Ethos Issue 7, Jan 2010

Opinion: Looking for Trouble
Gary Klein

In a risk-averse environment, analysts will be very reluctant to offer opinions that might be wrong. They will avoid the boundary line, moving as far to the accurate pole as possible. That is fine—except that their statements and observations will carry very little information value. More desirable is a situation where people go in the opposite direction. They migrate to the boundary line, trying to make the most extreme observations that they believe they can defend. These are the insights, the risky predictions, the disruptive opinions that can be so valuable.

There do not seem to be any special skills for spotting weak signals, other than a contrarian attitude. However, by encouraging speculation rather than conformity, curiosity rather than avoidance of mistakes, disagreement over harmony, we may be able to increase success in noticing the early indications of threats.

The harder challenge is getting higher ups in the organisation to take these early indications seriously. Efforts here will involve breaking them out of their fixations. They will have to give up their old mindsets before they can seriously entertain new ways of viewing events and threats.

Dr Gary Klein, a Senior Visiting Fellow of the Civil Service College since 2007, last visited Singapore in September 2009, during which he conducted a series of workshops for our public officers. A Senior Scientist at MacroCognition, LLC and at Applied Research Associates, Inc., Dr Klein was instrumental in founding the field of Naturalistic Decision Making and helped to initiate the new discipline of macrocognition. More recently, he has been investigating sensemaking, replanning, and anticipatory thinking.

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