X-Events in Social Processes At a random moment in time, the generic behavior of any social system is to be in a trending pattern. In other words, if you ask how will things look tomorrow, the answer is that they will be just a bit better or a bit worse than today, depending on whether [...]
Resilience Planning for “unknown unknowns” is in principle a challenge to the imagination; we have to systematically extend our understanding by pushing the borders of our existing thinking outward from our current perception of what is relevant, what is logical, what is causal. Principles: We apply four design principles in our Resilience Portfolio method. In [...]
Suomi Mood Indicator Key questions being addressed: What is the dynamics of the society? How can we anticipate discontinuous shifts in the dynamics? What kinds of politics and communications is feasible in the current situation? Our collaboration partners are the Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Interior of Finland. Also this project is conducted in [...]
This book serves as the final report of the Game Changers project lead by John Casti and coordinated by Leena Ilmola. The project was established towards the end of 2009 as a part of the Extreme Events in Human Society initiative at IIASA, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Laxenburg, Austria). Download Report
Uncertainty Scan Uncertainty focused Delphi has been developed for scanning for potentially disruptive drivers of the operating environment. This is a major difference to the traditional Delphi study that focuses on looking for a consensus of the expert panel about future developments. Principle The web-based scan collects all the potential drivers of the operating environment [...]
Structural scenarios have been developed for the foresight exercise in which we try to generate ideas about the future for the environment that we know our cognitive constraints are prominent; we know very little about the drivers that may shape the environment. Principle The idea is to generate as many different structures as possible based [...]
The current strategy of the organization is based on the situation of the operating environment and uses the existing strengths and capabilities as a starting point. In most of the organizations, megatrends-based foresight exercise has been included in the strategy process. If, for some reason, there is a lot of uncertainty about the trend [...]
Key questions being addressed: How to succeed in the world of surprises? What are the long-term national resilience requirements that emerge from the increasing uncertainties in the global physical and social environments? What kinds of concrete decisions decision makers should make now? Our collaboration partners in this project is Center for Strategic Foresight of the [...]
The social mood concept developed is based on four principal theoretical frameworks: Socionomics (Prechter 2003, Casti 2010) – how the social mood, the way a population feels about the future, biases and shapes the character and timing of social events, such as elections, political and social upheavals and economic trends (National Coordination Secretariat 2008, 143-168). [...]
When two (or more) systems are in interaction, each system has its own level of complexity, which is usually tied up with how many degrees of freedom the system has for taking independent actions at a given time. Since these levels of complexity are almost never the same, there is a complexity “gap” between [...]
