Global Change
The topic of Global Change ties together almost all my interests. We are now in a transformed environment of global change and risk. COVID-19 is just the first of systemic emerging global risks to play out, many of which will have similarly wide-scope, unanticipated, and counterintuitive effects.
To achieve resiliency will require looking differently at almost every situation. Many of the major crises emerging in the last couple of decades—from 9/11, to the 2008 - 2009 financial crisis, to the COVID-19 pandemic—have been made much worse by failure of imagination, which makes people believe they cannot happen. Many innate human biases, such as the narrative bias (pulling out some elements and ignoring others in order to make a comforting level of “sense” out of a very complex situation, which misleads us and leads to actions that can make things worse), or the induction bias (the assumption that things will generally stay the same: that the near future will be like the recent past), result in a false sense of security, and a belief that “it can’t happen here” or “it can’t happen now.” Yet...it can.
In particular, I am concerned with how learnings, theories, experiences, and products from anthropology, archaeology, and even the arts, can be combined with our understanding of complex systems, international relations, and social change—and applied to help comprehend the dramatically increasing transformations we are experiencing around the world today.
My 5-part television documentary series, “A World On the Brink” (with Real Vision Television), and a recent article “Flattened: Disintermediation Goes Global” in the September-October 2017 issue of “The American Interest” both represent efforts to explore these themes. More recent programs looking again at escalating change are: Beyond the Brink (April 2020), and A World Broken into Splinters.
Right now, at SIG, I am also involved with a group based at Duke University, and headed by Dr. Tony O’Driscoll, in working on an advanced system of immersive simulation-based approaches to get to the ‘root’ of change and uncertainty. This iterative ‘war game’ will help managers of businesses and of cities or states, and investors, to understand which specific near-term decisions are most likely to lead to the most desired outcomes. It will let decision-makers identify key signals that will guide a progression path to those outcomes as they navigate a dynamic and evolving situational landscape. The goal is to produce the most desired real-world results by deftly sensing and responding to important shifts due to 2nd, 3rd, and 4th order effects of events like the COVID-19 pandemic. The iterative approach surfaces the opportunities and threats that exist today, revealing those that are most likely to increase or decrease tomorrow, and demonstrating how the decisions we make—and the assumptions on which those decisions are based—may lead to unanticipated positive or negative outcomes.
I am interested in how societies develop and deploy narratives, and then use those narratives to generate social cohesion . . . and in what happens when such narratives start to fail in the context of internal and external changes.
In particular, I’m interested in the interaction between radically advancing technologies and more ossified human social structures that are not changing at the same pace.
What is the interaction between those two factors and our individual selves?
To what extent are our actions and reactions constructed, and to what extent innate?
How do our conceptions of ourselves—and the storylines we live by—have to change to allow us to exist with the technologies we are building and the transformations that are resulting?
Do we have the capacity for such transformational change? And will we allow ourselves to change to the extent we need to?