Unstudied conditions are avoided as vigilantly as possible—right now, when it matters—by control room operators of large critical infrastructures mandated to operate reliably and safely systemwide. Having failed to fail because an operator was behaving ignorantly is orthogonal to high reliability management.

–That said, ignorance has functions in large socio-technical systems—but in ways not captured by the happy-talk of trial-and-error learning and Experiment! Five under-recognized positives deserve highlighting:

(1) A longstanding proposition in organization theory has been that operators and managers cannot know everything and something like bounded rationality is required in order to undertake decisions and manage. More, a mandate for comprehensive decisionmaking would undermine reliability management at the complex system level, not enhance it.

It is in such senses that the operations of other large infrastructures with which a control room is interconnected are largely, if not completely, “unstudied conditions” for that control room. Real-time management by a control room is so knowledge-intensive that its operators cannot be expected to understand just intensively how the other interconnected infrastructures and their control centers operate.

(2) The comfort zone of control room operators includes managing nonmeasured or unmeasurable uncertainties so as to stay out of unstudied conditions—unknown unknowns—about which system operators are by definition ignorant.

The uncertainties are not denominated as calculable risk, but still operators may know more about consequences than likelihoods, or vice versa. Operators undertake uncertainty management because they can and do differentiate uncertainties.

(3) Large system control operators do innovate even within their comfort zone. We see their improvisation in control room assembly of options just-in-time under conditions of high volatility (high unpredictability or uncontrollability in the outside environment). In fact, the evolutionary advantage of control rooms lies in the skills and expertise of its operators to operationally redesign in real time what is otherwise inadequate technology or regulation.

There is a kind of learning-through-error-management going on, but the learners do so by avoiding having to test the limits of system survival. Professionals will not deliberately chance the first error becoming the last trial (i.e., trial-and-error as probe-and-explode).

Certainly the view–“It’s almost impossible to innovate if you’re not prepared to fail”–is orthogonal to the innovation-positive we observed in critical infrastructures.

(4) That said, some unknown-unknowns may be key to something like an infrastructure’s immune system for managing under variable risk and uncertainty.

The complex and interconnected nature of large socio-technical systems suggests that “low-level” accidents, lapses or even sabotage may be underway that systemwide reliability professionals–like control room operators and their support staff–do not (cannot) observe, know about, or otherwise appreciate. This is less “ignorance is bliss” than ignorance as the ability to put up with what is disliked without knowing it as reliability is maintained by other means.

(5) Last but not least: When unstudied conditions and unknown-unknowns are feared because of the awful consequences associated with behaving ignorantly, the ensuing dread promotes having to manage dangerous complex technologies more reliably and safely than theories of tight coupling and complex interactivity suggest. Wide societal dread of systemwide failure takes on a positive function in these cases, without which the real-time management of dangerous technologies would not be warranted, let alone warrantable.

(It’s at this point that someone complains I’m advocating “the manufacture of dread for the purposes of social control through taken-for-granted technologies.” Which is oddly unreflexive on their part if they really believe what they say, since the very infrastructures they criticize enable them to render such judgment, here and now.)

–The upshot of the five features is this. Notions of experimentation and innovation are recast in the face of unstudied conditions and they vary substantially from Experiment! Adapt! Be resilient! Each exhortation may be true as far as it goes, but each does not go far enough in specifying the with-respect-to-what desideratum.

–Let’s start with a quote:

Zambia defaulted on interest payments to some of its private lenders in November 2020 when private creditors refused to suspend debt payments. In February 2021, Zambia applied for a debt restructuring through the Common Framework, but little progress has been made on the negotiations as large private creditors, such as BlackRock, have so far refused to reach an agreement on debt relief.

BlackRock, headed up by Larry Fink, is the largest of a number of bondholders who are refusing to cancel Zambia’s debt, despite lending to the country with interest rates as high as 9% (in comparison to wealthy countries like Germany, UK and USA who were given loans at 0-2% interest in the same time period) potentially making huge profits. Debt Justice estimates that BlackRock could make up to 110% profit if repaid in full.

Meanwhile, Zambia is experiencing devastating impacts of the climate crisis such as flooding, extreme temperatures and droughts, which are causing significant disruption to livelihoods and severe food insecurity. Unsustainable debt levels mean the country lacks many of the resources required to address these impacts. This decade, Zambia is due to spend over four times more on debt payments than on addressing the impacts of the climate crisis.

https://debtjustice.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Debt-and-the-Climate-Crisis-Briefing-October-2022-UPDATED.pdf

Compared to BlackRock, only two nations, the USA and PRC, have GDPs greater than the wealth managed by BlackRock (whose recent assets are reported to be $10 trillion or more). It’s also said that the ten largest asset-management firms together manage some $44 trillion, roughly equivalent to the annual GDPs of the USA, PRC, Japan and Germany.

–Yes, of course, we still must say that the current sovereign debt crisis could be better managed. Fair enough.

It would be more accurate to say, however, that BlackRock is actually being managed in ways the sovereign debt crisis can’t. BlackRock does have a C-suite, right? Why then not start with BlackRock? After all, it rose to an undisputed shareholder superpower only after the last financial crisis of 2008.

–In other words, think of BlackRock as the global financial crisis currently underway and the “sovereign debt crisis” as the smoke-and-mirrors to get the rest of us to believe otherwise.

We know exactly who benefits from placing the blame on the Government of Zambia’s fiscal and monetary management, when the Global Behemoth BlackRock is managed even worse in terms of self-interest.

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.

–Imagine two parallel worlds so alike that they would have been exactly the same, were it not for one line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. One world has, “I am thy father’s spirit;” the other, “Ich bin dein Papas Spook.” The former world does not know of the latter line; nor the latter know the former’s.

So what? The point is that both readings and their respective commentaries lurk as possible, because Hamlet‘s complexities are multiple.

–Adorno starting an opera on Tom Sawyer, Picasso painting Buffalo Bill Cody, Sartre preparing a screenplay on Freud, Benjamin Britten facing the prospect of becoming a bandmaster (or Samuel Beckett a commercial airplane pilot), Coleridge and fellow poet Robert Southey planning an egalitarian community on shores of the Susquehanna, Goethe’s ideas to clean up the streets of Venice, Kafka drafting rules for a socialist workers’ cooperative, and Abraham Lincoln and Hedy Lamarr securing their respective patents–all are connected. By me.

Even though the concatenated clauses have not appeared before or been considered as such. You can’t test the real-time I make.

–We’ve over-invested in economic growth on the premise that it takes us further. But good-enough betterment goes even further. The 19th century French poet, Lamartine, wrote “Utopias are often just premature truths”—which is the shortcoming I have in mind: Stopping short at progress is premature. It lacks betterment’s yes-but grounded in the complexities now.

As if lives cannot suddenly and startlingly change for the better, but they can suddenly and shockingly change, sometimes irreversibly, for the worse.

Adam Phillips (2021). On Wanting to Change, p. 69

The epigraph is suggestive: Sample people–on this planet of 8 billion and more–whose lives have in fact suddenly changed for the better. What might they have to tell people who insist they know the next is as bad, and probably worse?

My own answer: Sudden positive change is a real-time performance than can’t be plagiarized by others. Negative change is photocopied all the time, everywhere. In Phillips’ terms: The former’s acknowledgement differs from the latter’s knowledge.

At best, socio-technical systems are reliable only until the next failure ahead. This means that preventing that next failure is just as important for establishing a track record in failure prevention as future failures being prevented because, say, the systems are more sustainable than now.

Further, this is a track record of real-time system operators who manage reliably because they learn and unlearn. They are reliable because (not in spite) of learning that they didn’t know what they initially thought they knew, they in fact knew more than they had first thought, or both.

What a senior risk manager told us applies to the challenge of reliability management in key socio-technical systems, now and ahead: “Really, just because we haven’t had a meltdown doesn’t mean our practices were effective”.

I

I don’t know about you, but I’ve turned into a survivalist when reading articles on major policy issues. If it doesn’t hook me in the first couple of paragraphs, I scroll down to the last paragraph and read backwards on the look-out for the upshot. If I find something, I read backwards for a bit longer and decide if it’s worth returning back to where I first left off.

This is largely a problem of genre. The journalist article starts with the dead or dying victim, when I the reader want to know upfront, not what’s wrong, but what’s actually working out there by way of strategies to reduce the victimhood. Something must be working out there; we’re a planet of 8 billion people!

I want to know right off how people with like problems are jumping a like bar of politics, dollars and jerks better than we are. Then tell me how we might modify their doing so in order to make it work here as well.

II
There is also that other genre, the academic article on a major policy issue. To be honest, some articles are doing better to get to the upshot(s), at least within the first two or three pages of single-spaced text, i.e., if and when they get to the part, “This article contributes to. . .” Still, too many top-of-the-page Abstracts conclude with, “Finally, implications are drawn for further action.” As if the oasis is somewhere out there in the desert of words ahead.

Tell me what those implications are so I have energy to read the next 20 pages. I’m not asking the authors to simplify. I’m asking them to tell me what they conclude or propose so I, the reader, can decide whether or not their actual analysis supports their case. Indeed, tell me upfront, because I may find I have something better to recommend from their assembly of facts and figures.

III

There is also that Executive Summary you find in some–by no means all–policy-advocacy reports. Many such reports are also doing a better job laying out recommendations upfront so that the readers can decide for themselves whether the rest of the text makes their case.

The problem arises where the rah-rah of advocacy gets in way of the details of how to implement the recommendations. You still find many instances of the already obvious, “We need a more equitable society,” and then full-stop. Not.Good.Enough. These aren’t calls for action but a form of bearing witness, a very different policy genre than the advocacy report.

IV

In fact, many long-form journalism pieces or academic articles come to us posing as two other genres, essays or mysteries. We the readers are meant to see how their thinking unfolds. Or in the case of executive summaries, the values of the advocates are to shine bright above all else. Fair enough for readers knowing they are reading essays or mysteries or a tract. But not good enough for others who want more by way of action.

I

Our interviewees were insistent: A magnitude 9.0 Cascadia earthquake will be unimaginably catastrophic. The unfolding would be unprecedented in the Pacific Northwest. True, magnitude 9.0 earthquakes have happened elsewhere. But there was no closure rule for thinking about how this earthquake would unfold in Oregon and Washington State, given their specific interconnected infrastructures and populations.

Fair enough, but not enough.

So many interviewees made this observation, you’d have to conclude the earthquake is, well, predictably unimaginable for them. That is: not totally incomprehensible, like unknown-unknowns. It is a known unknown, something along the lines of that mega-asteroid hit or a modern-day Carrington event.

II

I think something more is going on in these interviewee comments. It has to do with the interview as its own genre.

The American author, Joyce Carol Oates, recently summed up its limitations to one of her interviewers:

David, there are some questions that arise when one is being interviewed that would never otherwise have arisen. . .I focus so much on my work; then, when I’m asked to make some abstract comment, I kind of reach for a clue from the interviewer. I don’t want to suggest that there’s anything artificial about it, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to say, in a way, because I wouldn’t otherwise be saying it. . .Much of what I’m doing is, I’m backed into a corner and the way out is desperation. . .I don’t think about these things unless somebody asks me. . .There is an element of being put on the spot. . .It is actually quite a fascinating genre. It’s very American: “The interview.”

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/07/16/magazine/joyce-carol-oates-interview.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Daily:%20July%2019%2C%202023&utm_term=lithub_master_list

Oates adds about interviewees left “trying to think of reasonably plausible replies that are not untrue.” I suspect such remarks are familiar to many who have interviewed and been interviewed.

III

I believe our interviewee statements to the effect that “The M9 earthquake will be unimaginably catastrophic” also reflect the interview genre within which this observation was and is made. The interviewees felt put on the spot in the midst of answering about other important work matters. They wanted to be just as plausible as in their earlier knowledgeable answers. That is: “unimaginably catastrophic” is, well, not untrue.

So what? “Anyway, this is not to say that there was anything wrong about my statement to you,” adds Oates. “It’s that there’s almost nothing I can say that isn’t simply an expression of a person trying desperately to say something”–this here being something about a catastrophe very desperate indeed.

Buy, borrow or otherwise acquire Digging Up The Future by Maarten Vanden Eynde (2020, Maastricht University Press). Or go first to his website, https://www.maartenvandeneynde.com/.

Below are reproduced (apologies for the poor digital quality) three selections, verbatim, from the book and found at the website:

—Restauration du lac de Montbel

“Every year the Montbel lake in the southwest of France, dries out a bit more. This is partly due to global warming and partly to the use of the lake by local fire department helicopters in fighting nearby forest fires. In a vain attempt to restore something that is broken both physically and metaphorically, Maarten Vanden Eynde tries to repair the bottom of the lake by filling up the cracks with plaster. The gesture, documented in this photograph, is of course futile and to no avail.

“‘Restauration du lac de Montbel‘ hints at the loss of knowledge that is an inherent result and part of the passing of time. Consequently we are all doomed to make ridiculous gestures and draw false or incomplete conclusions in the future, because objective knowledge will always be outnumbered by subjective (mis)interpretation.”

(from https://www.maartenvandeneynde.com/?rd_project=11&lang=en)

—Homo stupidus stupidus

”’Homo stupidus stupidus‘ is a human skeleton that has been taken apart and put back together again in a different and rather puzzling shape that bears little relationship to human anatomy despite our knowledge of it. It is a critical comment on the human arrogance that declares itself doubly wise – Homo sapiens sapiens – and names after itself an entire geological era, the Anthropocene, to represent its own influence on Earth. ‘Homo stupidus stupidus’ questions the extent of human self-awareness, of self-knowledge of where we come from, how we evolved, and where we are going. The work symbolises our inherent failure in understanding ourselves or predicating our future on the basis of our past and present.”

(from https://www.maartenvandeneynde.com/?rd_project=336&lang=en)

—Genetologic Research no. 2 & 4

“Lengths of wood from different trees are glued together so as to resemblea tree trunk. The growth rings are matched together like a puzzle, as if an attempt has been made to recreate a tree’s original shape without any surviving point of reference, the growth rings being the only visible guidelines available. ‘Genetologic Research no. 2 & 4‘ are among the earliest examples of an imaginary journey into a fictional future past, where knowledge is lacking and frames of reference are flawed.”

(from https://www.maartenvandeneynde.com/?rd_project=66&lang=en)

Today I read: “A few years ago I would have said that there was no chance that the US will be the world’s biggest economy by the end of the 21st century. Now I am certain the US will remain the largest economy throughout the whole of this century.”

One reason why is offered by what I read yesterday: “Any socialist effort to navigate the very real state shift in the climate will require a massive reconstruction and deployment of productive forces. For example, all the major cities that are on a coastline on this planet will have to be moved inland. That means the electrical grids and sewer systems need to be rebuilt. We will need to reimagine urban life on a massive scale.”

The latter’s impossible-to-implement undermines anything like the certitude in the former’s starting point.