Thinking differently about the unimaginable
First, there is the predictably unimaginable that comes with the new. Think here of “violent crime” as a legal category in the US that didn’t exist prior to the 1970s. “Speaking of ‘political prisoners’ had become such a major political criticism that it was no longer possible to imagine it as a legal category,” concludes another. That new categories and conventions are ahead that we don’t now imagine is quite predictable.
Second, that there are analogies to redescribe current policy problems is also predictable. The Green New Deal has most often been likened to Roosevelt’s New Deal. It’s also been likened to the Civil Rights Movement, 19th century abolitionism, and the war economy of the Bolshevik Revolution. There should be no doubt that the climate emergency has been or will be compared to many other events you and I won’t imagine until that comparison is made.
Third, earthquakes with unimaginable impacts are predicted all the time. That in fact is the genre convention. It’s no different than predicting that experience after my death will be the same as experience before my being conceived.
Thinking differently about implementation scenarios
The authors of a fine report concluded that significant gaps exist between what was proposed in the EU AI Act (concerning artificial intelligence) and the then existing EU digital legislation (formally “the digital acquis”):
We identify eight key areas where challenges may emerge, and make the following policy recommendations: . . .
https://www.ceps.eu/ceps-publications/the-ai-act-and-emerging-eu-digital-acquis/)
In my view, the first question we ask is not, “Who’s going to adopt the recommendations and, if so, with what modifications?” but rather: “Who would implement the finalized recommendations and what are implementors’ scenarios for failing to do so?” This acknowledges the longstanding role of implementation as de facto policymaking.
Thinking differently about pre-disaster mitigations
Retrofitting a bridge pre-disaster isn’t a chancy wager on what might or might not happen to the bridge. Retrofitting is managing latent interconnectivities between bridges and other infrastructures that become manifest during and immediately after the disaster. That inter-infrastructural connections will shift and these shifts will involve bridges is far more predictable than this or that bridge will fail, unless retrofitted.
This means attention is crucial to the track record in retrofitting bridges before and after disasters, here and elsewhere. Note the implication: Retrofitting has to occur in order to have a track record to monitor and learn from.
Since there are real material and cognitive limits on controlling inter-infrastructural connectivity at any point in time, doing more by way of managing the pre-disaster latency of interconnectivities is elemental. Bringing water systems up to power’s better practices is a way of managing latent interconnectivity in advance of disaster, one interviewee told us.
Thinking differently about risk management for crises
I
What to make of the debacle of Sam Bank-Friedman’s cryptocurrency firm?
“I wasn’t even trying, like, I wasn’t spending any time or effort trying to manage risk on FTX,” Mr. Bankman-Fried said. Echoed a co-head of digital asset trading in Citigroup about FTX, “The thing that I picked up on immediately that was causing us heartburn was the complete lack of a risk-management framework that they could articulate in any meaningful way.”
Before it was the wrong framework for managing risks; now the problem is having no framework at all. But how could FTX not have risk managers, albeit of sorts and not formalized?
II
In answer, let’s recast the issue. Risk and risk managers were around long before risk management frameworks and registries had been formalized. Think Christians being around from the time of Jesus to the time of formalizing the Scriptures in 4th century AD at the Council of Nicaea, How did Christians operate in the 300 years between? Can we think of Bank-Friedman and his FTX colleagues (and other cult-entrepreneurs) in the same way as these early Christians?
No wonder the guardians of current frameworks might want to convince us the FTX debacle has nothing to offer by way of lessons learned.
Thinking differently about crisis leadership
The literature on crisis leadership is largely top down (leaders direct) or bottom up (self-organizing crisis response), where networks are said to be vertical (hierarchical) or horizontal (laterally interacting).
We add a third category: control rooms, and not just in terms of Incident Command Centers during the emergency but already-existing infrastructure control rooms whose staff continue to operate during the emergency.
Paul Schulman and I argue control rooms are a unique organizational formation meriting society protection, even during (especially during) continued turbulence. They have evolved to take hard systemwide decisions under difficult conditions that require a decision, now. Adding this third is to insist on real-time large-system management as the prevention of major failures and thus crises that would have happened had not control room managers, operators and support staff prevented them.
Thinking differently about predictions
As I remember the to-ing and fro-ing over the introduction of Bt cotton in India, saving on insecticides was the putative plus and runaway GM crops the putative negative. I know nothing about the subsequent record but suspect that actual findings must have been differentiated, as any such findings, by region and other demographics.
All this came back to me when I read the following passage describing a conference paper on Bt cotton:
Ambarish Karamchedu presented on Dried up Bt cotton narratives: climate, debt and distressed livelihoods in semi-arid smallholder India. Proponents of this ‘technical fix’ position GMO crops as a triple win. India has semi-arid and arid areas where rural poverty is concentrated, with an intense monsoon season (3-4 months), making farming a challenge. BT cotton introduced around 1995, thrives here. India is the biggest cotton cultivator and Bt cotton is grown by 7 million smallholder farmers, 66 percent in semi-arid areas with poor soils and low rainfall prone to monsoon. In Telangana, 65% of farmers across all classes produce BT cotton, with good harvests for 5 years, after which they decline. Failure of farmers who face increased input prices have to resort to non-farm incomes. The triple win technological fix narrative perpetuates and exacerbates the problems it seeks to solve, and benefits farmer institutions rather than enriching farmer knowledge and practice.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VfvjJlxB9VPKQj55dNbZ_VH6oPi2IEVd
It’s that “with good harvests for 5 years, after which they decline” that grabbed my attention. Did anyone predict that for Bt cotton?
This matters, because in the absence of any such prediction, why not also conclude: “Well, five years is five years more than the critics expected?”
Thinking differently about luck in infrastructure crises
Ensuring systemwide service reliability has always involves a measure of luck in major critical infrastructures. Control room operators will tell you this. At its most abstract, good luck can be defined as the non-occurrence of system failure in the absence of exercising failure avoidance options, while bad luck is the occurrence of failure in the presence of exercising those options.
But luck also favors the well-prepared, and well-prepared operators make a difference. Consider how a senior operations engineer for a transmission grid described a close call to us:
. . . We nearly caused a voltage collapse all over the western grid. Everything was going up and down, we were trying to get power from all the nuclear units in the western grid. Life flashed before our eyes. And then the gen dispatcher did intuitively the right thing. He said, Shut one pump down. How he figured that, I still don’t understand. It was something we had never seen before. We had no procedures. . .We went back and looked at it, and the planner said, Oh yeah, you should never have been running three pumps, and we said, Where did you get that from? So we started writing new procedures.
When talent meets opportunity, the value added by professionals is stopping close calls and near misses from tripping into system failures. That there can be no guarantees makes it luck.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 