Important methodological implications of using triangulation in complex policy and management

Triangulation is the use of multiple methods, databases, theories, disciplines and/or analysts to converge on what to do about the complex issue. The goal is for analysts to increase their confidence–and that of their policy audiences–that no matter what position they take, they are led to the same problem definition, alternative, recommendation, or other desideratum. Familiar examples are the importance in the development literature of women and of the middle classes.

In triangulating, the analyst accommodates unexpected changes in positions later on. If your analysis leads you to the same conclusion regardless of initial positions already highly divergent, then the fact you must adjust that position later on matters less because you have sought to take into account utterly different views from the get-go.

Everyone triangulates, ranging from the everyday cross-checking of sources to more formal use of varied methods, strategies and theories for convergence on a shared point of departure or conclusion. Triangulation is thought to be especially helpful in identifying and compensating for biases and limitations of any single approach. Obtaining a second (and third. . .) opinion or soliciting the input of the range of stakeholders or ensuring you interview key informants with divergent backgrounds are three common examples.

Detecting bias is fundamental, because reducing, or correcting and adjusting for bias is one thing analysts can actually do. To the extent that bias remains an open question for the case at hand, it must not be assumed that increasing one’s confidence automatically or always increases certainty, reduces complexity, and/or gets one closer to the truth of the matter.

Now return to our starting point: The approaches in triangulation are chosen because they are, in a formal sense, orthogonal. This has another profound methodological implication: The aim is not to select the “best” from each approach and then combine these elements into a composite that you think better fits or explains the case at hand.

Why? Because the arguments, policies and narratives for complex policy and management already come to us as composites. Current issue understandings have been overwritten, obscured, effaced and reassembled over time by myriad interventions. To my mind, a great virtue of triangulation is to make their “composite/palimpsest” nature clearer from the outset.

To triangulate asks what, if anything, has persisted or survived in the multiple interpretations and reinterpretations that the issue has undergone over time up to the point of analysis. Indeed, failure to triangulate can provide very useful information. When findings do not converge across multiple orthogonal metrics or measures (populations, landscapes, times and scales…), the search by the analysts becomes one of identifying specific, localized or idiographic factors at work. What you are studying may be non-generalizable–that is, it may be a case it its own right–and failing to triangulate is one way to help confirm that.

Pastoralists as the witnesses-protagonists

In my reading, narratives of pastoralism divide into three major groups. There are the studies of pastoralism long past (think: Wilfred Thesiger). I’ve also read anthropological studies from the 1950s and 60s that share a nostalgia for pasts not threatened by modernizing pressures.

The second group is everything that Thesiger and colonial-era anthropologists are not. To cut this long story short, today’s pastoralists are imbricated through and through by overlapping settler-colonial, racial and global capitalisms. There is a deep irony in the fact that the thorough-going critiques of capitalism end up shadow pricing a past thought to be outside the cash-nexus.

The third group is for me more interesting and recent. The literature here seeks to stand in the pastoralists’ marginal(ized) positions and from there speak to the dominant economies and politics at the center. Some of this draws pastoralists to the center by demonstrating how their practices and ways of thinking are shared by, if not have positive implications for, center-based economics, banking, and pandemics (I have in mind the recent work of Ian Scoones and his PASTRES colleagues at IDS Sussex).

I want to focus on a fourth group of narratives, and frankly one I’m not sure exists like the others. Here the narratives are those where contemporary pastoralists are “witnesses-protagonists,” much along the lines of the character, “witness-protagonist,” found in certain period-specific novels.

III

In her 2024 Modern Language Quarterly article, “On the Origins of the Witness-Protagonist,” Anastasia Eccles gives examples of novels where such characters are found. For our purposes, these are less important than the features she ascribes to this character type (I quote at length):

This essay focuses on the “witness-protagonist”: a recessive but still identifiably major character who observes the developments of the main plot from a position on its margins. Such characters are familiar from modernist novels, but this essay turns back to a formative stage in their history to recover their forgotten political significance. . . .

The witness-protagonist took shape during a period of mass revolution abroad and democratic mobilization in Britain in which constituencies lacking formal recognition claimed the power to remake the structures of collective life. These historical developments turned the phenomenon of “unwarranted” participation into a pressing matter of public debate—and a basic condition of modern political subjectivity. The characters considered here tend to strike readers as illegitimate subjects who do not quite fit into or live up to their assigned roles. Instead of anchoring the whole, as we might expect protagonists to do, they call the form of the whole—its boundaries and its internal arrangement—into question. In their curiously unstable narrative position, they illuminate the formal conditions of democratic agency. . . .

Such a figure thus embodies the apparent paradox of a peripheral center or a major minor character. . .

The witness-protagonist, then, is a character whose status in the novel as a whole is somehow in question. We might say that these characters pose problems of or for form, insofar as form is taken to mean some principle of underlying fit or coherence among the novel’s parts. The signs of this problem are evident in the commentary surrounding these characters, which so often takes the form of a struggle to fix or locate or categorize a figure who does not quite behave like a normal protagonist. . . .

If the novel form projects an imagined community or potential body politic, these novels draw attention to that community’s grounds and limits. By focusing on characters whose station in the novel is anything but secure, they underscore the contingency of any particular arrangement of the collective. . .
Accessed online through https://read.dukeupress.edu/modern-language-quarterly/article-abstract/doi/10.1215/00267929-11060495/385703/On-the-Origins-of-the-Witness-Protagonist?redirectedFrom=fulltext

I don’t know about you, but I suspect I’m not the only one who sees pastoralists we’ve studied or read about in terms of: being at the margins, but still difficult to locate with respect to the dominant narrative; not like the usual protagonists at the center, though still clearly a center of gravity interacting with that bigger narrative; but so insecurely as to call into question the dominant narrative(s).

An example I have in mind is that of a 2023 Annual Review of Anthropology article, “Financialization and the Household,” by Caitlin Zaloom and Deborah James. Although not explicitly in the preceding terms, the quote below captures this sense of speaking substantively and interactively about the center from the perspective of householders, including rural and poor households at the margins:

Finance and the household are a pair that has not received sufficient attention. As a system, finance joins citizens, states, and global markets through the connections of kinship and residence. Householders use loans, investments, and assets to craft, reproduce, attenuate, and sever social connections and to elevate or maintain their class position. Householders’ social creativity fuels borrowing, making them the target of banks and other lenders. In pursuit of their own agendas, however, householders strategically deploy financial tools and techniques, sometimes mimicking and sometimes challenging their requirements. Writing against the financialization of daily life framework, which implies a one-way, top-down intrusion of the market into intimate relations, we explore how householders use finance within systems of social obligations. Financial and household value are not opposed, we argue. Acts of conversion between them produce care for the self and others and refashion inherited duties. Social aspiration for connection and freedom is an essential force in both financial lives and institutions.
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-anthro-052721-100947

Imagine if the very first article you ever read about global financialization began with the preceding quote. Imagine that those articles you actually have read up to this point on global financialization now must be re-read as slightly-off-center by comparison. What you thought was the plot all along isn’t the plot with which you could have started.

Source. Ian Scoones (forthcoming, 2024). Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World. Polity Press.

Infrastructure and reliability: 4 examples where conventional wisdom falls short

1. Second chances in the energy transition

2. The positive functions of social dread, blind spots and organizational setbacks for infrastructures and their reliability

3. Retrospective versus prospective standards of reliability in the financial sector

4. “Once nuclear power plants have been in operation long enough, we’ll see more major accidents more of the time”: Yes or No?

Second chances in the energy transition

Attempting to enact political and economic transformation without infrastructure support – without a way of pumping water, growing food, or delivering healthcare – is like doing origami with smoke. No matter how ambitious your scheme, how virtuosic your technique, the folds vanish as soon as you make them. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8414030/

You needn’t be clairvoyant to realize that the energy transition–whether in its reform or radical versions–means a host of second chances for critical infrastructures and their provision of reliable services.

With or without Stop-Oil, infrastructures will remain central to energy provision and interconnectivity; with or without Sustainability, reliability will be demanded across that interconnected provision. Yes, of course, technologies and system configurations will change, but even the keywords of radical versions–transformative, emancipatory–are redolent with the promise of second chances along the way. So too for the concepts and practices of infrastructure and reliability.

So what? For one thing the Climate Emergency portends all manner of illiquidity, not least of which are today’s critical infrastructures being tomorrow’s stranded assets. But stranded underscores the place-based character of the assets. Stranded also implies the possibility of other uses for the infrastructure. Stranded, in other words, means taking the places for second chances very seriously. Will the energy transition(s) be granular enough to do so?

The positive functions of social dread, blind spots and organizational setbacks for infrastructures and their reliability

Proposition: Under conditions of social complexity (more elements, more interconnections, more differentiated functions), what is negative in effect can also be positive when the mandates are for high reliability in service provision.

Social dread

Every day, nuclear plant disasters, airplane crashes, water-supply collapse—and more—are avoided that would have happened had not operators and managers in these large systems prevented their occurrence.

Why? Societal dread is so intense that these events must be precluded from happening on an active, continuous basis. (It might be better to say that we don’t altogether know the degree of “societal dread” unless we observe how knowledgeable professionals operate and manage hazardous critical infrastructures.)

There is such fear of what would happen if large interconnected electricity, telecommunications, water, transportation, financial services and like did fail that it is better to manage them than not have them. Here, ironically, distrust is as core as trust. One reason infrastructure operators manage reliably is that they actively distrust the future will be stable or predictable in the absence of the system’s vigilant real-time management.

We of course must wonder at the perversity of this. But that is the function of this dread and distrust. Namely: to push all of us in probing further what it means to privilege social and individual reliability and safety over other values. We are meant to ask: What would it look like in world where such reliability and safety are not so privileged?

For the answer to that question is obvious: Most of the planet already lives in that world of unreliability and little safety. We’re meant to ask, precisely because that answer is that clear.

Blind Spots

Another way to describe hazardous sociotechnical systems is that they have significant blind spots when it comes to their management, some visible others not.

For example, my state’s department of motor vehicles handbook states:

Blind Spots
Every vehicle has blind spots. These are areas around the vehicle that a driver cannot see when looking straight ahead or using the mirrors. For most vehicles, the blinds spots are at the sides, slightly behind the driver. To check your blind spots, look over your right and left shoulders out of your side windows. Only turn your head when you look. Do not turn your whole body or steering wheel.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/california-driver-handbook/

“Driving a vehicle” is, in other words, managing the way drivers do in much part because of the vehicular blind spots posed for those drivers.

The broader point is that blind spots in sociotechnical systems represent a mix of both weaknesses and strengths for their managers. You get all the advantages and the disadvantages of driving a car in comparison to otherwise driving a tractor-trailer or horse-and-buggy. Or the same point from the opposite direction, you get all the advantages and disadvantages of managing micro-grids in comparison to otherwise having to manage the current electric transmission and distribution grids.

Organizational Setbacks

Setbacks—unanticipated, unwanted, and often sudden interruptions and checks on moving forward—are fairly common and typically treated as negative in complex systems and organizations.

Less discussed are the conditions under which such setbacks are positive. Arguably best known is when a complex organization transitions from one stage of a life cycle to another by overcoming obstacles characteristic of the stage in which the organization finds itself. An example is CAISO (the California Independent System Operator of the state’s main electric transmission) moving from its startup phase in the late 1990s to its full ongoing operations at present in 2024.

Other positive setbacks serve as a test bed for developing better practices, whatever the stage the organization finds itself. Some setbacks are better thought of as design probes for whether that organization is on the “right track,” or if not, what track it could/should be on. In yet other circumstances, setbacks serve to point managers in the direction of things about which they had been unaware but which matter.

For example, among all its negative features, did the 2008 financial crisis also serve as a timely interruption to remind us how central regulators are to the continuity of complex financial and credit systems? Did the crisis end up as a much-needed probe of how well the financial and credit institutions are keeping their sectors on track and under mandate? Was the 2008 crisis a test bed for more anticipatory strategies in credit lending and investing? Did the crisis in effect serve as an obstacle, whose surmounting has been necessary to promote the operational redesign of the financial and credit sectors in more reliable ways?

Note the obviously mixed answers to these questions mean the setbacks cannot be considered a priori negative.

Upshot: Complex is as positive as it gets in critical infrastructures mandated to be highly reliable.

Retrospective versus prospective standards of reliability in the financial sector

Nuclear explosions occur, dams are overtopped, and grids do separate and island, but these events are rare–rare because of their management beyond technology and design–and when they do happen they serve to reinforce their must-never-happen dread.

In contrast, financial services have “should-never-happen events”—bank runs should be avoided and financial crises shouldn’t happen. The standard of operating reliability is not one of precluding financial crises from ever happening, but rather of treating these crises (1) as avoidable though not always, or (2) as inevitable (“busts are part of market capitalism”) or at least (3) compensable after the fact (as in the pre-2008 assurance that it’s better to clean up after a financial bubble bursts than trying to manage it beforehand).

Not having reliability of financial services based on must-never-happen events has major consequences for standards of economic stability and growth.

At the macro level, there are two different standards of economic reliability: The retrospective standard holds the economy is performing reliably when there have been no major shocks or disruptions from then to now. The prospective standard holds the economy is reliable only until the next major shock or downturn.

Why does the difference matter? In practical terms, the economy is prospectively only as reliable as its critical infrastructures are reliable, right now when it matters for economic productivity. Indeed, if economy and productivity were equated only with recognizing and capitalizing on retrospective patterns and trends, economic policymakers and managers could never be reliable prospectively.

III

For example, a retrospective orientation to where we are today is to examine economic and financial patterns and trends since, say, 2008; a prospective standard would be to ensure that–at a minimum–the 2008 financial recovery could be replicated, if not bettered, for the next global financial crisis.

The problem with the latter–do no worse in the financial services sector than what happened in the last (2008) crisis–is that benchmark would have to reflect a must-never-happen event for the sector going forward.

What, though, are the chances it would be the first-ever must-never-happen event among all of that sectors’ should-never-happen ones?

“Once nuclear power plants have been in operation long enough, we’ll see more major accidents more of the time”: Yes or No?

By way of answering, yes or no, let’s start with an anecdote:

There is an apocryphal story about Frederick Mosteller, a famous professor of statistics at Harvard University. Sometime in the 1950s, a student of Mosteller´s was unconvinced that a six-sided die had a precise 1/6 chance of landing on any of its six sides, so he collected a bunch of (cheap) dice and tossed them a few thousand times to test his professor´s theory… Evidently, according to said (bored) student the numbers five and six appeared more frequently than the numbers one through four. Professor Mosteller´s unsurprising response was that the student had not tossed the dice enough times. ‘Rest assumed’, the student was told, the law of large numbers would ‘kick in’ and everything would (eventually) converge to 1/6. Undeterred, the student continued rolling a few thousand more times, but the fives and sixes were still showing up way too frequently. Something fishy was afoot. It turns out that the observed frequencies were not quite 1/6 because the holes bored into dice – to represent the numbers themselves – shift the centers of gravity toward the smaller numbers, which are opposite the numbers five and six. Ergo, the two highest numbers were observed with greater frequency.
https://cpes.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/stefan_voss_paper.pdf

In other words, it takes a very great deal of work to undertake a randomized control experiment, as “control” is such a misleading term in the real world. Something uncontrolled/uncontrollable intervenes significantly between treatment and measurement.

This means that one reason why there haven’t been more nuclear accidents (given their complex and unpredictably interactive technologies) is not because “we haven’t waited long enough.” It’s more likely other intervening factors have been and are at work.

And one such reason is that the plants have been managed beyond their technologies. They are managed more reliably than theory predicts precisely because of the next failure ahead–that is, there are no guarantees and as such must be managed reliably instead.

Being right is a matter of genre: a lesson from Louise Glück

In public policy, the wish–so often unfilled–is for the right person at the right time in the right place doing the right thing.

In poetry by contrast, we have Louise Glück’s poem, “Crossroads,”

My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young—

love that was so often foolish in its objectives
but never in its choices, its intensities.
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised—

My soul has been so fearful, so violent:
forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously,

not wishing to give offense
but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:

it is not the earth I will miss,
it is you I will miss.

Given the poem’s theme, the shortening of lines from three to two is so RIGHT!

Major read: the positive functions of social dread, blind spots and organizational setbacks in complex sociotechnical systems

Proposition: Under conditions of social complexity (more elements, more interconnections, more differentiated functions), what is negative in effect can also be positive.

Social dread

For the answer to that question is obvious: Most of the planet already lives in that world of unreliability and little safety. We’re meant to ask, precisely because that answer is that clear.

Blind Spots

Another way to describe hazardous sociotechnical systems is that they have significant blind spots when it comes to their management, some visible others not.

For example, my state’s department of motor vehicles handbook states:

Blind Spots
Every vehicle has blind spots. These are areas around the vehicle that a driver cannot see when looking straight ahead or using the mirrors. For most vehicles, the blinds spots are at the sides, slightly behind the driver. To check your blind spots, look over your right and left shoulders out of your side windows. Only turn your head when you look. Do not turn your whole body or steering wheel.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/california-driver-handbook/

“Driving a vehicle” is, in other words, managing the way drivers do in much part because of the vehicular blind spots posed for those drivers.

The broader point is that blind spots in sociotechnical systems represent a mix of both weaknesses and strengths for their managers. You get all the advantages and the disadvantages of driving a car in comparison to otherwise driving a tractor-trailer or horse-and-buggy. Or the same point from the opposite direction, you get all the advantages and disadvantages of managing micro-grids in comparison to otherwise having to manage the current electric transmission and distribution grids.

Organizational Setbacks

Setbacks—unanticipated, unwanted, and often sudden interruptions and checks on moving forward—are fairly common and typically treated as negative in complex systems and organizations.

Note the obviously mixed answers to these questions mean the setbacks cannot be considered a priori negative.

Upshot: Complex is as positive as it gets. in large sociotechnical systems.

Another article ends where it should have started

. . . .The German solar sector conservatively reinforces an inherently unequal global and national political economy, rather than fostering a radically restructured economy that runs on principles of solidarity and sustainability, not profit. Radical democratization and decentralization, the mandatory use of recycled materials, while curbing the power of corporations involved in the political economy of energy, with a strict (and strictly enforced) ban of all trade of electronic and other toxic waste together with fundamentally reformed regulations on trade of energy manufacturing resources prioritizing ecological and social justice concerns, might be a start.

“Might be a start“? An anemic “might be” to conclude a long set of spot-on criticisms? So comes to end another article where it should have started.

Why? Because readers already know we need radical restructuring. Many could and would add to this list of desirables.

So then the question remains as it has been: how are we to get there? What are the better practices across a wide spectrum of sites that work to achieve behaving better–economically and democratically and regulatorily?

Another virtue in reviewing really-existing practices as widely as possible “might be” to demonstrate that solar renewables are the last thing a good number of sites need worry about.

Retrospective versus prospective standards of reliability in the financial sector (revised)

Not having reliability of financial services based on must-never-happen events has major consequences for standards of economic stability and growth.

III

The problem with the latter–do no worse in the financial services sector than what happened in the last (2008) one–is that benchmark would have to reflect a must-never-happen event for the sector going forward.

What, though, are the chances it would be the first-ever must-never-happen event among all of that sectors’ should-never-happen ones?

Positive setbacks

Setbacks—unanticipated, unwanted, and often sudden interruptions and checks on moving forward—are fairly common and typically treated as negative in policymaking, implementation, and operations.

Less discussed are the positive setbacks. Arguably best known is when a complex organization transitions from one stage of a life cycle to another by overcoming obstacles characteristic of the stage in which the organization finds itself. Moving from start-up to on-going operations is one such transition.

To summarize, setbacks are positive in terms of their degree of importance and of the time horizon over which they are important:

Did the 2008 financial crisis, by way of example, served as a timely interruption to remind us how central regulators are to the continuity of the financial and credit systems? Did the crisis end up as a much-needed probe of how well the financial and credit institutions are keeping their sectors on track and under mandate? Was the 2008 crisis a test bed for more resilient or anticipatory strategies in credit lending and investing? Did the crisis in effect served as an obstacle, whose surmounting has been necessary to promote the operational redesign of the financial and credit sectors in more reliable ways?

Note the obviously mixed answers to any such questions do not mean the setbacks are a priori negative.

At the core of socioeconomic betterment is the radical work of “yes, but”

Which present debt crisis—one, more, or all—are we talking about when it comes to managing better? Is it: that we can’t predict how to adapt better to future debt conditions; that increases in the public debt (including interest payments) are unsustainable even in the short-run; that our latest jargon about better debt management vaporizes like other budgeting fads; and/or that it’s not an issue of if the public debt becomes catastrophic, but only when? The four overlap, but each of represents a different kind of “present.”

Betterment comes to the fore not by having to choose which of present (or in combination) “more accurately” represents reality. Rather it is by insisting that each must be interrogated by asking the further question: “Yes, but what are the implications of not-knowing the present being identified in each?”

Doing so ends up in all manner of “yes-but.” As in: What if “not knowing the present” is the way we keep options open or in reserve, if only because we rightly insist that affairs constellating around the public debt remain difficult after three hundred years grappling with the yes’s and no’s of inexperience in better dealing with it? Indeed, getting to those options is the radical work of “yes, but” when it comes to betterment.

Earlier definitions of betterment figured in versions of the 18^th century European Enlightenment. The term was used interchangeably with “improvement” or “progress,” though from time to time singled out as its own unit of analysis (most notably, Adam Smith’s “the great purpose of human life which we call bettering our condition”).

The explicit diversity in Enlightenment thinkers, however, made it inevitable that not-knowing, difficulty and inexperience would come into greater focus.

Voltaire discusses not-knowing in the entry “On the Limits of the Human Mind” of his Philosophical Dictionary; David Hume, Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, grappled with the acknowledged idea of “not-knowing as the key to the contented life,” according to one commentator. In the view of another, Adam Smith expressed “an open skepticism about the possibility of knowing definitively what it is we are really doing;” while Immanuel Kant famously wrote about “the unknowability of things-in-themselves.” “Full recognition of the importance of uncertainty and the unknowable in analysing economic processes is an eighteenth-century heritage. . .which cannot be emphasized too often. . .” writes a third observer.

As for difficulty, historian Jonathan Israel sketches its central role in the Radical Enlightenment: “The notion, still widespread today, that Enlightenment thinkers nurtured a naive belief in man’s perfectibility seems to be a complete myth conjured up by early twentieth-century scholars unsympathetic to its claims. In reality, Enlightenment progress breathed a vivid awareness of the great difficulty of spreading toleration, curbing religious fanaticism, and otherwise ameliorating human organization, orderliness, and the general state of health was always impressively empirically based.”

Nor was the role of inexperience remote to versions of the Enlightenment: “In the light of the triumph of Newtonian science, the men of the Enlightenment argued that experience and experiment, not a priori reason, were the keys to true knowledge,” writes historian, Roy Porter, where inexperience ironically became a touchstone for criticizing French Enlighteners: “Above all, critics complained, in politics the philosophes lacked the quality they pretended to value most: experience.” More, the almost universal priority given to education by Enlightenment advocates reflected their acknowledgement that more education was to mean, acutely, more experience.

III

So what? Widespread not-knowing, difficulty and experience can give rise to social dread, and the response to dread is knowing what to do by way of betterment.

The large-scale systems for betterment—whether defined around markets at one end or social protections at the other—are managed in large part because of widespread societal dread over what happens when they aren’t managed reliably and safely. Critical infrastructures for energy, water and healthcare (among others) are so essential that they mustn’t fail, even when (especially when) they change. That they do fail, and materially so, increases the very real pressures that it’s far too costly not to manage them.

We of course are meant to wonder at the perversity of this. But that is the function of this dread, isn’t it? Namely: to push us further in probing what it means to privilege social and individual reliability and safety over other values and desires. We are meant to ask: What would it look like in world where such reliability and safety are not so privileged? For the answer is also altogether evident and right before us: Most of the planet lives in that world of unreliability and little safety. We’re meant to ask—because the answer is that evident, even with (precisely because?) of the yes-buts.

Sources

Gay, P. (1969). The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. The Science of Freedom (Vol. 2). First Paperback Edition. W.W. Norton & Company: New York, NY

Groenewegen, P. (2002). Eighteenth Century Economics: Turgot, Beccaria and Smith and their Contemporaries. Routledge: London and New York

Israel, J. (2010). A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ.

Lloyd, G. (2013). Enlightenment Shadows. Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK

Porter, R. (2001) The Enlightenment. Second Edition. Studies in European History. Palgrave/Macmillan: Great Britain.

When it comes to complex sociotechnical systems, their blind spots are sources both of weakness and of strength

I take the social science finding that “humans make technology and technology remakes humans” to be easily demonstrated. The policy-relevant issue, however, centers on the specifics.

In my view, specifics about different blind spots associated with different technologies are first to be identified and then compared. My state’s department of motor vehicles handbook states:

Blind Spots
Every vehicle has blind spots. These are areas around the vehicle that a driver cannot see when looking straight ahead or using the mirrors. For most vehicles, the blinds spots are at the sides, slightly behind the driver. To check your blind spots, look over your right and left shoulders out of your side windows. Only turn your head when you look. Do not turn your whole body or steering wheel.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/california-driver-handbook/

This means that driving a vehicle is a kind of managing precisely because of the blind spots they pose for their users. Yes, there are blind-spot monitoring technologies and the promises of self-driving cars. But who doubts that these technologies will have humans “looking over their shoulders” by way of having to respond to new blind spots newly induced by the new technologies?

The point here is that socio-technical blind spots represent a mix of both weaknesses and strengths for their managers.

You get all the advantages and the disadvantages of driving a car in comparison to otherwise having to drive a tractor-trailer or horse-and-buggy. Or the same point from the opposite direction, you get all the advantages and disadvantages of managing micro-grids in comparison to otherwise having to manage the current electric transmission and distribution grids.

No one should doubt that sustainable green technologies pose blind spots for their managers in addition to whatever cognitive biases (confirmation, attribution, more) of the managers.

III

Don’t mistake this, however, as an argument for the technology status quo.

Rather, the point is to ward against trusting anything like “fool-proof” technologies. One engineer we interviewed early on in our research told us, “I try to design systems that are not only foolproof but damned foolproof, so even a damned fool can’t screw them up”. To think that the necessity of having to manage technologies is the problem misses the crucial point of management also being one of our strengths.