Neglected systemic questions

Abuse of Faith in Governance: Mystery of the Unasked Question (Part #13)

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There is a natural tendency to set aside as irrelevant to immediate challenges the consideration of unasked questions. The strategic focus of any form of governance is on action -- on the most "concrete" possibility (and often literally so). As the premier management cybernetician, Stafford Beer is noteworthy for his (adapted) version of Le Chatelier's Principle -- relevant to any discussion of complex adaptive systems:

Reformers, critics of institutions, consultants in innovation, people in short who "want to get something done", often fail to see this point. They cannot understand why their strictures, advice or demands do not result in effective change. They expect either to achieve a measure of success in their own terms or to be flung off the premises. But an ultra-stable system (like a social institution)... has no need to react in either of these ways. It specializes in equilibrial readjustment, which is to the observer a secret form of change requiring no actual alteration in the macro-systemic characteristics that he is trying to do something about. (Stafford Beer on Le Chatelier's Principle as applied to social systems: The Cybernetic Cytoblast - management itself. Chairman's Address to the International Cybernetic Congress, September 1969)

Such an observation would suggest the need to be attentive to the associated unasked questions to avoid the traps they imply --bearing in mind the observation of a pioneering policy scientists Geoffrey Vickers: "A trap is a function of the nature of the trapped" (Freedom in a rocking boat: changing values in an unstable society, 1972).

Recent and more general studies of relevance to the neglect of such questions, now highlighted by the financial crisis, include the following:

• Karen A. Cerulo. Never Saw It Coming: cultural challenges to envisioning the worst (2006)
• Jared M. Diamond. Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed (2005)
• Charles Handy. The Age of Unreason: new thinking for a new world (1989)
• Thomas Homer-Dixon. The Upside of Down: catastrophe, creativity, and the renewal of civilization (2006)
• Donald N. Michael. On Learning to Plan - And Planning to Learn (1997)
• Paul Ormerod. Why Most Things Fail: evolution, extinction and economics (2005) [extracts].
• Joshua Cooper Ramo. The Age of the Unthinkable: why the New World Disorder constantly surprises us and what we can do about it (2009)
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable (2007) [contents]
• John Ralston Saul. The Unconscious Civilization (1995)

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