Is our obsession with agility dangerous?
It’s funny how so many of us believe that human structures are somehow special. As if the rest of nature is more knowable, more predictable but our own designs — companies, the economy, society — are so wildly complex, ambiguous and uncertain that we could never truly understand them.
Image: Mike Newbry
This type of thinking is partly a legacy — at least in the west — from the ancient Greeks who thought of humans as split in two, as Jeremy Lent explains (listen to my podcast conversation with him here): there’s the polluted body on the one hand and a next to perfect soul that connects us with the divine on the other.
And so we have come to idealize anything that sprung from the human mind, as if it would follow rules that are somehow different from and far more complex than the rest of our environment.
It’s understandable. But it’s also incredibly arrogant.
Different rules for humans
And — in spite of the very humbling experience that the COVID-19 pandemic was — the latter somehow seems to have augmented this pattern of thinking. It fuelled our obsession with everything VUCA — volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity — together with its popular remedy agility. Or fluidity, elasticity or flexibility, depending on what you prefer.
In our broader context which we have come to perceive as totally unpredictable, we’ve become all about fast reactions: hiring employees or government officials who are smart problem solvers and setting up teams and structures that can more easily shift in times of change or crisis.
That’s great. And I mean that in the most unironic of ways. We need to get better at facing the unpredictable, as the COVID-19 crisis exposed.
But we also need to get better at predicting, and acting upon that information.
A proactive OS, not a reactive one
Our shift in focus towards the unpredictable comes with unintended consequences. If you view the human world as this wild and unknowable place where rapid response is the only possible answer, your basic operation model is a reactive one.
And right now, we are facing a great number of challenges that need solving before they get out of hand. Waiting for them to happen — and only then solving them — will leave us so much worse off than avoiding them.
An obvious example would be the many flash floods in Belgium, Germany or Britain at the end of last year. This type of consequence of global warming will cost governments a huge amount of money. Only in the Walloon side of Belgium, my home country, the damage runs into the hundreds of millions, possibly even billions. Pretty ironic that our Flemish minister for Justice and Enforcement, Environment, Energy and Tourism Zuhal Demir claimed, just a few days after these floods that that we need “to keep the European climate plans feasible and affordable”. Affordable is a pretty hollow concept when you will be faced with the exponential financial cost of your bad decisions. This Politico article shows exactly how “affordable” our future will be in Europe:
“Europe’s north will struggle with floods and fires, even with warming at the lowest end of expectations — the Paris Agreement limits of 1.5 or 2 degrees above the pre-industrial global average. But the south will be hammered by drought, urban heat and agricultural decline, driving a wedge into one of the European Union’s biggest political fault lines.”
It’s why I absolutely abhor the concept of “ecorealism” which believes that we should not invest too much in the environment, but in technology, innovation and entrepreneurship which will then solve all the environmental and adjacent social problems we’re facing.
Just like we’ve been talking about moving from ‘sickcare’ — where we fight diseases when they surface (the current situation) — to real healthcare — where we prevent them — we have to prevent our environment from becoming (more) diseased instead of waiting until the problem grows and then facing it, at much greater cost and with the losses of many lives.
We need ‘healthcare’ for our environment, not ‘sickcare’. If we don’t, the cost of waiting will be immense.
Back to a dual-mode world
We have to stop idolizing agile mindsets and fast reactions alone, and move back into a dual-mode world. One in which we rapidly act on acute problems (because, yes, we cannot predict everything) and another in which we fight to avoid the ones that we know will come. Because we do have information about how pandemics evolve, what a rise in temperature means for sea levels and migration streams or what the impact of an ageing society will be.
We will need to learn to live with paradoxes, and adopt a more bi-modal, Janusian type of thinking. To cite the recently deceased Ralph Stacey — he was talking about organizations, but it applies to society as a whole too — our world is “predictably unpredictable” or “unpredictably predictable”.
Ralph Stacey: Complexity and Paradoxes 2015
A lot of things are predictable. Until they aren’t. Sometimes we can manage things. And other times we just cope. But we must not let black swans like COVID-19 push us in a one-sided reaction mode.
According to Hegel’s dialectic method of historical progress, a thesis is always followed by a negation of that thesis — called the antithesis — to be concluded by a synthesis whereby the two conflicting ideas are reconciled to form a new proposition. In our case: we have come out of a slower moving period that seemed more predictable, stumbled upon one that was a lot more unpredictable (the pandemic being its current epitome) and now we will need to find a way to deal with both. Perhaps it would be less of a synthesis than an acceptance of the dual, even multifaceted nature of evolution.
A probable future
Adopting a new language to talk and think about the future might help. One that steps away from the one-track concepts of unpredictability or predictability and talks of probability instead, a concept we can borrow from quantum physics.
I think that we can, for instance, all agree that the probability of global warming is extremely high. And yes, there is always that chance that someone will invent a tool that will stop and even retract it, but the probability of that happening fast enough to avoid severe damage in the fabric of society in the coming years seems rather low. In fact, we have almost no information about what could trigger such a solution, while we do have a cornucopia of data about the consequences of global warming.
So when the probability of an event is high, let us prepare for it by betting on several scenarios now — with existing tools not potential ones — instead of waiting and counting on our agility.
This is a repost from an older story from February 5, 2022. I transferred it here because, in two days, Twitter will discard the Revue platform, where this was first published and I did not want to lose this post.
