How do we make sense of a messy world?

A goofy looking tourist comes across something unusual...

What the hell is that? What the hell is that thing? (a look of recognition) Oh, I know what that is. (staring more intently at the 'thing', then a look of puzzlement) What the hell is that?

Steve Martin in a Saturday Night Live skit.

Making sense of some complex messy situation is what humans do. But we also tend to take that we do this for granted. Sometimes it helps to make our thinking processes more explicit so that we can think about the processes themselves and in doing so make them more effective. Psychologists call this metacognition, where ordinary cognition is just the thinking process itself.

So in the hopes that we can improve our sensemaking abilities lets consider:

What triggers us to think about phenomena is when those phenomena are surprising. When something doesn't happen the way we expect it to we have a problem. I'll get back to the reason that these situations are problems in a bit. To follow this process in a linear fashion I'll keep on the main track. Like Steve Martin in that famous SNL skit, we recognize when something is amiss. We realize when something doesn't fit our model of the world, when something doesn't look right. Or we are surprised by something we've never seen before. Our emotions can go through a whole panoply, from surprise to fear, the default if we can't rule out danger, to annoyance, to conviction that it is not that strange (denial), and so on. Martin did a masterful job of doing just that in his skit.

The first step is to try hard to match the phenomenon up with something we do know something about, to try and fit it into patterns that we have encountered before. That takes some mental work since the measure of our surprise is essentially a measure of how unlike anything we would recognize it is. This, in fact, is what we mean by information — news of difference or the unlikelihood of the phenomenon vis-a-vis our prior experience and knowledge. The greater the surprise we feel the more informative something new is. Of course, if it is too surprising we suffer information overload. Our nervous systems are not able to adequately process the information.

Failing to make a reasonable categorization we get to work on the real issue, learning the nature of the phenomenon and putting it into the context of our larger personal world. We try to make sense of the phenomenon. We are compelled to do this because we deeply need to survive. And new phenomena might be either dangerous or a potential benefit to be exploited. We won't know until we understand it and its relationship to our world. That is what makes surprises problematic. Not only might the phenomenon be harmful or beneficial (important in either case but particularly so if it is harmful), but it may be recurrent over time, in which case we had better understand it in relationship to other parts of the world that we do understand. If we learn those relationships we may find causal cues that alert us in the future that the phenomenon is imminent and we can prepare for it. For example if we experience a tornado and noted the quality of the sky (cloud formations, color, etc.) just before it touched down we will remember that sky pattern as a warning that a tornado could form in the future.

All unexpected social phenomena are incredibly complex with many hidden variables (like what are the thoughts going on in other minds!). We call these 'wicked' problems. They are so under specified in our minds that we simply haven't got ready ways to grasp their significance or project what is going to happen in the future. Problem solving, in the sense of avoiding harm or exploiting opportunities (or in some cases, maybe just maintaining the status quo) requires first grasping the nature of the phenomenon and connecting its nature to the larger world. Solving the problem involves understanding the problem and its consequences well enough that you can anticipate future states of the world under various possible actions that might be taken. If the phenomenon looks to be a recurring one (e.g. teen pregnancies are rising vs. you learning that your teenage daughter is pregnant), then one needs to develop a policy for action for the future. Policy problems are wicked.

How does one, or a group, come to understand phenomena of this sort. Typically our model of cause and effect is limited due to the fact that there are too many hidden relationships and hidden causes. Nevertheless, we do look closely for evidence of temporal ordering in events and use our abductive reasoning to attempt to construct a working model. There aren't many options for testing a model in wicked problems like we do in ordinary science. We construct hypotheticals but can't really test them. Instead we have to refine our models by observation.

It isn't strictly true that we can't do experiments, of course. We do this all the time when we intentionally say something to see how someone else will respond. Or if we take an action to see what others will do in response. But most people are not terribly manipulative; indeed we tend to think someone who is suffers a form of mental disorder. It is probably a minor instrument in our repertoire. More generally we rely on simple observation and relational associative learning to develop our beliefs about what causes what.

Between repeated observations of phenomenal relations with inductive learning and whatever experimenting we can do, we seek to understand what is happening. Ideally we can develop a model of the phenomenon such that we understand what sequence of events lead to what consequences and what it means to us (danger or opportunity). If our inner motives include protecting our kin or our tribe or whatever group we associate with (or alternatively if we are looking for exploitive opportunities for the group) then the process is essentially the same but now the scope is much larger. In any case it is a groping for understanding so that we can comprehend the phenomenon and use it in some sense that constitutes the sense making activity.

Understanding includes knowing what actions we need to take to alleviate harm or exploit the opportunities. But more than simple reaction, we often seek causative triggers that allow us to control the phenomenon (like controlling fire or planting seeds). This is our inventive side, using our creative thinking to explore possible ways we can initiate a desired result. Given that we can anticipate a phenomenon, we can also take proactive steps to get the outcome we desire, usually at a lower cost than had we been reactive. This, after all, explains how we have mastered so many aspects of nature. We are wired to exploit and we have the cognitive tools to do so.

What we don't have is an ability to see long into the future and anticipate the consequences of our own short-term masteries. We are not equipped to integrate over larger scopes of time and space than the immediate. Burning coal or oil solve immediate problems but create longer-term problems of a global scope. The long history of mankind solving small-scale wicked problems (think Henry Ford figuring out how the workers in his plant could purchase one of the cars that they had worked on) and the exponential rate at which such problems have accumulated and been tackled masked the fact that all of these solutions had ultimate global consequences. Some of those consequences, like mass production creating the consumer, have seemed good, at least at first. Others like burning fossil fuels at exponentially increasing rates, have proven harmful.

These are wicked problems at time and spatial scales that are nearly impossible to comprehend. Making sense out of the whole mess that we now have is probably beyond the ability of any single human and probably beyond the capabilities of even a large group of people. The reason is that there are so many interrelated problems with internal factors driving other problems, effectively the hidden variables I mentioned earlier. Take for example the issue of global warming melting the Arctic ice cap. As horrendous as this is, at the very same time we seem to be passing the peak of oil production, driving up the cost of energy. We have long ago passed the peak of oil discovery (in terms of estimated volume of each new find times the number of finds per unit time). Ordinarily we might think that by the normal laws of economics the increase in cost would drive down demand, but so far that has been minimal on a world-wide basis. So what are people talking about if the ice cap melts? They are excited about the prospect of drilling in the Arctic ocean for OIL! That's right, lets drill for more to keep the price of oil down, so we can burn more, and never mind that burning this stuff is why we have global warming in the first place. Solving one problem (cost of oil) will just increase the severity of the other problem (global warming) and human nature doesn't seem to get it. This is truly a wicked problem.

I am, as I write this, returning from a meeting with a small group of researchers and practitioners. We are organizing a project to develop a set of computer-mediated collaboration and discourse mapping tools for sensemaking at a global scale. We call the effort Global Sensemaking, or GSm (go here to see our group social network, and here to see our emerging ideas). Our objective is to develop Internet (World Wide Web) software that enables dedicated sensemakers (e.g. global climate scientists and policy makers) to collaborate in an effort to understand the impacts of global problems (like global warming on climate). If the pattern of sensemaking described above holds true, then the hope is that these efforts will lead to positive actions that mankind can take to solve the problems. Currently the only real methods for sensemaking and collaboration has been the normal science process — research and publish — which takes years just to produce the knowledge base. Collaboration and integration has had to wait for conferences and, in the case of climate change, the meetings of the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) that take place only occasionally. The GSm group seeks to provide tools that allow on-going collaborations and data gathering/interpreting so as to, it is hoped, speed up the process of sensemaking. With on-line tools, too, the various stakeholders in a sensemaking process will not have to travel long distances to accomplish this work. [BTW: I am traveling by train, 21 hours each way between Seattle and Berkeley CA and sleeping in coach leaves a lot to be desired.]

Of course, it is still an open question (and will remain so until sense is made out of these problems) that we actually do know the real nature of these problems such that we can prescribe solutions. Many people who assume we do are ready to sally forth with solutions they think will help, e.g. solar energy systems to solve the energy and climate problems (usually preceded with a "all's you need to do is...". But I am afraid these are simple reactive approaches (ideas) and are not anticipatory as a result of solid understanding. We have yet to know how we will expect to exploit or avoid until we really know what the problems are and what are the trigger or leverage points in the causal networks. Still, we feel compelled to try. I suspect, however, that our margin of error in picking solution actions is very thin. We are running out of time and we cannot afford to pick technologies and actions that will exacerbate some other problem while we think we are solving the one in focus. In this sense, the global problems we face are second-order wicked. They are wickedly wicked! Thus, I think it is imperative that we attempt to make global sense of these global problems, and soon. In prior blogs I've written about systems science and its ability to provide a framework for understanding the way the world works in a more holistic fashion. My efforts in this GSm work will be to embed systems principles in the design of tools in order to help GSm users apply systems thinking to their work. We have ideas about how to do this but tackling the design of such tools is, itself a wicked problem! Wish us luck.

Comments

[Wayne Hamilton]

Third try on slow WiFi. Anyway, GSm sounds very interesting. Might it include a simple sustainable water use model. If so I'd join the group for a trial. If not and you know of another place where math sustainable modeling is evolving, please let me know. Thanks