| |
Ethos Issue 7, Jan 2010
Thinking About the Future:
What the Public Service Can Do
Peter Ho
How can the Public Service overcome cognitive and institutional
hindrances to anticipating strategic surprises? In the following excerpt
from his 2009 Strategic Perspectives Conference keynote address, Head
of Civil Service Peter Ho charts the way forward.
It is fair to say that Singapore
recognises the need for decision-makers
to prepare for the future.
Our efforts to understand and plan for
the future have evolved and improved
over the years. Scenario planning is
now a key part of the Government’s
strategic planning process, and has
proven useful in surfacing otherwise
hidden assumptions and mental models
about the world. More importantly, the
scenario planning process has helped
to inculcate an “anticipatory” mindset
in many of our civil servants by getting
them to raise “what if” questions on
the issues that they deal with. The
Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning
programme (or RAHS), launched in
2004 as a complementary capability
to scenario planning, is being used to
examine complex issues in which cause
and effect are not easily discerned; it also serves as a shared platform for
analysts from different agencies to
collaborate on perspective-sharing,
modelling and research.1
Yet why do decision-makers, who
have ready access to ample information,
fail to respond to warning signals of
imminent crises? Why, despite support
from the public sector leadership, and
years of scenario planning workshops,
and with new tools like RAHS, are we
still not fully adept in anticipating the
future? How can government agencies
better organise their strategic thinking
about the future?
OBSTACLES IN ANTICIPATING
STRATEGIC SURPRISES
The human mind can play tricks on
us. We see what we want to see, and
sometimes miss out the glaringly
obvious. So it is with thinking about
the future. We miss out on signals not
only because of the limitations of our
tools and methods, but also because of
the nature of human cognition. Many
surprises that governments have to deal
with—natural disasters, pandemics, even
financial crises and political upheavals—
can often be assigned probabilities, or
anticipated through the “stories” or
“narratives” that scenario planners use.
This should lead governments to take
precautionary measures. The reality is
that we often do not.
The reasons why we do not are
several. These include confirmation
biases, groupthink and other cognitive
failures; our inability to make sense of
complexity; the problem of retrospective
coherence; poor or missing incentives
to prepare for strategic surprises; and
fragmentation of risk.
WHAT THE SINGAPORE PUBLIC
SERVICE CAN DO
Over the years, I have become
increasingly convinced that thinking
about the future and strategic surprises
will remain a messy business. If we
try to get precise predictions, we are
pursuing the wrong aim. We cannot
predict the future. As futurist Peter
Schwartz noted, “the objective is not
to get a more accurate picture of the
world around us”.2 Rather, we should
seek to provide input for decision
makers to make informed assessments.
His colleague from Royal Dutch/Shell,
Pierre Wack, added that scenarios should
“help change assumptions about how
the world works” and “compel people to reorganise their mental models of
reality”.3 Good scenarios should facilitate
better decisions, not better predictions.
| |
|
|
| |
WHY WE FAIL TO ANTICIPATE THE FUTURE
COGNITIVE FAILURES
Decision makers tend to discount future risks
and contingencies, and place too much weight
on present costs and benefits. Governments are
also prone to confirmation bias, which is the
tendency to pay attention only to data which
is consistent with existing mental models.
For example, during the boom years before
the current financial crisis, most experts
dismissed the risks of a major financial or
economic crisis. The few who foresaw an
impending crisis—like Nouriel Roubini and
Nassim Taleb—were roundly ignored.
Social networks and groupthink are also a
source of confirmation bias. Mavericks—whose
views do not conform to group opinions—
tend to be rejected; they will disappear over
time unless a mechanism is set up to protect
them. Crises can also break outdated mental
models, but they are an expensive way to force
recognition of confirmation biases.
What can be done: Well-crafted, challenging
scenarios that articulate imaginative yet
plausible ways in which the future could
evolve, can prompt management to think the
unthinkable and consider radical approaches
and circumstances.
|
|
| |
|
|
II I |
|
