Greg Fisher — Global Incoherence

I was recently asked to take part in a roundtable co-organised by Nik Gowing and CIMA (the Chartered Institute for Management Accountants). The roundtable was designed to feed in to the Churchill 2015 conference in November, and was on the subject of ‘thinking the unthinkable’ with regard to global leadership. The premise, which I agree with, is that the world is changing rapidly, such that those in positions of authority who are meant to lead us through such problems are being overwhelmed by multiple wicked problems.

These wicked problems include: climate change; ISIS; the Arab Spring (which I see as a generally good thing); the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing global recession; and rising tensions between the West and Russia.

I thought I would share my thoughts, some of which I shared at the roundtable, on this (hugely complicated) subject via a blog article.

Ultimately, I see these wicked problems arising from a tension between two broad points: the world looks more like a closed system that is now hitting capacity constraints; and we are employing a ‘simple systems’ mind-set to what are complex system problems.

The World as a Single, Closed System

The first point is that the world is now behaving more like a single, closed system than at any point in human history. It isn’t actually a closed system because it is open to the sun’s energy but, if I were to put it bluntly, there is no longer any ‘outside’ from which we can import solutions and export problems. At the same time, feedback effects have become more pronounced, and the earth’s capacity constraints have begun to be tested by the simultaneous growth of the human population and its average per capita consumption.

These features appear to have arisen from the stunning advances in transportation technology over the past hundred years or so and, more recently, by the advancement of information and communication technology. All of this has cultivated a much more integrated, interacting world.

Prior to this, for several hundred years, the world was organised, both in a real and a legal sense, in to nation states, which operated – broadly speaking – like small open systems. In such a world, you can generally ignore the impact you have on the wider host system. You can also export some types of problem (sending convicts to other shores, for example) and import solutions to other types of problem (invading resource-rich countries, importing slaves etc.).

And, generally speaking, the more powerful countries were more able to seek solutions from their outside than the less powerful, and they could do this without any expectation of a significant detrimental response / feedback. Hence, empires were built.

We have moved away from this world for the reasons cited above: transportation technology, ICT, and increases in population and per capita consumption. Of course, the resulting wicked problems are not only important at the global level for national politicians and diplomats: they are also challenging the senior executives of organisations of varying sizes and types. The environment for many directors has changed, and continues to change, rapidly.

The ‘Simple Systems’ Mind-Set

The second point is that the dominant way of thinking in the world is reductionist, linear and static. Reductionism is the idea that we can break a whole system in to parts to understand it; linearity is the notion that cause is proportional to effect (i.e. small causes create small effects and vice versa); and by static I mean that dynamical effects are either ignored or under-emphasised.

In my opinion, this ‘simple systems’ thinking is demonstrated most clearly in orthodox Western economics. But economics is not merely an exemplar here, it is also important because it has widespread effects on corporations and governments all over the world. It frames decision making concerned with trillions of dollars of resources.

Now, an important point to note here is that the simple systems mind-set is a reasonable approximation for decision-making in the old world of multiple small open systems. Indeed, the relationship between the two is brought in to focus if we make the inverse point: we can imagine this simpler mind-set emerging in this old world as a reasonable approximation of how it works. Our pattern-recognition capabilities are, after all, concerned with reasonably approximate hypotheses.

In my opinion, and this is the core point of this article, the global wicked problems listed above have arisen because we are living in a world for which the simple systems mind-set is no longer a sufficient approximation. Among other things, the world in which we now live has no outsides, it is prone to cascading effects (like global financial crises) and acute feedback effects.

Synthesis
Global Incoherence
Greg Fisher