Sea Ice

As mentioned in earlier scenarios usually describe a continuous development
from the present towards a possible future. However, this method does not account
for very unlikely events that have a strong impact on the field. Such discontinuities
of developments are called Wild Cards.
Since the goal of the scenario process is to provide pictures of the future as a
tool for strategy building it is useful to include wild cards in the process in order
to identify very robust scenarios, i.e. scenarios that are not affected by wild cards,
or worst case and best case scenarios that call for an adjustment of strategy.
A wild card should be characterized by topic, impact, plausibility, time scale
and causes (After: Steinmüller, Karlheinz: ‘The future as Wild Card. A short introduction to a new
concept’, in: Susan Brockett and Margareta Dahlström (eds.): Spatial Development Trends.
Nordic Countries in a European Context, Stockholm: Nordregio 2004 (Nordregio Report 2004:
6), pp. 193 – 202)):

1. Topic: The subject of the wild card or the sector on which the wild card has
direct impact (e.g. technological or social wild card).
2. Impact: What are the consequences of the wild card? Wild cards can have
a strong, wide-spread impact, or an impact limited to a specific field. Only
include wild cards into the analysis that are relevant to, i.e. have an impact
on, the field under investigation.

3. Plausibility: All wild cards are by definition unlikely but some are highly
improbable, some are less improbable and some are simply not very probable.
Seen from a methodical perspective, it might make sense to take even
impossible wild cards into account because the demarcation (often fuzzy at
best) between the possible and the impossible is based on the knowledge
available at the moment and even on ones personal view of the world.

4. Time-scale: Here it would be necessary to differentiate between wild cards,
which are sudden, unique events, and processes, i.e. improbable short-term,
medium-term or longer-term developments.

5. Cause: One may distinguish between wild cards which occur without any
preparation whatsoever, often in the form of accidents or catastrophes due
to a chance coincidence of circumstances, and wild cards which are the result
of longer-term processes, typically creeping catastrophes.

In ScenLab wild cards are special key factors. They carry two future projections,
the likely (plausible) future projection ‘wild card does not occur’ and the unlikely (not plausible) future projection ‘wild card occurs’. The plausibility of
wild card occurrences can be adjusted by the user. However, it is highly advisable
that this plausibility is significantly lower that the lowest plausibility value for any
future projection of the regular key factors. If this is not the case it needs to be
discussed if it is really a wild card, or a key factor with a low plausibility future
projection.
ScenLab incorporates the wild cards into the consistency matrix like all other
key factors. However, special care must be taken in evaluating the paired consistency
values. The future projection ‘wild card does not occur’ should be neutral to
any other future projection. This is because if the wild card does not occur nothing
should happen to influence the other future projections. The future projection
‘wild card occurs’ should not be totally inconsistent with all future projections
of any key factor. This is because this would cause projection bundles containing
this future projection to be deleted automatically. Therefore no projection bundles
containing this future projection would ever show up in the result list.
For data comparison ScenLab allows the user to run the algorithms with and
without including wild cards into the analysis.