into wild cards and weaksignals is not focused on equity, fairness and sustainability – it isfocused on making the most money.

Do you prefer other definitions of wild card and weaksignals? Is there anything you would like to add orsubtract from the definitions?

This notion of black swans, and the consciousness that whetherit is a signal or whether it is weak or not is dependent on alarger analysis supplied by the observer. Weak signals should beinterpreted consciously and as expectable, challenging or visionary– that is, negative and positive as well as extrapolative or most likely.Positive we argue should be visionary, not simply good.

So do you mean that weak signals lie in the eye of thebeholder?

Yes, as analysts, we use our own mental models to label a particularissue as a weak signal of change. Presumably, the way the logicgoes, everyone else would miss the weak signal but I would seeit because I have this particular model. My point is these modelsshould be understood in terms of whether they are extrapolative,negative or visionary. The context in which you find the weak signalis important.

What in your view are the best methods to identifyweak signals and wild cards?

Essentially continuing to think about it and having analysts whounderstand both what they are looking at and the systems. Aweak signal is something that is going to change a system andunderstanding the systems is really important.

Do you mean scanning on a systems level, rather thanfocusing maybe on scientific fields?

You can go within fields but knowing the systems. For example, takedesktop manufacturing, which would be a critical line of innovation.My forecast is that we will have a desktop device that would doalmost anything, so understanding the technology about that enoughto be comfortable with the forecasts is important, and then I wouldargue an understanding of how it is going to be used is important.