uncertainty Archives - Page 2 of 2

April 15, 2020February 11, 2022Strategic surprise, uncertainty

Covid-19: Four Rules for the Decision-Maker to Work with Experts in the Face of an Unprecedented Event

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The situation has become familiar with the covid-19 epidemics, and in particular with the controversy over the use of chloroquine: everyone has an opinion and groups are being formed in favor or against it. Yet regularly, people are being called to order by others who demand that only experts should be allowed to talk on issues relating to the management of the epidemy. The message seems to have been heard: for the past three weeks, doctors have been massively present on television sets. The country has become a large proxy medical consultation room. But the question remains: faced with a complex and unprecedented situation such as the coronavirus, who has the right to speak out? To what extent can experts be trusted? More importantly, how can the decision-maker work with them?

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March 21, 2020February 11, 2022entrepreneurship, Strategic surprise, uncertainty

Responding to the Covid-19 Crisis: Three Courses of Action for a CEO

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In these times of coronavirus epidemic, I have the opportunity to talk to people from very different backgrounds (emergency doctors, researchers, self-employed people, entrepreneurs, retirees, business leaders, etc.) to understand how they “live” the current crisis both personally and professionally. From these discussions, I can draw three courses of action that a CEO can usefully adopt in the face of the extreme and unprecedented situation we are experiencing. (more…)

March 18, 2020January 31, 2023Strategic surprise, uncertainty

The Four Things that Covid-19 Reminds Us About Decision Making in Uncertainty

The unexpected emergence of the coronavirus and its uncertain consequences remind us of four things that we should have known, or that we knew but did not apply about the environment in which we live: the unpredictability of the future, the difference between risk and uncertainty, the non-linearity of the evolution of the world, and the social construction of surprises.

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March 12, 2020January 31, 2023Management, Strategic surprise, uncertainty

What the Covid-19 Tells us About the Management of Uncertainty

The coronavirus, which is currently causing a major international crisis, is one of those unprecedented events that are taking us by surprise by making all the forecasters lie who, only three months ago for the New Year, were telling us what 2020 would be like. Should we be afraid of the virus? This is the question that each of us is asking, torn between the worry of not taking seriously what could turn out to be the epidemic of the Century and the fear of giving in to panic if its impact proves to be only modest, as Dr. Eric Caumes, head of the infectious diseases department at the French Hospital Pitie-Salpetriere, who recently declared: “If you are not afraid of the flu (up to 10.000 deaths/year in France), why are you afraid of the coronavirus?” This seems to make sense, and yet the comparison is not legitimate, because it ignores a very important distinction, that between risk and uncertainty, which a decision-maker must absolutely understand.

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April 10, 2017September 5, 2017uncertainty

How I Learned to Stop Worrying (about Rules and Procedures) and Love Ambiguity and Uncertainty

Uncertainty, defined as the indeterminacy of the future, is almost universally experienced as a major problem among philosophers as well as among businessmen and politicians who wish, in the famous words of Descartes, a philosopher, “render ourselves the lords and possessors of nature.” But it has not always been so. Renaissance humanism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had a very different attitude, embracing the complexity, diversity and chaos of the world with interest. Yet, everything changed in the seventeenth century, when humanism gave way to rationalism. Why? The answer to this question is provided by the work of the philosopher Stephen Toulmin.

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March 23, 2010March 23, 2010Case studies, Theory

Framing: a key concept in the management of uncertainty and disruptions

The fog of war, a long 2003 interview of Robert S McNamara, shows that how one frames an issue has an influence on on how a question can be solved. As soon as they got engaged in Vietnam, the US presented the conflict as a fight between freedom and communism. This happened in the late fifties, after China had become communist and right after the Korean war, in a context in which the communist world seemed to progress inexorably. The domino theory, introduced by the Republican US president Eisenhower in 1954, stated that once a country fell and became communist, neighboring countries also would. Hence it became crucial to defend any country facing a communist insurgency. As David Halberstam mentions in his book “The best and the brightest”, the US national context also played a role later in the Vietnam process: Harry Truman, Eisenhower’s Democratic predecessor, was accused during the cold war to have “lost” China in 1949 and to have been weak against the communists, particularly during the Mccarthyst period. A longstanding reputation of “Democratic weakness” persists to this day as a result. In the early 60s, the democrats were still traumatized by these accusations that were systematically used by their Republican adversaries. This is the initial cognitive frame with which the Vietnam question was analyzed by President Kennedy’s administration. Right from the beginning then, the administration was prisoner, without being aware of it, from a frame that was in effect imposed by their adversaries. Despite their doubts and mounting skepticism, they would remain unable, right until the very end, to get rid of it.

In the interview, McNamara tells the story of his encounter with his former enemies during his 1995 visit to Vietnam. Much to his surprise, he realizes then that Vietnamese were first and foremost nationalists before being communists. Hence, that the conflict could in fact be framed as a nationalistic fight for union and independence, something Americans could actually have been sympathetic to. He also realizes that there is nothing that the Vietnamese dislike more than the Chinese, thus showing the fallacy of the fear of a great Chinese plot in South-East Asia, and more generally of that of a grand union of communist countries against the western world. A knowledge that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger will use to their advantage in their opening to China to counter the Soviet Union.

Framing the conflict in terms of a moral fight of good versus evil and asserting the inevitability of the domino theory also raised the stake of the conflict considerably for the US, making it more difficult to withdraw and limiting their margin for maneuver. It’s difficult to give up when the freedom of the world is supposedly at stake, but much easier when it’s framed as a civil war in a distant country.

The concept of frame of course also applies to the corporation. It is especially important in periods of uncertainty and turbulence caused by disruptions. Disruptions bring about profound change that require corporations to review the way they perceive and analyze their environment. Any corporation use a frame that is the result of past experience and of what the corporation has learned about its successes and failures. The more the corporation has been successful, usually the stronger the frame and the more difficult to change. For instance, raised in technological excellence, telecom operators denied the significance of internet telephony on account that it was not working well. GM discounted the importance of the Japanese cars in the seventies from the height of its market share. Kodak reacted to the emergence of digital photography by inventing a… digital film (APS) simply because the company was unable to imagine a world without films, and as a result tried to ‘cram’ the new technology into the old, to use Clayton Christensen’s expression. More recently, music majors reacted to peer to peer by framing it exclusively as acts of piracy, and as a result limiting their action to the legal option, instead of taking an open view on the undermining by the Internet of their very reason to exist on the marketplace.

More generally, enabling an organization to change with its environment requires changing its frame. The question, of course, is how to define the new frame and how to adopt it. Some researchers such as Sarah Kaplan show that this can be achieved by organizing ‘framing contests’ between different possible frames within the organization. The chosen frame will be the result of this contest, the process of which creates the conditions for the frame to be properly adopted and used. See a previous post I wrote on Framing here.