OK, now we are in a situation we have been talking about in our speeches and scenario projects for decades. A virus by the name of COVID-19 (a version of a Coronavirus) is spreading and is threatening to turn into a pandemic. And it really seems to shake up the system.
The problem for me is that in most projects a pandemic is considered a wild card and is seldom analyzed deeper. It just sits there on a PostIt-note.
But now it is happening. So what can we do?
Most of us futurists don’t have the professional skills to act directly. But we know how to work with mapping complex, uncertain and long term consequences. We have tools to organize scattered and seemingly irrelevant pieces of facts and knowledge and create maps of possible futures.
The challenge is usually that we are not experts in any areas we are dabbling with.
But knowing how to draw maps of uncertainties and think in larger-scale systems is a relevant skill set we have.
So yesterday evening I started to draw a basic Futures Wheel model and added pieces of knowledge, observations, and possible consequences I already collected. It became this model as a first version – version 0.1.
I am not done with this yet, but I thought that there might be other futurists out there that might be interested in my first shot? And who maybe will be able to add it to their own insights and thoughts?
A result could be a set of useful scenarios for thinking about the longer-term consequences of where this might be heading?
Great tool.