Preface: It Could be Otherwise

This book is about uncertainty, but not only about uncertainty. Uncertainty is inextricably enmeshed with human existence. Even death, our only certainty, is mitigated by the uncertainty of when it will occur. The arrow of time continues to advance the tenuous balance between the punctuated, incomplete and biased knowledge of the past and the uncertainty of what the future will bring.

The future is the ultimate inexhaustible reservoir of uncertainty for the inhabitants of this planet. Notions and imaginaries of the future continue to change. Currently, it appears as fragile and fragmented, as a plural and contradictory mixture of desired and feared imaginations. Ever since modern societies manifested an unprecedented preference for generating novelty, the future became an open horizon with science and technology at the forefront, pushing further into the unknown. Yet what is exciting for some feels threatening to others. Innovation, to use this ubiquitous term, remains a double-edged sword.

Uncertainty is also a powerful incentive in the striving for more knowledge. This includes more effective ways for predicting the future. From the consultation of oracles to the latest charts and graphs as the visualization of the enormous amount of data analytics available today, humans are eager to anticipate what lies ahead. But widening and deepening the knowledge base means more. It enables greater certainty in orientation and practical intervention when confronted with numerous uncertainties. The rise of modern science and technology has led to the vast improvements of material living conditions that provide the potential to lift the remaining parts of the world population out of poverty. Our scientific-technological civilization has developed enormous capabilities to anticipate risks and to focus on uncertainties. But the more we know, the more we also realize what we do not know as yet.

Uncertainty is an inherent component of the process of research. It resides in the multiple ways of searching for and generating new knowledge. Discovery is open-ended and fundamental research cannot predict what it will find or when. Research is the basis of a powerful and systematic process that seeks to transform uncertainties into certainties, only to be confronted with new uncertainties again. Scientific certainties are carefully couched in the precise terms of the conditions under which they hold. Moreover, they are always preliminary. They can and most likely will be replaced by new knowledge, sidestepped by new certainties. Together with curiosity, the lure of uncertainty and of discovering what was not known before is the driving force in this domain of creative human endeavour. If the belief in progress of science and technology and the possibilities for intervention it opens has never waned in the scientific community, this is not always the case in society. The challenge for science to share the sense of intimate involvement in embracing uncertainty with society of which it is a part, so goes my argument, increases together with the capability of science of confronting uncertainty.

At present, the fissure of how to deal, let alone cope, with uncertainty marks the relationship between science and society. While 'society', this volatile and hard to grasp assemblage of alternating publics, organized groups in civil society, engaged and dissatisfied citizens and the media, may share some knowledge with experts in making technical judgements, significant differences remain. The line between the prerogative of experts in making technical judgements, including those pertaining to the respective degree of certainty, and the prerogative of non-experts to assess the consequences of those judgements is a fine one to tread (Collins 2014). Between these positions lies the vast range of unintended consequences of human action. It takes us into the realm of complexity in which properties and the behaviour of a system are not determined by its parts, but by their interaction. Seeking to reduce the hidden uncertainties that arise through these interactions will be one of the major tasks ahead. It mutually implicates science and society, as neither can succeed without the other.

Uncertainty is not only embodied and enacted in notions of the future or in the domain of knowledge production. It is a well-known feature of organizational life. Every institution and social organization encounters and needs to cope with uncertainty all the time. In different ways, they are confronted with changes in their environment. They crave for success and efficiency, however defined, and know that they must continue to learn from mistakes and from the ambiguity of their experience. This necessitates adaptation, anticipation, preparedness and even innovation. Depending on their goals and specific organizational forms, available resources, leadership and power relations, institutions seek to reduce uncertainty. They also exploit it for their own purposes and/or accommodate it by a muddling-through approach. These elements overlap and vary.

Uncertainty for institutions, and how to deal with it, comes in different guises. Due to the enduring crisis they unleashed, financial markets have been catapulted into the centre of public scrutiny, outrage and timid attempts at more and tighter regulation. They have been criticized for having been fooled by randomness as they failed to recognize the non-normality of events under their remit. More concretely, they are criticized for having committed the policy error of not distinguishing risk from uncertainty. Thus they largely missed the non-normality that may result in the escalation of uncertainties, leading to potentially catastrophic phase shifts (Haldane 2012). Uncertainties in this peculiar institutional environment offer fascinating glimpses on how simulation models and insights into the dynamics of complex adaptive systems can uncover yet another dimension of the unintended consequences of human action.

One uncertainty that many institutions have to deal with is the uncertainty of future success. This is often intimately tied to people, the human resources of any organization. Initiated by new public management practices, a noticeable trend has been the widespread introduction of quantitative indicators and various kinds of impact assessments. Obviously, this influences the recruitment and selection of people, but also the (re)distribution of responsibility across different levels of hierarchies. As a consequence, uncertainty is shifted elsewhere.

Humanity has made impressive strides in moving from acceptance of what was perceived as fate and the inevitability of destiny towards attempts to shape the human condition in its material, cultural, political, social and organizational dimensions. The various historical trajectories display no lack of arrogance and hubris, of chaotic failures, of overconfidence and the ensuing catastrophes. Yet, once the future became conceived as an open horizon, whatever the weight and burden of path-dependence in history, it provided the possibility of escaping the inevitability of a strict determinism. The future became seen as truly uncertain. From then onwards, to accept reality as it is made it possible to assert that it could have happened otherwise.

Which brings me to the second main theme of this book: the cunning of uncertainty.

The argument presented here is that, in the various manifestations and enactments of uncertainty, the logic of its cunning is at work in the ways we encounter and engage with it. Uncertainty is never completely static but is a process that does not cease to evolve. It encompasses extremely long time­scales and, on the level of human experience, also very short ones. Decisions over life and death may be taken in the blink of the eye, while human interactions with the natural environment may reveal their impact only in geological timescales. The cunning of uncertainty may manifest itself in the choice of the right moment. Timing is also cunning.

Uncertainty is often embedded in situations of ambiguity where it is difficult to disentangle what is known in principle but not in the practice of what is not (yet) known, even if practical action must be taken. The distinction between risk and uncertainty also continues to shift over time. Advances of science and technology in conjunction with novel forms of organization and social innovation transform former uncertainties into risks. Simultaneously, systemic risks that were invisible until now come into sight.

The cunning of uncertainty is a subversive force of reasoning and action. The English word cunning has the same etymological root as the German kennen and können. It is knowledge that combines knowing and crafting. It bears resemblance to the cunning of reason which for the ancient Greeks was embodied in metis. It is seen in action alongside episteme and plays an important role in Homer and in Greek drama. According to Detienne and Vernant, it 'implies a complex but very coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behaviour which combines flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, various skills and experience acquired over the years. It is applied to situations which are transient, shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous, situations which do not lend themselves to precise measurements, exact calculation or vigorous logic' (Detienne and Vernant 1978: 3). Einstein and Bacon admitted cunning reason as an integral part of their epistemology and in their interactionist realism (Elkana 1981).

The cunning of uncertainty can be captured by thick descriptions...