Sohail Inayatullah Professor at Tamkang University, Taipei at the Graduate Institute of Futures Studies, associated with Queensland University of Technology (Centre for Social Change Research) and an Adjunct Professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast (Faculty of Social Sciences and the Arts) and an Associate at the Transcend Peace University.

Can you give a bit of background: what you are working on now and what you have done in the past?
 
Recently I have been doing foresight work in three areas. Firstly, international policing, the Fishers International Policing Executive Program brought together about 15 police executives from Denmark, Holland, Brunei, Singapore, Australia, US, Canada to look at how the external world is changing and what the police should do in response to that change. We start out with some scenarios, then look through the systemic change and where in the policing narrative changes are needed. For example, in Canada the policing narrative is: ‘Give us more’, and the public are saying: ‘We are being asked to cut back, so why should the police not have to cut back too?’ As organized crime becomes more sophisticated, the police are feeling far more vulnerable. The only way they can succeed is by becoming more diverse, with more females and more people with different languages and far more community policing. I have also been working with high school principals throughout Australia. In the health area I am working with a range of World Congress health professionals and the chiefs of health throughout the Asia Pacific, looking at how ‘smart health’ is challenging the topdown approach to health care. For example,. peer-to-peer, meditation, less meat, preventative type healthcare are challenging the traditional model. We aim to get them to look at emerging issues, at how the world changes and how we can adapt to become more preventative, rather than going to the traditional command control view, which is a fear mode. If they are concerned with looking good for the public, they become more rigid. Instead, we do action learning with them, seeing the weak signals and looking at how we can transform. Originally I started futures work in the 1970s as a student at the University in Hawai’i. From 1981 to 1991, I was senior policy analyst and planner with the Hawaii judiciary, where I coordinated the Court’s Foresight Program and at the end of that I did a PhD. In 1994 I moved to Australia, working at the university doing consulting for 14 years. For the last 10 years I have been professor at Tamkang University. It has the largest futures programme in the world – about 5,000 students at undergraduate level – and we are allowed only 12 MA students. I believe in action learning. Theory develops from practice and seeing what works. Based on that, I theorize the future. I don’t do consulting per se. My main goal is to use theories and methods to frame ‘How did we learn? ’ So I help the client or organization learn in different ways, rather than give them a particular future or particular answer.
 
Have you in your work noticed, or can you envisage, any major wild cards, positive or negative, that may occur in the next 20 years?
 
I don’t use the term ‘wildcards’, because it overly emphasizes randomness. I prefer Graham Molitor’s emerging issues analysis,1 where you go from problems to trends which have some seeds of change, or Elina Hiltunen’s weak signals/weak signs – they are growing, but have not become massive. Vegetarianism was’ weird Californian stuff’ and now, with climate change, more people are becoming vegetarian – it has entered the debate. The Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organisation (CSRIO) said five years ago that vegetarianism was not appropriate and now they recommend it. So a major science body is saying it is good for you and for the climate. That is a major wild card/weak signal that could dramatically change production and distribution of food. PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) offered a $1million prize for anyone who can grow in vitro food, i.e. growing meat without having to kill the cow. That would dramatically change the entire world production of food, meat and dairy. Developing artificial meat within five or 10 years is a game changer for the entire planet. So one is the vegetarianism, the second is technology that changes the game.
 
Would these two be your favourite?
 
They come up a lot. The other one is peer-to-peer. Most organizations go to command control when in crisis; peer-to-peer is difficult, because there are so many divergent viewpoints it is hard to get agreement and there is a lack of consensus. My conclusion is that it will become more important and it empowers people. For example, in the health field patients don’t just go to doctors, they create patient-to-patient peer networks. One critique says this creates ‘cyberchondria’. With Google apps, you will soon be able to see how many people in a room have a similar disease profile to you. That is quite dramatic and, it may not be a wild card any more, it keeps on growing exponentially. But doing it wisely is the wild card: how do we use peer-to-peer wisely?  1 http://cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/viewArticle/716/622
 
What dramatic impact can you see from these wild cards and how could these be addressed from future research?
 
Only three percent of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) health budget goes on prevention. Imagine the scenario where you took vegetarianism peer to peer. I do research on people who do meditation. Their chances of getting infectious diseases and their health costs go down, their IQ goes up. So if you take just those three technologies – meditation, peer-topeer and vegetarianism – you put them together. The OECD budget is three percent; can you imagine the scenario where prevention becomes 20-30 percent of the budget? I believe these new possibilities are likely because the healthcare costs for ageing societies is very high. There is no way of meeting those costs, given the expectation of new technologies and the desire for people to live forever, without a move from a peer-topeer to a prevention model. You have two choices: you can put an ambulance at the bottom of the hill or a fence at the top of a hill. Most people put the ambulance at the bottom, because it is very hard to get credit for prevention. In foresight work, we have to think of metaphors or strategies whereby prevention is valued by the political system and the institutions that govern us.
 
Are there any specific fields where you think prevention research could take place?
 
Policing, as everyone says we cannot stop crime unless we move to prevention. Health too: the health system cannot survive without moving towards a prevention model and there is a financial imperative which makes it easier. It is about putting the language around the political imperative, so that leaders and government ministers have a story to tell. This also means that patients have to transform their narrative. The narrative is usually: ‘You are the government, take care of me’. The narrative should be ‘Patient, take charge of your health.’ It is not just the systemic change in how we tackle alcohol or meat or tobacco, it is the change to get patients empowered to look at technology and see what their own health possibilities are.
 
What are the weak signals that hint at the growing likelihood or imminent realization of these wild cards?
 
Whenever there is a major health outbreak, such as mad cow disease in the UK, then people quickly switch direction. That increases the chance of more dietary shift. Methane emission by cows, and the fact that the meat industry is one of the biggest problems for climate change, could be an impetus. Meditation, as health costs are so high and the technology is simple. The main challenge for futurists is how to transform the narrative so that it is not religious, but a rational practice, especially if you are in charge of a business or corporation. In a spiritual audit of the American corporation, over 50 percent of CEOs said spirituality is defined as something open, transcendental, inclusive; it becomes one of the key competitive edges, they have purpose, they work harder, they listen to others. It creates a whole change in the culture and climate. Even in the framework of competition, these wild cards can enhance one’s location in the world’s economy. It is mostly looking at how we change the cultural narrative, so that it feels more rational and there is support for it.
 
Can you identify any relationship, causal or otherwise, between the wild cards you just mentioned?
 
They are occurring because costs are high and people want to reduce costs, and because the things we are doing don’t work. People want to live longer, and people want the planet to feel better and look better and last longer for humans. Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson , in their book, Cultural Creatives, say the percentage of people who are more likely to change their diet or use meditation has gone up from three percent to five percent in the 1960s/1970s to 25 percent today. It has a gender base to it. Females are leading this, and in that sense they are the wild card. They are leading in employment figures, in the number of small businesses in the US. They are playing the leading edge role here. The old systems are not satisfying or meeting people’s needs and there is a need for a new system. I think these are wild cards, but the more I study them analytically, the more I can see they will shift from wild cards to normality. As researchers, our main goal is to collect the data, follow the signals, but also to work on the narrative to change the stories. So the framing of the issue is within our terms. When an Australian member of parliament saw the OECD report recommending vegetarian diets, he said: ‘These are crazy tofu munchers. They are a threat to our way of life’. We need to find a way so that he could also see these ideas are beneficial. When the wild card gets attacked in such a way, we can see something important is going on. It is moving up from emerging issue to trend.
 
Are there any wild cards that you think should be given top priority in research as very urgent research?
 
I think all those four – vegetarianism, peer-to-peer, meditation and ageing – work quite well. I would not try to prioritize them. You could ask researchers and see what they think is the most important.
 
In the iKNOW project, we defined wild cards as a low probability, high impact event. Do you prefer other definitions or would you add something to our definition?  I am OK with the definition. The challenge is that a metaphor of wild cards assumes total randomness. The work I did with Dator and Molitor on macro history and emerging issues shows that, yes, there is randomness, but we can see the traces of change. I am not sure ‘wild card’ is the perfect term, because people are used to a total random definition of the universe; they are complex, chaotic patterns. I would prefer a definition that also allows in the notion of deep structures, history and the possible structures in the future. I have no problem with your definition, but I would like something that is less based on world views and the card metaphor. Something to indicate that it does not come completely out of the blue. John L. Petersen’s book, Out of the Blue, is wonderful, but I prefer Graham Molitor’s emerging issues analysis, James Dator, etc. I think we can mix them all together, so that might be some theoretical prioritization: how to analyse these four terms and see where they are the same and where they are different. Our definition of weak signals is observable changes in current trends or state of affairs. Some particularly important weak signals could be precursor events that make a wild card more probable or even inevitable.Do you think this is a good definition or would you add something or subtract something?That sounds good. So you see a weak signal as something that influences the wild card. In that sense, it is not so much a wild card, because there is an event that influences its trajectory The weak signals give it a context. Then you can ask ‘In what weak signals is it my personal subjectivity, and what weak signals are intersubjective, what weak signals do we have quite a bit of data around? 
 
Do you have any interesting lessons to share from previous foresight studies that have employed a wild cards and weak signals approach?
 
I have noticed that people discount the future. When I do foresight workshops with the governmental sector, local city or local NGO, it starts out that the future is very far away. When we go through the emerging issues or wild card/weak signals process, suddenly something they considered 20 years away and we meet again they say: ‘Oh my, it is already here’. The rate of change is much higher than when people sit around and discuss it. No one wants to stand up and be the silly one and look stupid. It is important for researchers to push other people’s weak signals and wild cards, so that the movement of the group is allowed to bring in the improbable, the provocative, the disturbing and the ridiculous. If we give them the space to allow that thinking, then I find groups will become far more creative in their thinking. There has to be that permission, there has to be some story that lets all employees feel that this is OK. I am working with the Australia Bio Security Dept of Agriculture, Fisheries etc. They are looking at who should be doing emerging issues now: just the central office or all of it? There is this dialogue that both should be doing it, and so how do we create a database, data bank, a culture where anticipating the future becomes the norm? That is becoming crucial. I have found that does come from the CEO, but it should not be oversold. The thing I learnt from Canada Bio Security is that we need to find some winners and success stories that give the organization some motivation. They need to see that we can anticipate the future in certain areas and we can take a new idea and follow it through the full product cycle and make it real, so that citizens are happy with our ministry because of the costs reduced or income gained. I like the anticipatory action learning framework. We anticipate the future, but everyone develops action learning cycles within the organization.
 
Do you think people need to be more comfortable about thinking about the future?
 
Yes. They also need to be comfortable moving from the command control view that will predict the future to. this action learning approach that is looking for signals and wild cards and emerging issues, which we use to help us develop our scenarios of the future. So moving to a more adaptive learning organization.
 
What in your view are the best methods to identity weak signals and wild cards?
 
I use emerging issues analysis. I tend to do it in groups, and the more diverse the group, the better information we get. In a situation where it is just one group, they think the same and act the same. I try to get emerging issues groups with diversity built into them and there is permission in a foresight workshop to invite people you would not normally invite. Even if they are inappropriate, they force the movement of the group thinking that is going on. I find that very powerful. I say ‘Make sure you bring your clients along, people you don’t like and people who are very different to you’. Sometimes it is possible and sometimes not, but the foresight courses that work best are those with a high level of diversity. People challenge each other. They can help each other see things the other can’t. Travelling around the world helps in seeing things from different perspectives and engaging not just in analytical technologies but in emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence, any way to challenge the official view of reality. In my causal layered analysis approach2 I find the litany view, the official view of how things are and the move to alternative views work quite well.
 
Is there anything else you would like to add or ask?
 
Part of the role of futurists is to transform reality, not just to look for the wild cards. Once there is a narrative transformation and re-scripting, people can see things they could not see before. I find that quite powerful and this is at the core of my work. Find out what the emerging issues are, the weak signals and wild cards, unpack them, look at systemic analysis narrative. Then use these toys to create a different possible future. From there I will ask myself: what are the new emerging issues/wild cards?It is action, it is learning, it is long term?So we just keep on learning. So I am very happy with your project.