The Hunt for Grey Swans — Top 15 Methods & Frameworks — #2 SCAMPER

Chasing Possibilities, Wild Cards and Extremes by Playing with Convention

Author: Sean Moffitt, Grey Swan Guild Founder and CEO, Cygnus Ventures

Humans can be obstinate creatures of habit. In conducting hundreds of innovation and planning facilitations over the years, I frequently find it difficult to shake professionals from their avowed discipline or self-professed identity. It’s not wholly bad. Part of this behaviour is driven by professional badging and pride, part of it by comfort and sticking to what they know, and part of it is their implicit belief that their specific subject matter area truly holds the answer the majority of the time.

However, part of this intransigence stifles new thinking. I find the brains malleable enough to not only be informed by a broader range of thinking, but able to invoke that entire range as a filter for deciding on the resulting ideas and next ventures, to be invaluable as a professional mindset and skillset. They are much more capable of envisioning and creating better futures. It’s a trait frequently that gets some people to the next professional rung and in its absence, causes people to get pigeon-holed into their current siloed functions and small confined career spaces.

I’ve listed a number of external ‘scopes (e.g. tech gyroscope, customer kaelidoscope, cross-industry periscope and futures telscope) and realms of understanding (e.g. headwinds, tailwinds, wild cards) that any professionals in changing environments should invest themselves and balanced themselves in below. A large, more expansive mind simply produces stronger thinking that travels further.

In keeping with our push to lateral knowledge and learning. we are continuing our series of profiling 15 methods and frameworks that surface big possibilities, important wild cards and high value extremes. Our second method and framework we profile is SCAMPER, and it comes from the school of horizontal thinking and creative range.

Reminder — Grey Swan Definition: Unlikely but knowable key factors, events and developments, capable of being evaluated and validated in advance, with impacts that could positively and/or negatively shake up the world.

Let’s get vested in this effort together. Don’t be an ostrich, be a Grey Swan.

The Full Collection of Grey Swan Methods & Frameworks

Method #2 — SCAMPER — Playing with Convention

SCAMPER is an acronym-based, creativity framework and tool that provides seven prompts for improving the creativity of baseline thinking. Frequently used as an innovation tool for improving products and services, it’s equally serviceable for improving foresights, concepts and Grey Swan thinking:

Invented by: Advertising executive Alex Osborn, inventor of brainstorming (he was the O in agency colossus BBDO), followed by Bob Eberle, author and education administrator, who developed the SCAMPER mnemonic.

Category: Early stage, creativity framework and tool.

Why we Love It as a Grey Swan Tool: Understands small tweaking can lead to big changes in thinking; acts as a spur to creative thinking and originality, particularly for people who don’t have that intuitive skill.

Overcomes the sin of: The belief that everything old or previously invested is bad, instead SCAMPER reuses, recycles and transforms it into gold. SCAMPER stretches thinking out further than what conventional minds would judge, ensuring full and safe business team participation and cognitive flexibility.

Work preceded by:

• Existing orthodoxy, scenarios and trends — a full team grounding in established views, assumptions, projected and probable scenarios, and where relevant near term trends seem to be shifting to — these will be the starting canvas for creative engagement and alteration.
• Individual team member Grey Swan generation — ensure members come to the table with individually developed ideas on possibilities, wild cards and extremes based on SCAMPER before the influence of group discussion

Work followed by:

• Consider the most intensely felt SCAMPER outputs — expand on those creations that aren’t necessarily the most popular but those with an intensity of interest, consider their potential expanded interest and description; evaluate each for plausibility, impact, distinctivity and trajectory
• Develop new scenarios and contingencies — consider and experiment with how new developments, events, systems, products, services and features could develop from a SCAMPER Grey Swan trend world.

Facets of SCAMPER:

• Substitute: replace a mainstream thing, idea or accepted norm with an analogous alternative or something else. Other words as substitute stand-ins: alternate, surrogate, fill in, rename, repackage, replace, surrogate or switch.
• Combine: converge and fuse major events & developments from disparate areas, compound and synthesize the consequences. Other words as combine stand-ins: amalgamate, fuse, intermingle, link, package and unite.
• Adapt: maximize flexibility, tweak evolution or alter trajectory of a given signal, solution or development. Other words as adapt stand-ins: alter, amend, change, conceptualize, modify, readjust, revise, vary or tweak.
• Modify: magnify or minify the extrapolated trend, accelerate or slow up expected next stages. Other words as modify stand-ins: amplify, augment,expand, heighten, lengthen, magnify, multiply, slow up, speed up or stretch out.
• Put to Another Use: diverge where expected scenarios and developments are expected to manifest themselves. Other words as put to another use stand-ins: bring into play, diverge, employ, exhaust, reapply, use up or utilize.
• Eliminate: Remove constraints or omit qualifiers on a trend or development; cut noisy elements out. Other words as eliminate stand-ins: curb, disregard, jettison, lessen, liberate, omit, reject, restrain or simplify.
• Reverse: Rearrange the order or sequence of expected stage
  of assumed trend or development. Other words as reverse stand-ins: are: move backward, rearrange, relocate, reorder, reschedule, swap, switch or turn.

Additional Commentary:

“In many arenas of life, we frequently throw old stuff out before it’s past its due date, whether good or bad. As an emerging trend framework, SCAMPER has some real power in looking at, and then pivoting from conventional thinking. Impressive new thinking can be unlocked even with the smallest of input changes. The side benefit from SCAMPER use is that it also helps generate, and almost legislates, imaginative lateral thinking amongst its participants. There may be a good reason why it has stood strong as a framework over its 80+ year test of time.” Sean Moffitt

Grey Swan Posts:

This is number two of a set of fifteen posts on different methods and frameworks for chasing Grey Swans. but we have so much other commentary on this valuable but often overlooked chase for the non-obvious:

• I — Grey Swan Week and defining Grey Swans
• II — Our 2023 Report Card of Grey Swans (last year’s review and performance)
• III — Fifteen Ways to Hunt for Grey Swans (methods and frameworks) — #1 CIPHER
• #2 SCAMPER
• #3 SUPERCAFFEINATED U
• #4 FUTURES WHEEL
• #5 CONE OF POSSIBILITIES
• #6 WEAK SIGNALS
• #7 SWAN SOURCING
• #8 SCENARIO ARCHETYPES
• #9 OUTSIDE-IN COLLISIONS
• #10 POSSIBILITY PREMORTEMS
• #11 RED TEAMING
• #12 WHAT IF … EXPLORATION
• #13 ADOR EDGES
• #14 CRITICAL UNCERTAINTIES
• #15 MULTI-VIEW SCENARIOS
• IV — Fifty Grey Swan Wild Card Influences in 2024 (ranking the categories)
• V — Twelve Grey Swans Revealed (<25%) — Cloudy Swans
• VI — Twelve Grey Swans Revealed (<5%) — Stormy Swans
• VII — Twelve Grey Swans Revealed (<1%) — Shadow Swans

Stay tuned with us here, as well as on our website for all the rundowns.

Participate in our Hunt for Grey Swans

Don’t worry it’s a humane hunt. We have already invited some of our regular contributors to provide us the seeds of what will be our authoritative list of one hundred 2024 Grey Swans.

These are the improbable, disruptive and remote developments that decision makers better keep at least one eye peeled open for so they don’t blindside them. Perhaps you have some you’ve considered yourself.

Be among the most talented and wide-eyed observers. Let us know your Grey Swan additions and we will add them to our annual collection with our 2024 Grey Swan Guild Subnmission Form. Other benefits and collabroations may follow.

Grey Swan Submission Form: https://bit.ly/2024greyswan

Grey Swan Guild — Making Sense of the World and Next Grey Swans

We are the Guild whose mission it is to make sense of the world and next Grey Swans (wild cards, scenarios, early signals).

How we do this is guided by our four values of: aspiration, collaboration, curiosity and purpose.

We bring this to life through six facets of our world-leading Guild experience:

• Intelligence and Foresight
• Content and Publications
• Events and Experiences
• Training and Learning
• Global Community and Network
• Experiments and Ventures

Here’s what you can do in the Guild:

Learn about the Guild: https://www.greyswanguild.org/
Read our Content: https://greyswanguild.medium.com/
Attend our Events: https://www.greyswanguild.org/calendar
Become an Official Guild Member: https://bit.ly/gsgsmemberform

The Guild Hub: https://www.greyswanguild.org/

Cygnus Ventures (powered by Grey Swan Guild ) — Expain Today, Imagine Tomorrow

Now coming up to our 4th year of our Guild, we have built twelve ventures designed to create value and tap our enormous reservoir of talent found inside the Guild.

To get directly involved in any one of our Cygnus Ventures , including two venture efforts focused on research and intelligence efforts called Weathervanes (current focused) and The Radar Collection (future-focused).

Go Deeper as a Global Sensemaker: https://bit.ly/lofsenseform
Learn more about our ventures: https://www.greyswanguild.org/cygnusventures

To get directly involved in any one of our twelve (12) Cygnus Ventures including click here. To hire our ventures group for any of your own wicked challenges or Grey Swans, let’s have a discussion.

Join some of our ventures; https://bit.ly/gsgventures