Imagining Future Uncertainty (Week 2)
'Tomorrow will give us something to think about.'- Cicero
From an overview of complexity, the class moved on to Steve Cork's approaches to uncertain futures. These fell within the context of Gabriele Bammer's description (during Week 1) of uncertainty. She particularly focussed on 'unknown unknowns' as dangerous but oft ignored features of complex ecological, political and social systems. Her concept of 'meta-ignorance' is anathema to the political narrative of known problems and clear solutions just like complexity itself. As such, this week's political tool commences our exploration of uncertainty with an active preparation of strategies for unknown and largely unpredictable futures.
I was struck by the creative strategy of scenario planning to encourage organisations and the like to go beyond the status quo and explore the uncertain future. It involves the creation of multiple and varied future scenarios to 'emotionally prepare' for the possibility that they come true. Such approaches are necessary because large organisations are themselves complex systems. They are more immobile than the sum of their workforce's intellectual capacity would prescribe. Large public structures such as the Chinese government find change similarly 'challenging', according to Xuemai Bai. I attended her lecture on Asian urbanisation and sustainability in the spirit of cross-disciplinary exploration and found it to be pleasingly engaging and relevant to our course.
Further, the Australian political system itself is possessed by a similar inertia. Manning Clark once commented that Australian progressivism was as about as likely as a 'frog growing feathers'. Our social memory of such inherent conservatism generates a feedback loop in favour of opponents of political reform. It creates a political narrative that progress is too complex and difficult to be bothered with. Such commonly held attitudes partly explain the difficulties which the Gillard government is experiencing in promoting its carbon tax.
Further, the Australian political system itself is possessed by a similar inertia. Manning Clark once commented that Australian progressivism was as about as likely as a 'frog growing feathers'. Our social memory of such inherent conservatism generates a feedback loop in favour of opponents of political reform. It creates a political narrative that progress is too complex and difficult to be bothered with. Such commonly held attitudes partly explain the difficulties which the Gillard government is experiencing in promoting its carbon tax.
I would have liked to ask Steve Cork about how effectively scenario planning has been implemented beyond the Shell case. I wonder how comfortable CEOs and the like are with the childish concept of (albeit strategic) 'story time'. The simple imaginative approach of scenario planning also seems to tend towards a reductionism similar to conventional engineering's 'separation of concerns'. The tutorial activity of considering a future without oil from optimistic, pessimistic, rational and irrational perspectives is analogous to the simplification of de Bono's thinking hats. However, my group was so strongly optimistic that I felt we ran the risk of being unbalanced and unrealistic. I think that the integration of the different scenarios would be key. I am curious how this might be achieved without losing the subtlety of the relationships between the different scenarios.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb would claim that the detailed planning of different and specific iterations of an uncertain future is both simplistic and inefficient. His Black Swan thinking insists that it is better to expect the unexpected than prepare for a range of imagined predictions. I had hoped to attend a public lecture on Black Swans but I was ill. Nonetheless, I imagine that Taleb would have been horrified to witness the CIA's response to the Arab Spring. Because they were caught unawares by the fall of President Mubarak, CIA analysts are now diverting resources to attempt to predict all possible iterations of conflict in the Middle East. Given the great complexity of politics in that region, in this case at least a more general agility and alertness to unorthodox intelligence may be more appropriate than labyrinthine scenario planning.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb would claim that the detailed planning of different and specific iterations of an uncertain future is both simplistic and inefficient. His Black Swan thinking insists that it is better to expect the unexpected than prepare for a range of imagined predictions. I had hoped to attend a public lecture on Black Swans but I was ill. Nonetheless, I imagine that Taleb would have been horrified to witness the CIA's response to the Arab Spring. Because they were caught unawares by the fall of President Mubarak, CIA analysts are now diverting resources to attempt to predict all possible iterations of conflict in the Middle East. Given the great complexity of politics in that region, in this case at least a more general agility and alertness to unorthodox intelligence may be more appropriate than labyrinthine scenario planning.