Instances of the importance of knowing what are mistakes under conditions of pervasive uncertainty

1. Rescuing error from uncertainty

I

How do you know you’ve made a mistake if caught in the grip of everything else being uncertain? You know more, of course, after the fact, when consequences are clearer. But how do you know in real time that this or that action is a mistake to be avoided in the fog of war or such like you find all around you?

It is important, I think, to insist that real-time error avoidance is still possible even under conditions of widespread systemwide complexity and uncertainties (and not just by way of later hindsight).

II

Paul Schulman and I recently undertook research on a set of interconnected critical infrastructures in Oregon and Washington State. We ended up focusing on key interconnectivity configurations, shifts, connected system control variables, and changing performance standards as operating conditions shifted from normal, through disrupted, into failed, then if possible into recovery and a new normal for the interconnected systems.

The upshot is that not only do major uncertainties and risks change with shifting interconnectivities, but new errors to be avoided emerge as well, and clearly so.

For staff in the interconnected critical infrastructures, there are conditions under which it is a shared error for infrastructure operators not to micro-coordinate by way of improvising and communicating laterally (not just up and down a chain of incident command). This holds even if (especially if) emergency response and initial service restoration are not guaranteed after an interinfrastructural shock.

III

So what?

I know I have been too casual in wielding about global descriptions of “systemwide uncertainty, complexity, and conflict.” Error avoidance, in contrast, can be a far better site indicator for policy and management on the ground.

2. It’s not about unfogging the future

–We are so used to the idea that predicting the future should not be erroneous that we forget how murky and unclear the present is. To paraphrase Turgot, the French Enlightenment philosopher and statesman, we have enough trouble predicting the present, let along any such future! Because the present is not one-way-only, why expect anything less for the future when it unfolds?

But there’s murky, and then there is knowing better the way and how of that “murky.”

–Since the complexity of policy and management means there is more than one way to interpret an issue, the more interpretations we acknowledge the less mistaken we are about that the nature and limits of that complexity. That is to say, we are clearer about why multiple scenarios are our aim, namely, ones that “enable us to reframe our current understanding of our environment, appreciating the power of uncertainty and its capacity to inspire fear and wonder” (Finch and Mahon 2023).

The operative term for me is “reframe the present,” again and again, and then see what sticks.

3. The crisis sequence as an abstraction

–The painter Gérard Fromanger noted that a blank canvas is ‘‘black with everything every painter has painted before me’’. If, as painter František Kupka felt, “to abstract is to eliminate,” then stripping away the layers of black-on-black is akin to abstracting blankness. One implication: There is nothing more abstract in the art of change than “wiping the table clean.”

–Yet those sheets of empty, clean paper held up high by the crowd? Make no mistake: It is bstracting what can’t be changed, right now.

–The chief risk manager is a curator of artifacts called risk scores for this or that part of the installations called critical infrastructure. Each score is akin to the Surrealists’ frottage, a smudged impression on a piece of paper by rubbing with a pencil or crayon over the uneven surface. It is a mistake to see the smudge as a mistake.

–Take a linear sequence—beginning/middle/end—and move that “middle.” You’ve made a triangle of any crisis scenario. Downwards, and it sags into a V, as when the story can never get out of in medias res. Shift outwards, and it is neither right nor left, but in front, like climate activists in the vanguard.

This happens, that happens, and that’s it. So said, the crisis sequence comes to sound like grudges passed off as threats. Now that’s a mistake.

Sources

M. Finch and M. Mahon (2023). “Facing the Strategic Sublime: Scenario Planning as Gothic Narrative” in Vector 297 (2023) at https://vector-bsfa.com/current-issue/

E. Roe and P.R. Schulman (2023). “An Interconnectivity Framework for Analyzing and Demarcating Real-Time Operations Across Critical Infrastructures and Over Time.” Safety Science online.