Phil Hadridge has been part-time independent consultant of Diageo, United Health Europe, Nuon, BP, the Health Foundation, Oxfam, the BMJ and Barclays since 1998. Mr. Hadridge had a successful managerial career in the NHS and the Department of health. He serves as a founding director of Idenk, a consulting and investment company. He serves as a Member of Editorial Board of OnMedica Group Ltd. He studied MA at Cambridge University.

Can you envisage any major wild cards, positive or negative, that may occur in the next 20 years?
 
Whether it is a wild card or an uncertainty, the much predicted rise of India, China and Brazil faltering, and then something about the nature of capitalism in Anglo Saxon or western nations, which rises back to the fore again. This is counter to the prevailing assumption, so that would interest me. On climate, there is a widespread assumption about the way that is going to go, and there are some wild cards, e.g. new diseases, technological innovation that will far outstrip our use of carbon and fossil fuels. There are a lot of bleak wild cards that are written about frequently, and my approach is to try to look at them differently.
 
What do you see would be the most dramatic impact of these wild cards and how do you think it should be addressed by future research?
 
I think scenario work and futures work is less about understanding the future and more about understanding today and the methods to make this more manageable. Almost any of these projects have identified issues about democracy and technology, for example to overcome carbon, or the nature of economic power. A lot of the research is keeping an eye on the signals around them. It would be good if there was more investment in communication and conversation to get people ‘what iffing’ around those assumptions, i.e., thinking about what if those assumptions were not true. Probably investments in communication, rather than research, looking at how you convey some of the possibilities without sounding like a sceptic or a reactionary.
 
Can you pinpoint the weak signals that could hint at the likelihood or imminent realization of these wild cards happening? 
 
 I don’t think any of my ideas on this are totally individual, but the scanning sources of things.
 
Can you identify any causal or other relationships between the wild cards and weak signals that you have mentioned?
 
One of the relationships we see, and a sort of paradoxical one, is that the population growth in the global East and South creates a base for the economic focus. Some of that is relative to green technology and green research, but paradoxically it might not lead to a transformation in the nature of capitalism of those countries, as there may be a limit to growth. So there is some correlation, but I would not push it too hard.
 
 Looking ahead to the future of European research, which of these wild cards that you mentioned do you think should be given top priority in EU research?
 
I would encourage as much possible investment in any technology that surrounds environment and technology. The way that life was lived 100 years ago it would have been almost impossible to imagine the technological innovations that arose between 1910 and the Second World War. Medical technologies have transformed longevity and the human experience of ill health, and that was in a very short space of time. Some of the major concerns people have about life expectancy were addressed very fast. I think the same is going to happen about our concerns about environment or health and environmental wellbeing.
 
 In the iKNOW project we have defined wild cards as a low probability high impact event. Do you prefer any other definition?
 
 I would go with that one.
 
 We have defined a weak signal as an observable change in current trends or state of affairs and some may be indicators that a wild card could be happening, Is that a definition that you agree with?
 
 Yes. It may not be a signal of a wild card, but I would go with that definition.
 
 Do you have lessons that you could tell us about from previous foresight studies. Have you done any previous foresight studies using this approach with the wild cards and weak signals?
 
The way I have used them has been more of a brainstorm about the future.