Future Now
The IFTF Blog
"Puzzles, mysteries, post-normal science, and thinking about the future"
Malcolm Galdwell has a great article in the latest New Yorker on "Enron, intelligence, and the perils of too much information." It's about contrasting types of complex problems, and it holds a useful lesson for how to think about the future.
The national-security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large.
The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much.
In fields as diverse as oncology and military intelligence, as the ability to gather information and volume of data have gone up, levels of certainty have gone down. What used to be treated as puzzles must now be treated as mysteries. There used to be one test for prostate cancer, now there are many. They provide earlier and earlier signs of cancer, but (so Gladwell argues) they are also more ambiguous.
This situation-- that you have more, and apparently more sophisticated, information than ever before, but that knowledge doesn't necessarily translate into clearer conclusions-- is akin to what Oxford University professor Jerry Ravetz calls "post-normal science." Ravetz explained the term in an interview I conducted with him late last year:
Post-normal science contrasts to the "normal science" described by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.... [Normal] science discovers nuggets of fact; technology turns them into tools that enable the conquest of nature; and that leads to the improvement of society and human welfare.
But we can no longer separate 'science,' 'nature,' and 'society.' The combination of lifestyles and markets drives innovation in the science-based industries, and their cumulative effect is to further disrupt the complex global natural systems on whose stability we all depend. The degradation and destabilization of the natural environment as a result of globalized science-based industry increasingly threatens the survival of civilization itself.
The situation of science in its social context has become increasingly turbulent in recent years. We've entered a world in which facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high, and decisions urgent. Traditional mechanisms for regulating science are becoming obsolete. With nanotechnology, it's practically impossible; with converging technologies, which are all about linkage, it's inconceiveable.
In such contexts, there is a new role for natural science. Science in the policy context must become post-normal.
The granddaddy of all post-normal science problems, of course, is climate change; but debates over GMOs, nano, and stem cells can also have a post-normal quality. (Of course, there's now a blog about our "post-normal times.")
How does this connect to the future?
Our default assumption about the future is that it's a puzzle. There is A Single Future, just like a single location where Osama bin Laden is hiding, and with enough information, we can solve it. But in reality, it's a mystery: we can assemble vast amounts of information that offer clues about the future, but that information is going to be full of contradictions, mixed signals, and noise. Piling on more facts won't make the future easier to divine; it'll make seeing the future harder.
More fundamentally, there is no Single Future that futurists should be looking for. There are many possible futures, and the job of the futurist is to sort out which are more likely, and to help people see the contingency and opportunity in those futures. If fortunetellers traffic in knowledge of inevitabilities-- in knowing exactly what is going to happen and when-- the end-point of futurists' work should be a better knowledge of the contingency that's hard-wired into the future.