Richard A Slaughter is Director of Foresight International. During 1999 to 2004 he was Foundation Professor of Foresight at the Australian Foresight Institute, Swinburne University (Melbourne) and a consulting futurist who has worked with a wide range of organizations in many countries and at all educational levels. He completed a PhD in futures studies at the University of Lancaster in 1982. He has since built an international reputation through futures scholarship, educational innovation, strategic and social foresight and the identification of a knowledge base for futures studies. He is a fellow of the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF) and a professional member of the World Future Society (WFS). During 2001 - 2005 he was elected President of the WFSF. Richard is a prolific writer and holds several editorial positions. His most recent project is The Biggest Wake Up Call in History (Foresight International, 2010). In late 2010 he was the recipient of the Foresight Network, Shaping Tomorrow’s, ‘Laurel Award’ that named him as one of the world’s ‘all-time best Futurists.’

Where you are based?
 
I am based at my company, Foresight International Australia. I left Swinburne University, Melbourne, where I set up the Australian Foresight Institute, and since then I have concentrated on writing projects. My last big project was on ‘the state of play in the futures field’, funded by the Seattle-based Institute for the Future, and published in a special issue of Futures. It used a meta scanning frame, which we developed at Swinburne. A team of researchers used the internet and published sources to do a survey of futures work around the world and tried to make some tentative beginning conclusions. It was a sample study about the quality and type of work going on. It showed a particular pattern, which did not surprise me. It suggested that the older futures methods, like forecasting and scenario planning and other more linear and systemic methods, were widely used, but the newer methods that we have been working with are not very widely used.
 
 Which methods are those?
 
Things like the integral futures perspective, which is a way of including values in the whole pattern; the four quadrants, which are like four windows on reality; and integral thinking. Many fields have been revisioned and looked at freshly using integral perspective as a comparative lens. The four windows are a way of organizing different kinds of knowledge, so it is a model of Interdisciplinarity. We have knowledge that looks at the human interiors, individual human interiors, cultural interiors, individual exteriors, so how we behave and the rest of the physical world – the collective exterior. Using that as a sorting device and a way of looking systematically at the world through these four windows, you can tell what the emphasis has been in projects, books and writing. It also gives you a chance to understand how worldviews and values and other interior actors interact with the more familiar world that we live in.
 
 Taking this notion of ethics and values into account, do you envisage any high impact event or situation whereby major changes in the world values or views, in a considerable proportion of the world makes a major shift to different values to ones that we have today?
 
One that has been in training for some time – let’s call it a weak signal – is the shift towards post-material values. Going from the need to own a lot of stuff to feel good, to modes of satisfaction and fulfilment that are not based on possessions, but maybe on quality of relationships or doing the right thing by the environment. Where It stops being about me and my immediate needs and my personal stuff and is more about caring or maybe going for a stewardship kind of ethic or taking care of things.
 
 Where do you think will be a big shift towards that? Do you see it as a regional shift or will individual countries make that choice?
 
Bhutan is well known for having a national happiness quotient. That is not quite the same thing, but it is in the same ball park. They don’t want another consumer society with a great throughput of stuff, which we know does not make people particularly happy. So they have erected this qualitative notion of national happiness. I think all the developed countries have subgroups, throughout Europe, Australia, America, and Latin America, where people are rejecting materialist values. I don’t think it is regional; it is a shift of consciousness. That sounds flaky to people who are interested in technological foresight, but shifts of consciousness in awareness and foresight are overlooked powerful drivers of major change.
 
 Do you see any weak signals that brought this issue to your attention?
 
Yes. One example is a way of approaching small-scale farming that works within the capacity of the land to maintain fertility. It is not just pragmatic, it is more about cultivating the values that lead people to work within natural boundaries instead of trying to wipe them out and create monocultures. Another weak signal is a friend of mine who for years has insisted on cycling everywhere in Melbourne and using public transport. He got rid of his car and his van. It is almost an ideology for him. You can probably find scores of examples of people making small shifts because they think it is appropriate, rather than waiting for the big shift to happen.
 
 Where will the next big wild card be coming from and why?
 
One area that is ripe for very influential wild cards is energy supply – not the pollution aspect seen in the Gulf of Mexico, but more on the international supply side and the breakdown of smooth supply. On the ride up to the peak where we are now with oil there have been a couple of clear points where there were problems, such as the Arab oil boycott and the price spike. But the ride down from the peak will be much more difficult. A wild card could be a successful terrorist attack on a Saudi oil instillation or, conversely, proof that the Saudis have cooked the figures for their reserves. This is a weak signal that I have come across in a number of contexts – that they have not been honest about how much oil is left, in order to maintain confidence and keep prices stable. Proof of this would be a tremendous shock to the West. It is a wild card that could come at any time and could challenge confidence. Around energy, our societies have become dependent on what is an invisible process to the person on the street. You turn up at the gas station and fill up and drive away – what is the problem?  Behind that is a very long, spread out chain, with the possibility of disruption at many points in that chain. I think there are a host of wild cards around the supply chain for oil that are not taken seriously.
 
 Can you envisage very positive wild cards?We can go back to ethics and values, but perhaps logical or political or environmental major breakthroughs?
 
Yes. There are a lot of informal responses to a deteriorating outlook. Were all those individual projects and aspirations – The Age of Stupid, environmentalists, people trying to stop Japan whaling – to suddenly mesh in an effective way, instead of being fragments floating in different directions, were some sort of alignment to occur, then there could be a relatively fast, effective constituency that suddenly realised it had more in common than it had differences. That could work up through the social system and force leaders to get real. The whole political scene would have to finally stop playing its stupid games and deal with the current situation intelligently. All that activity could render itself more effective on a collective level and create the constituency. Politicians cannot act without constituency in a population and if that shift were to occur, we would see a lot of effective change happen quite quickly.
 
 What are the problems that you think that particular social movements can solve, because we have technologies, organized groups and constituencies and still we have not seen a major breakthrough solving particular problems. What are the key problems you think can be easily solved and what would you call that wild card?
 
I have been engaged with people who are attempting to bring new futures thinking into the education system at the system level, rather than through curriculum content at the classroom level, which is always going to be difficult. That is a wild card, in the sense that for years it has seemed almost beyond imagining that education paradigms could change and see the future as being at least as important as the past. If this work succeeds, it could catalyse a lot of the dissatisfaction, help give teachers a more constructive role and provide the support in the system that it has always needed. You would get a much more savvy and contextual-aware and futurefocused set of processes happening within the education system. That is a wild card which has continuity for me, but is still a low probability high impact category.
 
 What would be the major impact on a society with such a complete understanding of the importance of being able to shape the future and transform it? Take the car. It could be a wild card 200 years ago, but a traffic jam is the next generation of wild card to the car, so what would be the traffic jam for that wild cardA traffic jam is seen as negative, but what positive one could you see? What would be the ultimate consequence?
 
 Step one to get to a more future-responsive education system society is that we acknowledge we have got a problem. We wake up or we become aware that humanity is a shaping form on the planet, not some god or geology or weather. That catalytic change in the education system could get vast numbers of people to realize that it is us and therefore suggest we take responsibility for maybe the actions of past generations and certainly for ours and what we do now. Once you acknowledge that it is us and start taking responsibility, there can be a tremendous breakthrough of energy, focus and passion around changing course and doing things differently.
 
 How do you think mainstream religion will react to that particular major change of individuals visions about the future?
 
That is the traffic jam.
 
 You have mentioned ethics, the environment, energy and education issues. What do you think is the big issue that European society should be addressing?Not a wild card problem, but an ongoing problem. Then we can think perhaps about wild card solutions to that problem.
 
 Perhaps it is easier to look at Europe from a distance, instead of being focused on one part of it. I think the attempt to create a Eurozone and to integrate Europe has faltered because there are old identities, nationalities, national icons and languages – basically differences – that people value and want to hold onto. For those reasons, the ability of Europe to operate as a diverse continent seems to have stalled. The biggest problem is finding some unity in diversity, and not so much ageing, confrontation with Russia, open population. Were the continent to be more integrated, one that accepts and values difference, then it would find it easier to cope with the problems it faces. It is defragmented.
 
 So you see here problems of social cohesion or economic?
 
Well it has got an economic dimension. I disagree with looking at society through an economic filter. I think it is the wrong way round and that economics is being elevated beyond its station. Society is the primary entity and economics is a way of looking at processes that occur within society. So there are economic dimensions, but it is essentially a social, cultural problem.
 
 So social cohesion is a big problem for Europe. What will be the wild card solution to such a grand challenge?
 
The old-fashioned one would be some shared perception of an external threat that makes all these differences seem stupid and brings people together. It could be war or a dawning realization that we are heading to a four degree centigrade temperature rise, that people don’t want their kids to have to face. We are at a turning point in the history of our species in terms of the scale of our interventions in the way the planet works. We are at a point where people no longer have the assurance that social life will continue generations into the future. That is beginning to dawn on people. The shared perception of that other threat that affects everybody and all future generations is just one of those ‘aha moments’ for our species that might just help to create that external challenge or threat other than war.
 
Do you see any major breakthroughs in society where we can imagine a society without conflicts or crime? If that wild card happens, do you think it will be technologically driven?
 
I don’t think technology is as powerful or important as most futures people do. Technology changes the rules, and has evasive effects, but it is actually an outcome of a social process. It is not just a thing – a computer on a desk – but a historical stream of human activity that put it on your desk in the first place. The issue is more about the social processes that create the technology. We have crime and other social pathologies which link to behavioural change concerns. So our society will be pretty much the same in the next 20 years or with these traditional problems?  I don’t think it will be the same in the next 20 years. A combination of people and climate changes will be the most important drivers in changing things. Technology is way behind that – it has effects, but not as powerful as these two major drivers. I think crime and conflicts will get worse.
 
 No solutions?
 
The only solutions I can see are long-term cultural shifts. But if life conditions are deteriorating, then I don’t see short-term solutions to social problems like crime and other social dysfunction, unless people can see that they have to pull together and do something constructive. That is possible and is a really wild card, with high impact but low probability.
 
 Have you used the concepts of wild cards in your work in the past and if so, how do you translate these to policy?
 
I have seen it as a subset of futures methods and tools which I have looked at and found interesting, but have not used.
 
 If you were going to use this, how would you use it and where would you look for wild cards. What are the methods perhaps interviews or workshops?
 
Focused, well structured workshops are a good way to go, because you need reflection time. Detecting signals of change, not necessarily weak signals but signals of change, is incredibly lacking in the public infrastructure. That is a deficiency that we need to try and repair, because if you are not paying attention to signals of change that are being broadcast all the time within the global system, then you are blind. Not being aware – it is part of the waking up metaphor that refers to detecting and understanding and responding to signals of change. I don’t mean weak signals or wild cards. The definition of weak signals is broadening now and includes signals.I think that is very important. It seems to be genuinely interesting work.