Some events occur out of the blue. When two aircraft crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11 2001, society and business were left reeling.
Companies are used to dedicating themselves to future planning, yet such an event can force them onto a completely different course with no warning. Such ‘‘wild cards’’, say the authors of this paper, are, by definition, failures of foresight. They focus on the challenge of how to take into account strategic surprises that we know beforehand are unpredictable, and attempt to describe how to build a wild card management system by supplying evidence on two recent ‘‘wild card-friendly’’ corporate foresight exercises.
Both were initiated before the events of 9/11: in 1995, Daimler Aerospace concluded a scenario exercise that examined a set of disturbances impacting on the air industry; during 2000, Baring Asset Management ran a Delphi survey to consider the asset management and financial services sectors over a 10-year horizon, part of which focused on wild card questions.

Both cases suggest that wild card foresight projects help to make the task of new strategy exploration more reasoned. The authors maintain that foresight techniques help to nurture a creative atmosphere in which better-informed decision-making rules can emerge. They say that wild card research therefore makes organisations more sensitive and potentially more flexible and resilient - even if the worst-case scenario never materialises.

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