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This text summarises various items of feedback from the first note that was published. Thank you: please keep comments flowing. One correspondent sent me a larger note, which is going to be posted separately.
All agreed that the notion of a decision having a life cycle - going through a larval, pupal and adult stage, so to speak - was correct. Broadly, there was a stage of getting the tools of thought, a stage of assessment and a stage concerned with roll out under fine tuning. Several writers said that the emphasise in the literature on decision-taking was all about these last two stages - portfolio ranking, risk assessment and pricing and so forth; and on project management, post-project appraisal and the like.
Four issues were raised as needing attention:
By contrast, the blank canvas was concerned with the first step, and it was here that things had to change to meet the needs of a more complex and vocal society.
There was a great deal said about incorrect models. The issue was how we were to recognise the difference between the situations in which our basic way of thinking was incorrect, and those when our information was simply too poor for a good choice to be made. In addition, our choices are as much rooted in heuristics - rules of thumb, unspoken assumptions, values - as they are 'thinking models'. How are we to give proper balance to each?
These are important questions, but the fundamental issue was thought to be this: how do we recognise a bad way of tackling an issue, and move on? Plainly, the answer is through the carrot of clear answers and options, and the stick of failure. Whilst this is obvious in simple issues, however, it is far from clear in more complicated ones.
Ways of thinking which are socially-embedded are particularly hard to change. We prefer to blame the data or the messenger rather than to change our collective minds. We blame leadership, for example, rather than the principle under which these individuals are operating. Turnover in the boards of companies with an obsolete business idea tends to be high, even when they articulate the problem and the need for change.
This is particularly true when we have to abandon a valuable way of thinking for a void. It is much easier to drop, for example, communism as our guiding principle when there is an alternative glittering in front of us. The figure which showed the balance between complexity and novelty which an organisation or society could manage was thought to be highly pertinent. If we are offered a rival complexity management system we will be happy than is we are abandoned with none.
A development of this figure is given below. The same axes - of complexity, novelty - are broken by two arbitrary lines. The vertical line separates those things for which we have a familiar regime and those which we do not know how to handle. The horizontal line distinguishes areas where the issue is plain and obvious, where one cannot evade the fact that there is an issue to handle. Above the line, however, there are ten ways of looking at every issue and it is at least arguable that there is no problem, that the person debating it is seeing it from the wrong angle, with bias or in other ways which allow denial and misdirection.
The four spaces are plainly distinct, particularly when viewed from the perspective of how we come to abandon a false model. Political activists operate in the top left, bidding for legitimacy by trying to show that the "routine" box is in some way invalid - socially unjust, religiously inappropriate and so forth. The intellectuals try to show that the routine is wrong for other reasons: that things would work better if it were to be changed, through monetary management, for example. For reasons discussed above and in the original paper, the 'routine' quadrant finds it difficult to declare itself invalid, but it can withdraw trust and legitimacy from either of the other two and feel uneasy with itself.
Additionally, each of the other two quadrants can go to war with each other - a contest of brief duration, as the rationalists always lose in the short term and may win in the longer run, by osmosis, if their ideas prove to have legs - and they can fight internally. That is how most of political life is lived, and - says one correspondent - virtually all life in academia. These ideological, theoretical squabbles generate intense heat but usually have little impact on daily reality, save to weaken trust. When they do sweep up a society, however, they change it as no other force.
Comments were that the long, theoretical note had useful things to say, but that they needed to be dug out and made more clear. The emphasis o comment was on the ragged way in which decisions are usually made, and how this could be improved. People were struck by the "social" aspect of decision taking, and by the time, translation and resource which this needed is it was to be done well. If there was one view, it was that the knowledge economy needed very much more effort put into managing and understanding these issues than is done to date. A minority held strongly and that successful countries and companies would be those which were able to cope with complexity with a smile. A broader view was that if its implementation was not stand-alone a recipe for success, its absence was certainly a stand-alone cause of failure.
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