Radical Uncertainty

 

Perhaps you will agree that doing business in a society which is being disturbed by geopolitical conflict is not easy. When circumstances, rules, regulations can change overnight or geographical shifts are probable, long term commitment to or investments in alternative energy sources may be unwise. When you are following my columns, you will understand that I always ask Aristotle’s question: ‘seek knowledge of cause’. Uncertainty in information theory is also understood as the ‘information we don’t have’. Basing investments on information we don’t have causes uncertainty. At this moment I am observing that long term commitment into development of the Hydrogen bubble (I believe that would be the correct nomenclature) are gradually decreasing. An hydrogen hub connecting Rotterdam with the German Ruhr Industrial Area has been postponed.  Automakers don’t invest fully in cars running on hydrogen and already are rethinking investing in electrical vehicles, because of uncertainty about the availability of rare earth mineral resources and their costs, including so called ‘externalities’. Externalities are costs to society, the environment or to life that usually are not included in prices for products or services. If that were the case most things we’d take for granted would cost a lot more. Uncertainty means the inability to know everything fully. It is a fundamental property of complex systems (our industries, society, our planet or environment). Separating our industries from other ones is impossible because they are always interconnected and due to their interdependency, complex. One person in a government, may directly influence decisions we have to take. One incident in the shipping industry directly correlates to safety precautions in international ports. One oil spill in Alaska, directly impacts the entire world. A large number of unknowable elements directly affect our industries. A question to answer would be: can we control our industries ourselves, and if yes, how are we tackling radical uncertainty? The answer is; we can’t control uncertainty nor complex systems, but we can ‘steer’ them by using feedback. Based on Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Theory and Ross Ashby’s law of requisite variety, we can build and maintain maximum resilience by building variety in our systems; this means to develop awareness, knowledge and skills and add tools such as PPE’s, gas detectors, alarm systems etc. These are called ‘attenuators’ or dampers of risks. Top down managed industries are often not aware of cybernetical tools by which maximum viability is feasible. Managers I spoke to do not have the requisite variety they could have and rely on their operators and other staff who they believe they ought to know. But, then I will ask: ‘Are you sure that your people are doing the  right things or the wrong things right?’ ‘Can you be certain that you have built enough variety in your system to absorb outside variety (risk)?’ I tested this during several training sessions I performed world-wide and came to the conclusion that maximum variety has not yet been understood as the ultimate radical uncertainty containment tool available. Cybernetics is the science of viability. I can teach you.