THE fast-paced, digital age throws up new challenges for those seeking to deliver a rounded, well-informed opinion on the ever-changing issues of the day, writes Graham Leicester
It is time to come clean. For the past few years, I have been given an opportunity in these pages to contribute my thoughts on the pressing issues of the day, but I have done so under false pretences.
First, my attempts at “relevance” have been just that: attempts. These are the Opinion pages, but the news agenda dictates the subjects that are worth having an opinion about. That agenda today shifts with frenetic intensity, driven by real-time processing on social media. That sets a fast pace for the Opinion pages to keep up with, and I am usually in danger of being lapped.
It is some consolation to know that this may not be a great loss. Much immediate reflective comment on the news is wasted. Speculation drives speculation until, eventually, the facts slowly emerge. At that point, it is possible to search out the piece that tells the full story. The greater the distance, the better the piece – even if by that time people’s attention has moved elsewhere.
Perhaps it has always been this way. It was Churchill, after all, who remarked that “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on”.
And here is my second failing: what I write is not really “opinion” either. As the editor of these pages has pointed out to me on many occasions, it is no good exploring an issue, however interesting the journey, if there is no firm conclusion at the end. Better still if that conclusion can then be counter-blasted the following day by an “equal and opposite” display of expertise for the contrary position. A two-year referendum campaign on a binary Yes/No question is an agenda sent from Heaven for the Opinion pages.
But what if the real answer for most of the complex challenges facing us today is “it’s complicated”? Or “it could go either way”? Or “it depends”? Or – worst of all – “I don’t know”? In fact, “nobody knows”. And the appetite for easy answers and instant opinion is actually closing down the space for a genuinely creative response.
We are dealing with a highly-complex global system in which Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle applies: you can know a particle’s position or its momentum, but not both. In other words, we live in a dynamic system: the more you pin its elements down to understand its present condition, the less you can say about where it is likely to go next. And – to make matters worse (or much better if you share my own view of human potential) – the system is not made up only of billiard balls and particles but of living, breathing, emoting human beings. We are not only rational creatures.
The 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis (see me straining for relevance?) recalls Graham Allison’s book reflecting on those 13 days, Essence of Decision. He explores the episode through three models of decision-making: the rational actor model (weighing of evidence), the organisational model (people protecting turf) and the political model (“where you sit determines where you stand”).
Each model provides a plausible account of what transpired. Each has spawned leadership tomes and management courses aplenty. But in practice, as Allison notes, all of these models, and more, were actually in play across cultures and across continents.
The title of his book is taken from the main protagonist, US president John F Kennedy, who said: “The essence of ultimate decision remains impenetrable to the observer – often, indeed, to the decider himself … there will always be the dark and tangled stretches in the decision-making process – mysterious even to those who may be most intimately involved.”
It is fine for the president to say that, but not for the legions of commentators and opinion-peddlers. We need to have definitive answers, even if they turn out to be wrong.
David Greenberg made a similar point recently in the New York Times, musing on why the final chapters of books on big policy issues are so disappointing. We look there for answers. Yet what we tend to find are solutions that are either blindingly obvious or hopelessly impractical.
After the usually brilliant preceding analysis, this leaves the reader let down. Better to omit the last chapter altogether, suggests Greenberg. But that is inadmissible. As HL Mencken said as long ago as 1926: “To lack a remedy is to lack the very license to discuss disease.”
So, I was about to “hang up my pen” and leave the field to those with the stomach for that kind of a fight. Until I came across a brilliant speech by Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University. This was his keynote speech to the UK Conference of Science Journalists in London in June. In it he addresses precisely the issues I have raised, for an audience of practitioners desperately frustrated by the need either to “dumb down” or “sex up” their science reporting to fit the demands of their editors.
Rosen suggests we need a new domain for journalism that recognises complex reality. He calls it “the wicked problems beat”. Standard practice will suffice for “tame problems”. But wicked problems are different. They are difficult to pin down. They have no definitive formulation. And “the problem is interconnected with a lot of other problems”. Constructing a nuclear power plant is a tame problem. Coping with the aftermath of Fukushima is wicked.
Every wicked problem is unique. There is no off-the-shelf solution to apply, and the problem keeps changing on us. As Rosen says: “It’s not possible to understand the problem first then solve it. Rather, attempts to solve it reveal further dimensions of the problem (which is the secret of success for people who are ‘good’ at wicked problems).”
So how might such problems be covered in the press? Rosen suggests that “a classic narrative stands at the heart of the wicked problems beat”. It is the story of people getting stuck with a challenge and then getting unstuck. It is a global beat because wicked problems are global. It should be an early warning device, “picking up the faint signs of wickedness in problems that do not yield to expertise”. And it “treats denial as a news story” – because denial is typically the stage that precedes the recognition among people that they have a wicked problem on their hands.
Rosen’s words have been with me since the summer. Because they offer me a role in the classic narrative: I have been stuck and can now see a route to becoming unstuck. I realise that I have been on the wicked problems beat, with my International Futures Forum colleagues, for years. So, I now intend to operate as a first humble correspondent on the beat for this newspaper – seeking to put Rosen’s ideas into practice.
It will not be easy: establishing the wicked problems beat is itself a wicked problem (which is why it has not been done before). But Rosen makes it sound so compelling: “Preach humility to the authorised knowers. Mock the one best answer and single-issue people. Seek to deliver us from denial.” The time has come to take up the challenge. I hope others will join me. Surely a confident, enlightened Scotland can show the way.
• Graham Leicester is directer of the International Futures Forum. For further information, visit {www.internationalfuturesforum.com.internationalfuturesforum.com.internationalfuturesforum.com}