Thinking About the Unimaginable
Why, in the last two decades, have we been caught unprepared so often? COVID19 is the latest example. There are others. Who imagined 9/11? Why did the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq last so much longer than expected? Why were we so ill-prepared for the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, so surprised by the Great Recession of 2008 and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010?
All these events seemed unimaginable to most of us. Some, such as 9/11, were what Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a scholar, writer, and statistician, called “Black Swans.” They were so rare, unusual, and hidden by our cognitive limitations that we could only “see” them coming in hindsight. Yet, some were predicted, such as the tragedy in Iraq, Katrina, the housing bubble, and the current pandemic. Even then, we ignored warning signs and did not act early enough to prevent or ameliorate them.
The human, financial, and societal impacts of our failures of foresight and preparation have profoundly disrupted society, trust in institutions and our sense of control over our personal and collective future. What’s gone wrong?
We are by nature, biased and imperfect decision makers, no matter how rational we think we are. We may lack historical precedents that suggest such surprises or willfully ignore them. We can only handle so much cognitive complexity. We can be blinded by ideology. We make faulty assumptions which go unquestioned. We discount the impact of today’s decisions on the future because we live in the “here and now.” We are subject to the “first law of logic” – a way of thinking will continue in motion in a straight line unless it meets a greater force. The old saw that “if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got” has a corollary: “if you always think what you’ve always thought, you’ll always do what you’ve always done.”
We have sufficient tools to do better. What we lack is will, focus, and persistence.
We must institutionalize imaginative thinking about the unimaginable. The 9/11 Commission concluded that a chief cause was the intelligence community’s inability to imagine planes being used as flying bombs. We can improve our ability to forecast the types of events that might surprise us, their characteristics and requirements, even if we can’t predict when or if they will happen. Subject matter experts, futurists, risk traders, and science fiction writers, to name a few, can help us see “unimaginable” possibilities. Scenario planning, simulations, “war games” and other foresight planning tools are available but insufficiently used. These can bring the unimaginable to conscious awareness.
We must also structure ways to listen to the unimaginable. Short sellers were “forecasting” the housing bust before it hit, but few paid attention. Pandemic simulations have been conducted yet ignored too often in the halls of government. Recently, the bipartisan commission established to investigate the 2010 oil spill stated that none of their recommendations to prevent this again have been implemented by government.
We must set up structures whose sole mission is to challenge public and private sector thinking that doesn’t want to be challenged. Our current ways of doing this don’t always work. Most out-of-the-box thinking today gets channeled into the very institutions with a vested interest in silencing it. The warnings about Katrina and Iraq, for example, were expressed mostly within the organizations least likely to listen. Before the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Minerals Management Service was responsible for both regulating the off-shore oil industry and advancing oil exploration. Expecting them to reign in the very industry they are charged with promoting was like expecting a state’s lottery director to tell people they’re wasting their money.
We must also change what supports irresponsible decision making. As long as leaders in any sector have incentives that sanction poor foresight and bad judgment, we are begging to be surprised. When corporations are able to ignore their social responsibility by assuming they will just pay fines (or get government bailouts) if they make tragic mistakes, we incentivize dangerous behavior. When politicians would rather pay to fix a crisis than prevent it, we will continue to suffer. We’re responsible for this too. We demand Congress spend money in a crisis but refuse to be taxed at a level needed to prevent one.
Those who consciously or through negligence endanger the public pay too small a price. In the private sector, individual executives are rarely held criminally responsible and are often allowed to resign with golden parachutes. As Taleb says, “capitalism is about reward and punishments, not just rewards.” In government, firing is rare and elections too unpredictable and widely spaced to serve as deterrents.
Thinking about the unimaginable also requires humility, which will open us to looking for the dangers that hubris never considers. Until we are willing to hear others tell us difficult truths, setting partisanship and ideology aside, we will continue to face the future unprepared.
Photo Credit: NOAA - Hurricane Katrina heads towards New Orleans
