Useful perturbance: 2024 from the corner of your eye

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has just released its Preventive Priorities Survey 2024, a useful document which “evaluates ongoing and potential conflicts based on their likelihood of occurring in the coming year and their impact on U.S. interests”.

Launched in 2008 during the post-9/11 era of the “global war on terror”, the survey polls foreign policy experts to rate a set of contingencies proposed by the CFR, based on a call for suggestions on social media.

Reading the report is a useful way of “standing on the shoulders of foreign policy giants”, but also a reminder that, by looking only where the giants turn their heads, we may end up sharing their blindspots.

As the economist Frank Knight argued, probabilistic forecasting depends on making analogies to past events: we calculate risk in a given situation by modelling that situation based on past experience. However, Peter Scoblic reminds us, analogy may be an unreliable guide in the messy worlds of business and geopolitics – especially because comparing current situations to past ones can trigger biases which will then be hard to shift.

Why is this a problem?

As Trudi Lang and Rafael Ramírez argue in a recent article for MIT Sloan Management Review and the Oxford Answers blog, many leaders forget to unbundle their strategy from expectations about the context within which that strategy will play out.

Failing to follow ice hockey player Wayne Gretzky’s advice to “skate where the puck is going to be, not where it has already been”, strategists remain wedded to a vision of the context which may be invalidated by unfolding events. It can leave you with the uncomfortable feeling of Wile E. Coyote’s legs still milling round at speed, as yet unaware that the ground underfoot has changed and he’s run off the edge of a cliff.

The environments within which political and business strategies play out are even more complex than the field of play on Gretzky’s ice hockey rink. Perhaps a great player knows the behaviour of a puck on the ice so well that they can skate with surety to the end of its trajectory, but it’s rare that more complex strategic environments will behave so mechanistically. (Even ice hockey players need to allow for the actions of the opposing team).

This is why it’s useful to perturb people a little when strategising.

When humans become perturbed, we experience upset or concern. But the word has another, technical meaning too: the disturbance of motion, course, arrangement, or state of equilibrium.

When projectiles are pulled off course, when aircraft are buffeted by turbulence, when the regular motion of a celestial body – or even a hockey puck – is affected by some other force or influence: that’s perturbance, too.

In strategic terms, it’s the sense that the actors and dynamics in your context may not behave in the ways you expect – going beyond predictions, assumptions, biases, even hopes and fears; properly blindsiding you.

That’s when you may wish you had looked at something else alongside your studies of impact and probability.

For Lang and Ramírez, part of the reason people become wedded to assumptions about context is because of the “figure-ground” problem: just as with the optical illusion of the faces and the vase, you can’t see both your strategy and your assumptions about the context clearly at the same time.

Scenario work, by getting people to explore their context and the ways in which it might unfold beyond current assumptions and expectations, separates the “figure” of strategy from the contextual “ground”, allowing both to be seen in sharp relief, attention switching iteratively from one to the other.

That means releasing our sense of what is “likely”, but also what is assumed to be “impactful”. We cannot know for sure how the future will play out, no matter how much faith we express in our predictive models, and we cannot be sure what the impact of an event will be until we gain hindsight.

That may be the potentially bitter fruit of lived experience or the hindsight we can deliberately manufacture by creating a contrasting set of plausible future scenarios. These can serve as vantage points on the present, from which we might ask: “How will people in each of these futures look back on our situation and judge it as it unfolds?”

The authors of the CFR survey have some sense of their approach’s limits, expressly avoiding discussion of certain contextual factors and events:

The survey did not ask experts to assess broad trends like global warming, demographic change, or technological developments because it is inherently difficult to gauge how such trends could trigger conflict in a specific area over the next twelve months. Nor does the PPS attempt to evaluate the risk associated with more discrete events such as earthquakes, severe weather events, public health crises, or the death of a specific leader, all of which can undermine political stability. Such random events are inherently unpredictable within a short time frame.

But we can go yet further, to recall: a perceived trend is only a trajectory from the past, and it remains a trend only until it bends, breaks, or is perturbed. And – even within the carefully defined scope of the Preventive Priorities Survey – while it is true that expertise of the kind marshalled by CFR can hold great insight, Philip Tetlock’s work on Expert Political Judgment reminds us that experts in fact do no better at predicting future events within their field of study than informed non-specialists.

That doesn’t mean that experts and their analyses lack value; only that there are no soothsayers and we should not rely on such experts to wield a magic crystal ball which will tell us with confidence how the future will unfold.

Rather, we should welcome and even invite perturbance as part of our strategic deliberations. We should detach our assumptions about what is transpiring (the context) from what needs to be done (the strategy), and complement the dead-on vision of expert focus in documents like the CFR report with other efforts to look at situations from the corner of our eye.

So, as 2024 arrives, and the Internet brims over with features, blogs, and infographics setting out trends and predictions and listicles of “things to watch out for in 2024”, remember that what’ll really blindside you is everything they’re not looking at, everything that you can’t see by staring at a situation dead-on and asking “What’s likely to happen, and how big will the impact be?”

If you’re doing it right, it’s unlikely to be an emotionally comfortable experience – in fact, you should be truly perturbed by matters previously excluded from your field of vision.

But that’s precisely what will help you to look beyond the limit of your assumptions and more clearly perceive the uncertain context in which you are making strategic decisions.