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
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 [...]
Events that are: rare, surprising, and with large social impact Examples from Nature: Earthquakes, hurricanes, asteroid impacts, ice age Examples from Human Causes: Pandemic, nuclear holocaust, collapse of power grid
Seven Shocks – Finland Key questions being addressed: How can a small open national economy succeed in the world of surprises? Background IIASA/Xevents team has developed a unique methodology for analyzing external shocks and their potential impact on national competiveness. Seven Shocks project studied the special requirements the global economic system will set for Finland [...]
Abstract This report presents the materials, analyses, and conclusions produced during the Seven Shocks and Finland project, an activity of IIASA Exploratory Projects in June -December 2011. The primary objective of the project was to investigate the nature of the uncertainties and the resilience requirements that emerge from the complexity of the global social, political, [...]
