Despite Uncertainty

apply preparation and vigilance to act with adaptation by design.

(See also richardarthur.medium.com)

Executive decision-makers must often act without the luxury of perfect clarity and confidence. To set the stage for Awakened Enterprise, we consider characteristics that confound along with strategies to mitigate risk in choosing a course of action despite prevailing uncertainty.

In “Welcome to the Emergent Era,” Beth Comstock reflects on how rapidly-advancing technology can give rise to inscrutably complex systems — but also the emergence of order from chaos. That is, structured and adaptive systemic behaviors can manifest en masse from a multitude of interactions among simpler components.

VUCA Fog of War

These systems and environments emerge outside of bureaucratic hierarchy or decree, with ever-escalating complexity compounding volatility. Taken in conjunction with inherent uncertainty and ambiguity, which may often remain unknowable until the future actually unfolds, decision-makers experience what the military terms “fog of war.” Post-Cold War doctrine describes this group of four characteristics as “VUCA”:

• Volatility — prevalent forces and catalysts of rapid dynamic change,
• Uncertainty — unknown factors limiting prediction and confidence,
• Complexity — interconnectivity and interdependence/network effects &
• Ambiguity — lack of clarity due to nuanced and mixed interpretation.

Throughout human storytelling and historic records we can find plentiful cautionary tales on the risks of mistaken plans and decisions — tragic guesswork, amidst obscured or otherwise imperfect clarity. Hollywood films famously dramatize scenarios of consequential decision-making in deliberations of juries, parole boards, and finance, with the pervasiveness of VUCA central to the plot.

Motivating Mediocrity

Perceiving a looming threat of repercussions imposes potent influence on human behavior, as decision-makers rationally mitigate uncertainty-based risk through overabundant deliberation and conservatism. See:

Notional scenarios exemplifying how irresponsible caution incentivizes waste and mediocrity include:

• Physician concern over exposure to malpractice liability leading to additional testing or specialist consultation — delaying treatments and increasing costs to patients.
• Regulatory compliance redundant with or inferior to modern industry quality controls — delaying time to market & increasing product cost.
• Strict enforcement of building codes requiring elevators in housing projects — reducing options to house the homeless. (Not so notional).

In product design, the consequences of motivated conservatism may lead engineers to overwhelmingly assure reliability & robustness, resulting in:

• Reduced Performance Margin (specified operational limits — e.g., restrictions on temperature, etc.) or (lower operational capability — e.g., extra weight from added materials)
• Increased Cost (additional labor/materials in “over-engineered” design, testing, etc.)
• Increased MRO (maintenance, repair and overhaul) (through shortened part life spec/reliability, inspection interval, etc.)

Encouraging Evasiveness

Calculated response to the threat of repercussions incentivizes blame avoidance behaviors, anticipating retrospective judgment or exposure to liability — amplified by cultural negativity bias and the politics of fear.

Adding to mediocrity in action, the prevalence of such risks and penalties provokes reluctance to documenting decisions and actions. This dynamic, inscrutable, interconnected, and nuanced VUCA environment encourages defensively curtailing the candor, transparency, and completeness of information supplied to systems of record.

Knowledge & Time

The mind of an individual (or collectively across an organization) can struggle with constraints imposed by time: poverty of time when needing agility, or long intervals of time fading coherent thought into unreliable memory. Emergent opportunities can be lost due to inadequate investment in preparation — and preparation can be squandered by failing to recognize opportunity to act. These two failure modes, among others, exemplify the importance of applying knowledge competently in executing plans, duties, functions, or responsibilities.

“Luck is what happens when Preparation meets Opportunity” — Seneca the Younger (allegedly)

Preparation

Performance in VUCA environments depends on devoting time and investing resources in developing and maintaining up-to-date knowledge, skills, and capabilities. The resulting assets will reduce the costs and clumsiness of haphazard efforts to fill such gaps under duress of time constraints in reaction to unanticipated events. Preparedness crucially affords improved knowledge, awareness, and options in decisions to act.

In confronting a by-design VUCA landscape, many military decisions of consequence must be made within critical timeframes. Unlike a decision at HQ to upgrade a fleet of drones, a field officer may have only minutes to decide whether to strike or withdraw. The default to do nothing is itself a decision with its own consequence in missing a potential opportunity.

Military operations necessarily integrate the acquisition and flow of information into decision-making. Consider the evolution of the military term “command and control” (C2) to (C2I) — formally adding Intelligence, to (C4I) — adding Communications and Computers to today’s (C5: Cyber, Command, Control, Communications, and Computers) — where the implicit core of the operation is information itself.

The Paradox of Knowledge: “Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance.” —Yuval Noah Harari

In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari observes that when knowledge is used to guide actions, the application of those actions alters the very system from which the knowledge has been derived. This alteration likely results in a need to revise that knowledge based on the new equilibrium and dynamics of the system. In short — the longevity of knowledge worth having diminishes through its use.

Therefore, whether resulting from one’s own actions or in response to external events, continually maintaining preparedness mitigates risk within the confines of the VUCA environment — from acting with burdened resources and cost to diminished capability, ineffectiveness, or inability.

Situational Awareness

Operational decision-makers must accept pragmatic limits in confronting the fog of war; from limits on justifiable expenses to assess and clarify to a closing window of opportunity in the timeframe to act. Addressing such sensitivities, military command & control evolved further: to C4ISR, appending surveillance and reconnaissance, or including /SA (for situational awareness) in scoping strategic capabilities of modern decision superiority infrastructure like the US Joint All-Domain Command & Control (JADC2).

Regardless of the most generous resources, time and budget, we are limited by what is knowable to us in the present moment of the decision to act.

Situational awareness (SA) is not only a capability for triggering the capabilities of preparedness, its design is shaped by the preparedness strategy, and it is in turn an essential guide to refine preparations.

Awareness extends beyond, before, and after decision-points or detected anomalies, to cross organizational boundaries, bridge links in the supply chain, and even span the continuum of time.

• Learn from the past : Facilitate investigation (for root cause analysis of a newly-encountered failure), provide a reference for best practices (such as criteria and analyses for evaluating trade-offs), or populate a training set repository (for both human and machine learning).
• Look across the present : Assess current dependencies (on a newly confirmed / contradicted assumption or novel discovery), monitor consistency (of assumptions or system integrity), or track emerging trends (like process drift).
• Guide the future : Set in place contingency plans to adapt to foreseen changes or opportunities with potential to improve on current decision-making limitations, mitigate risk, or shift to fertile topics for research.

Examples of inquiries and actions from different time orientations:

Improving organizational acuity across the continuum of time sharpens focus and enhances productivity for activities and decisions previously fettered with ad hoc guesswork, reconstruction, and inconsistency — often necessarily reactive, and inherently conservative.

Act Despite Uncertainty

The Awakened Enterprise vision suggests capturing contextual metadata to preserve vitality of knowledge. The approach aims to mitigate behavioral impacts of VUCA Fog of War resulting in waste, mediocrity, and reluctance to document with candor, transparency, and completeness — empowering to act despite uncertainty.

To accomplish this, we set the following goals:

1. Improve confidence in making decisions by formally recording caveats.
2. Monitor commonality of assumptions and unknowns across all decisions.
3. Re-assess assumptions and unknowns vs. emergent change & discovery.
4. Systematize timely guidance as assurance to adapt to future change.
5. Safeguard value of learning to mitigate reluctance to accountability.

The framework requires cultural commitment from leaders and knowledge infrastructure to apply to decision-making within the VUCA environment.

Acknowledging human limitations with respect to persistent focused attention and precise and accurate memory, and institutional discontinuities in the human decision-makers over spans of time and across organizations, the Awakened Enterprise enlists the rapidly-evolving strengths of digital machinery to help tame the impacts of VUCA.

Organizations successfully competing in strategic global markets and delivering products and services with reliability, robustness, and resilience must proficiently build and maintain preparedness, which can then be applied with agility to recognized opportunity.

? 2024 All Rights Reserved.

Continued in

See also

• “Overengineering: Why we do it and 10 ways to tackle it”, Amanda Woo
• “Defensive Medicine is a Symptom, Not the Disease”, Dr. Adam Tabriz