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The Humanitarian Groundhog Day

Posted in Chaos, Evolution, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Meetings, Natural disasters, Networks, Organisations, Public Policy, Self organisation on March 24, 2011 | 14 Comments »

Humanitarian coordination has been described in a new ODI paper as a ‘wicked problem’ which demands new and radical solutions. This post explores the  longstanding incentive issues underlying the lack of effective coordination and suggests possible ways forward.

In a paper published last year,  Michael Barnett and I argued that the humanitarian system was stuck in much the same kind of bizarre loop as Bill Murray’s character in the film Groundhog Day: that it was ’condemned to repeat’. Each major disaster highlights pretty much the same problems and flaws, from Rwanda to the Tsunami to Haiti. This is despite a lot of work to try and improve the quality and accountability of aid between these events. Although some remarkable innovations have improved specific aspects of humanitarian aid, system-wide performance remains a major issue.

Drawing on the game theoretical work of Professor Elinor Ostrom and other leading political scientists, we argued that at the heart of this repetition was the issue of incentives.

The humanitarian system has few incentives for collective action, which are seen by many as key to effective coordination. Few of the humanitarian reform initiatives which have been launched over the past 15 years have attempted to understand or address the incentives that underlie and reinforce existing behaviours. This is because few if any agencies have been willing to sacrifice delivering quickly against their individual mandates for the benefit of the wider response.

This  ‘me first’ mentality is apparent throughout the interactions that make up the system - not just between international actors, but also in interactions with national and local actors, with ‘non-traditional’ actors such as the private sector and the military. It is also painfully evident in interactions with disaster-affected populations themselves.

Michael and I argued that without serious effort to examine and strengthen the incentives to cooperate versus those to ‘go it alone’, the coordination of humanitarian aid is likely to continue see a Groundhog Day-style repetition of below-par performance characterised by this ‘me-first’ mentality.

Haiti is the tragic exemplar for our times. Despite the complexity and scale of the post-earthquake response, the mechanisms set up to coordinate international efforts – sector-specific clusters in health, shelter, and so on – had no formal decision-making mechanisms or mandates. Remarkably, given their nominally central role in ensuring the coherence, effectiveness and efficiency of the response, the success of the cluster operations by and large came down to the personality or leadership skills of a single individual.

An ODI roundtable last month on the workings of the humanitarian system concluded that:

The recent humanitarian experience in Haiti is a tale of exclusion. The humanitarian system, with all its resources and coordination and information-sharing mechanisms, succeeded in by-passing many of the spontaneous, ad hoc or informal indigenous humanitarian responses. [agencies] actively excluded others, often without good reason.

None of this is new, of course. A UNOCHA-commissioned study published ten years ago revealed

…a ‘system’ that shows determined resistance to cede authority to anyone or any structure… Despite the urgency of the task, and the potential impact on human lives of poorly coordinated humanitarian responses, [key leaders] at the field level are all denied the ability to direct or manage humanitarian responses. Instead, all have to work on the basis of coordination by consensus. In the face of the obstacles, this is an uphill struggle…”

The Rwanda evaluation, published five years earlier in 1996, noted that the international system had ‘a hollow core’. It would seem that the latest solutions to this problem are also somewhat hollow.

And this is increasingly being recognised by disaster-affected states. Those that can afford to are turning down or strictly limiting international assistance. When Australia’s foreign minister Kevin Rudd was interviewed after the recent floods affecting his country, he argued that that one of the worst things they could have done was to have “a whole lot of uncoordinated delivery of stuff from around the globe plonked on [our] doorstep”. There are numerous ongoing debates in the context of the Japanese earthquake response which are also pertinent to this issue.

How can we deal with the Groundhog Day problem in system-wide humanitarian performance? There are numerous ideas bubbling around at the moment, from strict regulation to nationalisation to partial privatisation. But unless these new efforts tackle the incentives that arise at the point of disaster, they are unlikely to lead to significant and lasting change.

An important focus for anyone reflecting on how to improve system-wide performance is to explore ways to change the pay-offs, so that the longer-term incentives for mutual cooperation in the interests of disaster-affected people outweigh the short-term incentives for going it alone.

Without this issue being put front and centre so as to address the ‘hollow core’, any new reform to improve system-wide performance will sit on top of these issues instead of resolving them. Agencies will continue to deliver against their narrow, short-term organisationally-defined objectives, to the detriment of their own longer-term benefits, overall system-wide performance, and most importantly of all, the communities they purportedly seek to help.

Of course, such self-examination is not an easy thing to do, nor is it easy act upon. As the write-up of the ODI event notes, humanitarian coordination is a good example of a “wicked problem“: “difficult and fluid problems with no clear solutions, to which any response typically creates additional problems… the more closely they are examined or the better they are understood, the more complex and insoluble they may seem.” It continues:

Collective strategic action in the face of these problems may be continually frustrated; more effective responses may depend on developing and strengthening decentralised, diverse, non-linear and non-hierarchical approaches to problem-solving across the humanitarian sector.”

One radical suggestion for changing the pay-offs by along these line scomes from Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of the New England Complex Systems Institute. He suggests that the shortcomings of the humanitarian-response system in Haiti have a lot to do with a principle of systems thinking known as requisite variety. This states that an effective system has to have as many different states of response as conditions that are presented by its environment – or more simply, that internal diversity has to match external diversity.

This implies that we need to be seeing a lot more creativity and innovation in coordination efforts, in ways that are appropriate and tailored to different emergency contexts. The ‘one-size-fits-all’ model of the clusters, together with their lack of coordination ‘teeth’, may well be hindering more than helping performance.

There are also serious questions to address about who gets to judge the performance of agencies. According to a Slade interview with Bar-Yam, one example of such an improved model would be:

…one that understands that duplication and competition among NGOs is not a bad thing, so long as organizations are rewarded with donor money for delivering effective solutions.  And those solutions can only be determined by Haitians themselves…”  (emphasis added)

This idea seems to have some resonance with “cash on delivery” – an innovation from the development side of the system. Of course any attempt to apply this principle to humanitarian aid needs a lot more thought – and it is just one suggestion – but it is certainly an intriguing one. There are no doubt more such ideas to consider. What does seem clear is that this kind of incentives-focused thinking needs to play a central role in the current round of efforts on humanitarian performance and reform, if we are serious about change.

In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray’s character was only able to end his continuous loop of the same day when he started putting his own interests to one side. He ended the cycle when he stopped being arrogant and duplicitous, stopped trying to ‘win’, and started acting in the interests of the greater good in a simple and honest way.

Groundhog Day is a fable, of course, and to many it may appear a rather sentimental one. But it also contains a lesson that international humanitarian actors would do well to heed.

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Philippines turns to complexity science to strengthen disaster preparedness

Posted in Climate change, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Natural disasters, Networks, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Resilience, Strategy on March 15, 2011 | 3 Comments »

Following the Japanese earthquake, the Philippines government have announced plans to explore the use of complexity science in better understanding disaster vulnerability and risk.

The effort is to be taken forward by the Congressional Commission on Science Technology and Engineering, in collaboration with the Philippine Disaster Science Management Center.

Senator Edgardo Angara, Chair of Congressional Commission was quoted in a press release making a clear connection between the Japanese earthquake and this new initiative. He said that the tragedy served as another wake up call for the Philippines to invest in the science of disaster management and preparedness. The Senator also said that this will be taken forward as an international collaboration with Japan, Taiwan and others.

A particular inspiration for this work has been the OECD’s report from the 2009 global science forum, which highlighted resilience and vulnerability to extreme events as areas that could benefit from the application of complexity science (Click here for more on the report).

This is the latest example of a growing trend to apply complexity science in disasters, as noted in a previous Aid on the Edge of Chaos post. Complexity-inspired approaches are increasingly being put forward as alternatives to the ‘classic’ ways of analysing and understanding disasters. Indeed, one of the studies quoted in that earlier post suggested that:

…complexity theory is highly relevant for disaster studies because it provides the entry point to describe disasters as the interactions between sub-systems of nature and society or hazard and vulnerability… Disasters caused by natural hazards result from the complex interactions of nature and society…”

One grim example focused on Manila itself:

Consider the following three ingredients: a mega-city in a poor, Pacific rim nation; seasonal monsoon rains; a huge garbage dump. Mix these ingredients in the following way: move impoverished people to the dump, where they build shanty towns and scavenge for a living in the mountain of garbage; saturate the dump with changing monsoon rain patterns; collapse the weakened slopes of garbage and send debris flows to inundate the shanty towns. That particular disaster, which took place outside of Manila in July 2000… was not inherent in any of the three ingredients of that tragedy; it emerged from their interaction’ (Sarewitz and Pielke, 2001 cited in Ramalingam et al, 2008, emphasis added).

More recently Wired magazine ran a fascinating account of an attempt to understand the catastrophic  interconnections between hurricanes, deforestation and the 2010 Haiti earthquake (available here). The following is an excerpt from this excellent write-up:

…cause and effect in Earth systems is distinctly nonlinear. Inputs and outputs may not be proportional: a cause with ever-so-slightly different parameters than the previous instance might result in a wildly different effect. Additionally, systems and their component sub-systems interact to produce feedback loops that can either amplify or stabilize resulting effects. Feedbacks blur the line of what is cause and what is effect…”

There is much for this important initiative to consider going forward, not least how the scientists involved will work to get international aid agencies – often insensitive to history, context and dynamics of change - to take account of the emerging findings.

More on this important new initiative to follow soon.

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The globalisation of vulnerability

Posted in Agriculture, Climate change, Conflict and peace building, Economics, Financial crisis, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Natural disasters, Organisations, Public Policy, Resilience on January 11, 2011 | 5 Comments »

Most analysts agree that globalisation has become more intensive and dramatic in recent decades because of advances in technology, communications, science and transportation. While it can be a catalyst for development and progress, globalisation also carries significant and increasing challenges for aid policy makers and practitioners alike.

I: The new face of vulnerability?

Recent years have seen dramatic illustrations of the downsides of globalisation. Perhaps most significant of these has been the global financial crisis taking its toll on the poorest communities in developing countries.

However, the specific localised impacts and implications of such shocks often fall below the radar of research, analysis and existing monitoring systems. On the whole, these systems are too narrow in scope and too shallow in reach to capture the diverse, context-specific experiences of poor people. As Ban Ki Moon noted in the preface to ‘Voices of the Vulnerable’ in June 2010:

…in the face of the global financial crisis a number of developing countries have proven to be remarkably resilient – if judged purely in terms of economic growth. At the same time, it appears that the burden of coping has been borne disproportionately by poor and vulnerable people. This reality is poorly understood…” (emphases added)

In fact, much work on vulnerability has been traditionally undertaken in ‘disciplinary silos’ – in highly specialised ways which are often in isolation from each other. Environmental vulnerability is assessed by the climatologists, nutritional vulnerability by the food security experts, market vulnerability by the economists, disease vector vulnerability by epidemiologists, and so on. The precise nature of vulnerability is often also heavily debated, leading to differences within the silos.

The gap between this ‘stove-piped’ understanding and multi-faceted reality becomes heightened when one considers the number of ongoing global crises. The financial crisis is just one of a number of global trends (that we currently know about) which are interacting and impacting on the lives of poor and vulnerable people.

To take another example, the 2010 World Disasters Report focused on urbanisation, and found that “a high proportion of this urban growth is in cities at risk from the increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events and storm surges that climate change is bringing or is likely to bring.”

Along similar lines, the global food system is showing signs of strain once again. Work done during the last upswing in prices in 2008 suggested that a key requirement was better monitoring and anticipation of future bubbles. Unfortunately anticipation has not led to preventative action. All the signs are that environmental disasters - driven by climate change - and a growing speculative bubble in commodities – driven partly by changing investor patterns in the wake of the financial crisis - are pushing the world into a new food price crisis.

In the face of these trends and shocks, there is a slowly growing recognition that vulnerability itself has become globalised. Interestingly this insight has not come from within the aid sector but from organisations such as the World Economic Forum, whose Global Risk Report 2010 shows that – like the world economy – vulnerabilities are now tightly interconnected.

Global shocks and stresses have multiple, unpredictable effects and increasingly demand – but do not always trigger – diverse responses at the local level. As recent research indicates, employing language which Aid on the Edge regulars will recognise:

Cause and effect in global systems is distinctly nonlinear. Inputs and outputs may not be proportional: a cause with ever-so-slightly different parameters than the previous instance might result in a wildly different effect. Additionally, systems and their component sub-systems interact to produce feedback loops that can either amplify or stabilize resulting effects. Feedbacks blur the line of what is cause and what is effect. The global system is characterised by various sizes and degrees of complexity combined into a tangled and heaving mass of interdependent actions.

Despite these shifts in the nature of vulnerability, international aid policy and practice are still dominated by narrow, parochial approaches. Take for example the findings of a report on chronic vulnerability in Africa which found that much of the analysis undertaken by international agencies did not examine root causes and tended to divide vulnerability into immediate and structural issues. The agencies then focused their efforts on the immediate issues, allowing the structural issues to be largely ignored.

By contrast, the reality of vulnerability for most poor people was found to be “complex and nuanced… vulnerability can be influenced by gender, ethnic group and generation issues, and by contemporary and historical social processes that are often not analysed and not explained.” (emphasis added)

It would seem that it is only after things go seriously wrong that the inter-relationships between the key drivers of vulnerability become of importance to international agencies. To cite one prominent and very current example, the densely urban population in Port-Au-Prince was up until January 2010 experiencing high levels of vulnerability and multiple climactic shocks.  It was only after the 12 January earthquake that aid agencies became sensitive to this interconnected reality, by which time it was already too late for many in Haitian population. As one satirical headline put it at the time: ‘Massive earthquake reveals poor country called Haiti to the world’.

These examples give weight to the criticism I have made elsewhere – that the international community employs a ‘catastrophe-first’ model of lesson learning, which puts the emphasis on disasters striking before action is taken.

There are often good practical reasons for this – anticipation is still in its infancy, prediction is largely impossible. However, without wanting to diminish these challenges, the key is to do much more in terms of changing our mindsets.

As we argued in an ALNAP study on humanitarian innovations, there is a crucial need to find ways to move away from this catastrophe-first model of learning, towards putting vulnerability first.

II: From ‘Catastrophe-First’ to ‘Vulnerability-First’ ~ Three Ideas

This idea of putting vulnerability first has a number of possible implications, of which three are explored below.

Putting vulnerability first requires a better, more inter-disciplinary, understanding of the globalised vulnerability landscape among both policy makers and operational decision makers. As well as better shared data and analysis, we need to find better ways of breaking down disciplinary silos.

One way of doing this might be to examine how the ideas in one area might be transferred over to another. There is already some useful work in this direction, which seeks to generalise the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This suggests that vulnerability may be characterised as a function of three components: sensitivity, exposure and adaptive capacities. The UNFCC shows that such vulnerabilities can be understood through a combination of top-down modelling and scenarios with bottom-up, community-based approaches which recognise and build upon local knowledge and coping strategies. An interesting manifestation of this interdisciplinary approach in action is how the notion of ‘building back better’, a mainstay of disaster risk reduction, has found its way into the dialogue on the aftermath of the global financial crisis.

Putting vulnerability first also means finding ways of communicating vulnerability understanding in ways that capture the political and humanitarian imagination alike. For example, some agencies have started using the evocative image of vulnerability defined as communities and individuals ‘living on the edge’. People are living on the edge if their lives and livelihoods are exposed and sensitive to shocks and stresses, and their adaptive capacities are constantly on the verge of being overwhelmed. Living on the edge suggests that a small push could send a community or individual over the edge.

Being forced to live on the edge can have profound effects on the way people conduct their lives. It can lead to coping strategies which are overtly risk-averse – poor farmers faced with unpredictable prices might start to act in cautious and non-entrepreneurial ways even during normal times, limiting their prospects of increasing their well-being. At the other end of the spectrum, as has been found in coastal communities in Bangladesh, the desperately poor may adopt a “gambler’s throw” strategy, risking all or nothing when they know that a major livelihood shock is inevitable.

The emerging globalised vulnerabilities have already taken their tol, on poor people, and will continue to do so: increasing the numbers ‘living on the edge of disaster’, changing their geographic distribution, and increasing the diversity and unpredictability of risks faced. Successive waves of impacts have fundamentally changed coping mechanisms, reduced long term resilience for the sake of short-term coping mechanisms, undermining development prospects and making many communities more vulnerable to future shocks.

So we need to be paying much more attention to, and advocating for, people living on the edge of disaster, rather simply waiting until they have been tipped over the edge.

Finally, putting vulnerability first also means highlighting examples of good practice and innovations, and fostering national level and local engagement. Social protection, micro-insurance, community-based adaptive learning measures, and new national policy frameworks all have an important role to play in enhancing community-level and national resilience. It also means being honest about how far the international community still has to go as well as its inherent limitations. We need to see some significant organisational and professional changes in international agencies, who need to do more than simply ‘mainstream’ vulnerability. The globalised nature of vulnerability demands nothing short of a fundamental strategic re-orientation.

The final words go to Carl Folke of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, drawing on some of his work from last year, in which he suggests what this re-orientation might look like:

[This] line of thinking helps us avoid the trap of simply rebuilding and repairing flawed structures of the past—be it an economic system overly reliant on risky speculation or a health-care system that splits a nation at its financial seams and yet fails to deliver adequate coverage…

… the resilience perspective stands in stark contrast to development paradigms and global policies that… offer only minor adjustments of current behaviors, and that tend to concentrate on technical quick fixes to get rid of the problems…

...it encourages us to anticipate, adapt, learn, and transform human actions in light of the unprecedented challenges of our turbulent world…

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When Can Crowds Outperform Aid Experts?

Posted in Biology, Campaigns, Evaluation, Innovation, Knowledge and learning, Natural disasters, Networks, Organisations, Self organisation, Technology on January 3, 2011 | 5 Comments »

When does crowdsourcing work best? New research from the Institute for Human Development provides answers which may be of relevance for aid projects and programmes.

There has been a lot written, spoken and blogged about the power of crowds in making decisions. In James Surowiecki‘s bestselling Wisdom of Crowds, published in 2004, the central thesis was that diverse groups are likely to make certain types of decisions and predictions better than individuals – even those with specialist expertise. As Surowiecki noted:

…under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them”.

The six years since the Wisdom of Crowds was published have seen the rise and rise of online social networking and related technologies. Social media and the power of the crowd have been at the heart of everything from political resistance movements to presidential elections (and indeed, resistance movements following presidential elections). The term crowdsourcing was coined in 2006 to describe an organisational approach that harnesses the creative solutions of a distributed network of individuals. As one of the originators put it:

Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is per formed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers.”

There is a growing – some would say evangelistic – enthusiasm for crowdsourcing as the answer to a whole range of problems. Just a few initiatives off the top of my head: fundraising for socially responsible films, the development of transit planning in urban areas, combating corruption, creating markets for innovations, expanding scientific peer review processes. A quick Google illustrates just how expansive this agenda is.

The potential for crowdsourcing to contribute to international aid has also attracted a lot of attention, with perhaps the most prominent example being the role of new innovative technologies in the aftermath of disasters. The following is a typical example of the arguments made by the ‘pro-crowd’ camp:

The rapid proliferation of broadband, wireless and cell phones, coupled with new crowdsourcing technology, is completely changing the face of disaster relief. Everyone with a computer can provide crucial assistance, sifting through satellite photos, translating messages or updating maps, and most people are happy to do this free of charge — contributing to life-saving relief efforts is a powerful motivator… At a fraction of the cost of most relief budgets, crowdsourcing can solve coordination problems on the ground.

As many readers will be aware, crowdsourcing in disaster responses has been the focus of a passionate, sometimes vehement, and at times rather distracting debate.

My intention isn’t to retread ground that has already been well covered – and occasionally angrily stamped on – elsewhere. Instead, I want to explore evidence that tries to explain – following Surowiecki – the specific conditions under which a crowd is effective. Does recent research on decision-making yield any lessons or ideas worth a closer look?

Certainly, some of the crowdsourcing argument is borne out by the evidence. Numerous disciplines – from anthropology, cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology – suggest that collective decision making can help group members cope more effectively with unfamiliar contexts, and it is almost a cliche to say that humanitarian disasters are the archetypal unfamiliar context. However, reviews of this literature suggest many of these studies lack testable, well-structured concepts and hypotheses to explain exactly what collective decision making involves when compared to other kinds of decision making. They also often fail to examine the implications of different kinds of decision-making processes for the accuracy of decisions. These issues echo the challenges that have been put to the crowdsourcing community.

One recent exception to the above is simulation-based research that has been undertaken by analysts at the Institute for Human Development in Berlin. This work looks at a range of decision making processes, and suggests that there are two distinct ways in which groups can work to provide solutions to a problem.

First, individuals can follow specific ‘leaders’ in the crowd. This usually means drawing on those experts with information particularly relevant to the decision at hand. This is comparable to the typical aid decision-making process.

Second, crowds can work to aggregate information from the members, which is then made available to the crowd itself or to a third party. This enables decision making to be enhanced through ‘collective cognition’, a concept that underpins many of the arguments for crowdsourcing. This collective cognition can be unconscious emergent property, or it might be facilitated consciously through network interactions within the crowd.

The work by the HDI suggests a number of findings which are pertinent for the aid crowdsourcing debates:

  • a number of conditions influence when groups use ‘follow an expert’ or ‘wisdom of the crowd’ strategies. Specifically, the researchers found that the diversity of the group, the quality of individual information and group size all had a bearing on which approach is chosen.
  • in so-called single-shot decisions, experts are almost always more accurate than the collective across a range of conditions. However, for repeated decisions – where individuals should be able to consider the success of previous decision outcomes – the collective’s aggregated information is almost always superior
  • regardless of the decision-making approach taken, groups must have the potential to acquire information through social interaction, respond positively to those who possess pertinent information, and update their approaches based on the success of the previous decisions
  • In ephemeral and unstable social groups that make collective decisions only occasionally, individuals tend to follow the most informed individual. Stable social groups that encounter repeated decision points would do well to use some information aggregating process.

At the risk of over-generalising, the above suggests an emerging hypothesis – that for many simple or complicated issues where only one attempt is needed – ‘puzzles’ or ‘problems’, as a previous Aid on the Edge post put it – there is potential for experts to outperform crowds. The best illustration is to point out all those problems Malcolm Gladwell covered in Blink – detecting if a work of art was a fake, whether a teenager was carrying a gun, whether a fire would lead to a building collapsing, and so on.

In complex problems that require ‘multiple shots’, crowds can help augment expert perspectives by developing emergent solutions to evolving problems. The processes of information aggregation, transparent decision-making and effective feedback loops are essential here – all concepts which will be familiar to those interested in complex systems thinking.

Although the research is narrow, preliminary and based on mostly on theoretical simulations, the HDI work does point towards a more structured way of understanding the limits and possibilities of crowdsourcing. As such, it could be a constructive way to start to navigate some of the entrenched debates we have seen to date. Ultimately the research suggests that we shouldn’t be asking ‘does crowdsourcing work or not?’, but rather ‘when does it work, why, how, and with what benefits?’

This is not to say the answers will always be clear-cut or unambiguous, but asking the right questions will surely get us closer.

Now all we need is for some aid researchers to pick these concepts and questions up and run with them.

Or maybe an aid crowd would be better?

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Predicting catastrophes – limits and possibilities

Posted in Conflict and peace building, Evolution, Financial crisis, Innovation, Institutions, Knowledge and learning, Natural disasters on November 24, 2010 | 3 Comments »

Tipping points are found in ecosystems, economies and even bodies. But they’re usually recognized in retrospect, when it’s too late for anything but regret. Now a growing body of research suggests there are telltale mathematical signals. If scientists can figure out how to detect them, they may be able to forecast tipping points ahead of time.”
So starts a 2009 Wired article on prediction and catastrophes. Using the Nobel Prize winning work of Kenneth Wilson on sudden, non-linear changes in dynamic physcial systems, increasing numbers of scientists have been able model catastrophic changes in many other contexts. These include:

The researchers involved in these different examples argue that all critical transitions are preceded by the same basic mathematical patterns. Some specific examples of catastrophe signals are:

  • Stresses in the feedback loops that are evident in complex systems such as ecosystems
  • Systems take longer to recover from fluctuations that they normally are resilient to
  • Representations of system – visual or mathematical – that become jagged rather than smooth

The key to prediction of such events is then simply “to figure out what sort of data to look for, and then how to make sense of it.” As one of the authors of a Nature study put it:

….We are repeatedly blindsided by disasters that come out of the blue. If we had better tools for anticipating those events, we could avoid some of them…”

And a co-author of the same study:

…The fact that the patterns seem to recur in so many different circumstances suggests that the mechanisms underlying them may have universal characteristics…”

However, there is considerable scepticism about whether such prediction is possible.

Not only is the data gathering extremely time-intensive and expensive, but causality of catastrophic events is complex and there may be many interacting feedback loops and threshold points. Relevance may not be determinable ahead of time.

This debate is a vital one for policy makers and practitioners, and it illustrates the spectrum of approaches evident among those who would seek to make use of the complexity sciences.

On one end of the spectrum, discontinuous, non-linear change is being presented as a predictable property of complex systems, by those who seem to be suggesting that it is possible to exert greater control over real-world systems.

On the end of the spectrum, there are those that see interconnectedness of complex systems leading to inherent unpredictability. Two unlikely advocates for this perspective are the present and former Chairmen of the US Federal Reserve. As Alan Greenspan (whose evident affinity with complexity sciences was explored here a few weeks back) argued in recent evidence to Congress in the context of the financial crisis:

History tells us [we] cannot identify the timing of a crisis, or anticipate exactly where it will be located or how large the losses and spillovers will be… Nor can they fully eliminate the possibility of future crises.

His successor, Ben Bernanke, has linked such attempts to the futility of predicting the weather:

As an economist and policymaker, I have plenty of experience in trying to foretell the future, because policy decisions inevitably involve projections of how alternative policy choices will influence the future course of the economy… over the years, many very smart people have applied the most sophisticated statistical and modeling tools available to try to better divine the economic future.  But the results, unfortunately, have more often than not been underwhelming.  Like weather forecasters, economic forecasters must deal with a system that is extraordinarily complex, that is subject to random shocks, and about which our data and understanding will always be imperfect… To be sure, historical relationships and regularities can help economists, as well as weather forecasters, gain some insight into the future, but these must be used with considerable caution and healthy skepticism (emphasis added)

Stephen Strogatz sums up a pragmatic perspective on this debate very neatly:

It’d be very nice if it were true that there were precursors for tipping points in all these diverse systems. It’d be even nicer if we could find these precursors. I want to believe it, but I’m not sure I do”

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Complexity, crises and moving beyond recipes…

Posted in Chaos, Conflict and peace building, Financial crisis, Innovation, Institutions, Leadership, Natural disasters, Networks, Organisations, Public Policy, Self organisation on August 6, 2010 | 5 Comments »

The argument that modern organisations have to deal with complexity on a daily basis is fast becoming one of the least controversial statements any analyst, policy maker or practitioner can make. But what this actually means in practice is up for debate.

Some suggest that there is little or no rigour in statements such as ‘the world is increasingly complex’, and that beneath such arguments there is little but smoke and mirrors. See for example a recent blog which rips into the 2010 IBM CEO survey (highlighted here last month) for being based solely on perceptions rather than ‘anything real’.

Others say that we live in a qualitatively different world to previous eras, one marked by increasing interconnectedness and interdependence – economically, socially, politically, environmentally and technologically. In such an interdependent world, the argument goes, there is greater unpredictability and uncertainty. In the extreme, standard operating procedures, best practices and grand designs can be irrelevant, counterproductive or downright damaging.

Among this second group there is growing attention being paid to the the ideas of the complexity sciences,  to tap into their apparent potential to help think about an increasingly challenging world, and maybe even  better deal with its problems.

The last few weeks have seen some interesting blogs and articles that look at different crisis contexts – from global crises to humanitarian disasters and fragile states.

First, on global crises. Of special interest is the role of complexity sciences to help understand and navigate recent interwoven global crises - notably the so-called ‘Triple F’ crises of food, fuel and finance ( a previous Aid on the Edge of Chaos post highlights how Andy Haldane, a Bank of England director, used complexity science for exactly this purpose).

Lord Julian Hunt, former CEO of the UK Met Office, argues in a Reuters Blog that the rapid growth of global inter-connected problems have led to new kinds of collaborations between scientists, policymakers and the private sector. He sees “particular emphasis is being paid to global system dynamics” to inform policy making, research and practice.

Recent applications include using the ideas of complexity to understand how such crises emerge and are propagated; how individuals and organisations adapt to such crises; the resource implications of such crises; and the implications for sustainable development efforts.

Elsewhere, in an excellent post that is highly relevant to the ongoing Pakistan appeal and response, Wanderlust draws on Dave Snowden’s work on the Cynefin framework to illustrate how aid responses to humanitarian disasters are poorly matched to crises contexts:

When aid gets talked about in the public sphere, it’s generally messaged very simply in the media. Children are starving. They need food. An X-Y relationship. Ditto following an earthquake: houses are destroyed and people are in the rain: Give them tents. A Simple paradigm… When aid agencies manage their response programs, they create complicated management systems that involve careful analysis of all the factors, putting them into project documents with LogFrame Analysis that looks at cause and effect and all the possible links along the way that need to be managed. An X—Y relationship. A Complicated paradigm- certainly not Simple. However the realities of aid responses are neither Simple nor Complicated. At best, if you take a stable long-term chronic emergency like the situation in Darfur, it is fraught with feedback loops and vague inter-relations where cause and effect are highly flexible and interdependant. In Darfur there are more than two dozen armed groups operating, with their areas of control shifting on a weekly basis. When one gains strength, others weaken. They have their foundations in specific community and ethnic groups with long historical relationships. The drivers for the conflict are primarily natural resources, but there are also ethnic, political and other economic implications as well. By providing aid to one group you inadvertantly exclude or depower another, and emotions such as resentment or loyalty then shift that landscape. I could go on for pages describing the Complexity of Darfur. We can understand bits and pieces about it, and trace some of the loops and mechanisms in the systems, but we’ll probably never manage to map it in its entirety, and there will always be things outside our control – from human behaviour to the climate.

Last but not least, Foreign Policy in Focus draws on complexity principles to suggest what might really be done about Somalia, perhaps the archetypal ‘fragile state’. As is eloquently argued there:

Now that the violence of Somalia has spilled over into Uganda, western policymakers and pundits are suddenly all aflutter with the urge to ‘do something’. Exactly what that something might be is uncertain. Drone attacks, special forces, a Gaza-like blockade and even a full scale invasion have been suggested.

All of those are truly terrible ideas – and exactly the kind of legacy thinking that caused the US to hug the tar baby of IrAfPak. At best, they will generate yet another failure / quagmire, and expand the ever growing pool of pissed off people who want to car bomb Times Square. At worst, they could invite a ‘fifth column’ type of resistance on the part of the Somali diaspora and sympathizers, spreading conflict across the region and beyond. (Somewhere between 40% and 50% of ethnic Somalis live outside the country.)

Instead of pursuing the same old failed policies, the way to resolve intractable problems is to expand the ‘solution space’ – the range of available options. Solution space is determined by the perspectives – which we might also call beliefs, paradigms or ‘mental models’ – of the players involved. Because we can only act on ideas that get through our political / cultural / personal filters, the way to achieve breakthrough is to broaden our perspectives in order to see a wider range of possibilities…”

Each of these articles is challenging, thought-provoking and well worth a read. Each presents the limitations of existing approaches to analysis, policy and the subsequent actions taken by international organisations. Each attempts to present alternatives to what they view as outmoded ways of working, drawing on complexity principles.

Take Hunt’s argument that complexity science approaches can help us develop appropriate regulation of computerised financial markets. Or Wanderlust’s suggestions that a field managers’ gut instinct can prove as useful in chaotic disaster settings as a 3 week research study conducted by experts. Or the FPIF notion that imposing government structures in Somalia will be far less effective than acknowledging and working with existing governance processes, even if the government in place is disagreeable to Western sensibilities.

Perhaps the biggest challenges to the wider take-up of such complexity-inspired suggestions is that, if they stay both sensible and true to the principles of complexity, they tend not to provide recipes which can be followed. Rather, complexity theory

  • provides a set of lenses with which to look at the world,
  • helps pose questions which can help better understand the dynamics of real world systems, and
  • helps generate insights as to how these dynamics can be ‘sensed’ and ‘navigated’

Despite this, complexity sciences are all too often judged by the same set of values and mindsets inherent to existing mechanistic and top-down ways of working. All too often people seem to want to get something for nothing from the ideas of complexity – they in effect want to see complexity applied in ways that ‘tell us what to do’. For those looking to replace mechanistic recipes with complexity-inspired recipes, disappointment is inevitable.

As Cynthia Kurtz, one of the co-developers of Cynefin, recently wrote in a wonderful essay:

Emergence requires presence. It requires awareness, negotiation, the building and verification of trust, the mending of fences when they need to be mended and the removal of barriers when they obstruct. Most people do emergence well, but rarely without effort. If it is without effort, it is more likely to involve following instructions, not participating in emergence.

Perhaps this imposition of old attitudes onto new approaches is inevitable. But it is not irredeemable. As Albert Einstein has suggested: “we can’t solve problems by applying the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Where to start then? However huge the political and institutional challenges may seem, there may be as many blockages and biases at the level of individual personal preferences. To close on another classic quote, this time from Tolstoy: “everyone seeks to change the world, no-one seeks to change themselves”.

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Lessons rising from the ash

Posted in Financial crisis, Knowledge and learning, Leadership, Natural disasters, Public Policy, Reports and Studies on May 3, 2010 | 1 Comment »

In the 1970s, systems thinker Russell Ackoff argued that some of the greatest problems happen when messy problems are dealt with as if they were simple puzzles. The true extent of interconnectedness and interdependence of the world we live in is ignored or downplayed until a crisis – i.e. when it is already too late.

Time and time again, whether it is foot and mouth disease, terrorism, climate change, or the banking crisis, senior leaders and politicians display their inability to anticipate critical issues that are emerging. This is what I have described elsewhere as the “catastrophe-first” model of lesson learning.

The Icelandic volcano has led to a new wave of such analyses among journalists, often  drawing on the ideas of complexity science. A New York Times article featured on this blog is just the latest example. In the UK’s Guardian, George Monbiot drew on complexity in his piece entitled ‘What links the banking crisis and the volcano?’, and suggested:

beyond a certain level, connectivity becomes a hazard. The longer and more complex the lines of communication and the more dependent we become on production and business elsewhere, the greater the potential for disruption. This is one of the lessons of the banking crisis. Impoverished mortgage defaulters in the United States – the butterfly’s wing over the Atlantic – almost broke the global economy. If the Eyjafjallajökull volcano – by no means a monster – keeps retching it could, in these fragile times, produce the same effect.

(a previous Aid on the Edge post highlights a speech by the Bank of England’s director of financial stability in which he uses complexity adaptive systems theory to explain the banking crisis)

But what do scientists think? John Brockman, editor of the ever-impressive Edge.org, invited scientists, philosophers, psychologists, economists, artists and theoreticians from diverse fields to contribute their thoughts to The Ash Cloud- An Edge Special Event.

Brockman’s call was specific: he wanted the community of thinkers on the Edge to think about the ash cloud and the reaction to it, and tell him in 250 words something “that I don’t already know and that I’m not going to read in the newspapers”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, quite a few of the comments focus on different aspects of complexity science. These included:

  • Haim Harari, physicist, who echoes Monbiot in saying the ash crisis and the financial crisis have much in common:  Most decision makers don’t understand math and science, he says, and most mathematicians and scientists “have no feel for the real implications of their calculations.”  He says we need scientifically trained political decisions makers.
  • Peter Schwartz, futurist and cofounder of the Global Business Network,  is among those who say the consequences of the eruption are “a true Black Swan.”  He also says the event may not be over. If the volcano continues to erupt, or the even bigger adjacent volcano erupts, the ash cloud could be bigger, spread further, and have even greater consequences.
  • Emanuel Derman,  professor of financial engineering, who said  “Old technology-propeller driven planes-would not have been grounded by ash. More efficient, more vulnerable.”
  • Lawrence Krauss, physicist, who argued that the ash cloud demonstrates that with major events there is no such thing as local or regional, illustrating using the potential of a nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan to disrupt global climate for a decade. He adds, “If a simple volcano in Iceland  can immobilize much of the world, even a small scale nuclear conflict has the capacity to affect all of humanity so profoundly that mere airline flight cancellations would be the least of our worries.”

Others wrote about our need to understand risk, the trouble with risk aversion, the fallibility of models, and our relationship with chaos.  Click here to read all of these  provocative essays.

I have two personal favourites. The first by Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran has implications for complexity in aid problems:

Two ideas should be kept in mind when dealing with this epistemological and methodological entity called “nature”. First, we do not have the “real” image of nature, and maybe never will. We only have models, theories and simulations, in which “facts” are defined by a partial number of variables. Second, we need more integrative thinking: Scientists working together will recognize the complexity of nature, have a more accurate image of it, and will stop proposing naïve models. This applies to understanding volcanoes, brains, markets and stars. We cannot surrender to the complexity. When we stop trying to explain nature through science, we try it through religion or myth. Curiosity is also a force of nature, and science is the best tool available to understand the world… That’s the best we can do with uncontrollable forces of nature: from volcanic ashes to emotions.

And a shorter contribution by Roger C. Schank, psychologist and computer scientist, who says, simply: “

We are confused, as we should be.”

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“There is no such thing as a natural disaster”: crises, complexity and the role of theory

Posted in Knowledge and learning, Natural disasters, Networks, Organisations, Public Policy, Reports and Studies, Resilience on February 3, 2010 | 5 Comments »

In the few weeks following the Haiti earthquake, much of our work at ALNAP has focused on getting key operational lessons from previous earthquakes into the hands and minds of operational agency staff, and briefing media representatives on a variety of issues related to the relief and recovery work. 

As the initial signs of some kind of normality are returning for the people of Haiti, it may seem rather bland or even improper to talk of theory. But theories can and do powerfully shape how we think about disasters, how we understand the aftermath, and how we carry out international aid work.

Increasingly, the complexity sciences are being put forward as alternatives to the ‘classic’ ways of analysing and understanding disasters. In his 2003 book, Natural disasters and development in a globalizing world, Mark Pelling - a leading researcher on natural disasters based at Kings College London – argued that many developments in disaster resilience and climate change adaptation have strong affinities with complexity theory, although their use is often not acknowledged. He also suggested that complexity science offers a ‘meta-framework’ to bring together a number of ways of understanding disasters. This framework uses ideas of emergence, self-organisation, adaptation and networks, each of which are looked at below.

Emergence is increasingly important in how we understand the dynamics of a crisis. As argued by Greg Bankoff, Georg Frerks, Dorothea Hilhorst in Mapping vulnerability: disasters, development, and people: 

…complexity theory is highly relevant for disaster studies because it provides the entry point to describe disasters as the interactions between sub-systems of nature and society or hazard and vulnerability… Disasters caused by natural hazards result from the complex interactions of nature and society…” 

Such complexity-oriented approaches have been used to explore Hurricane Mitch, the Peruvian earthquake, the Montserrat volcano and others. As one study has noted: 

Consider the following three ingredients: a mega-city in a poor, Pacific rim nation; seasonal monsoon rains; a huge garbage dump. Mix these ingredients in the following way: move impoverished people to the dump, where they build shanty towns and scavenge for a living in the mountain of garbage; saturate the dump with changing monsoon rain patterns; collapse the weakened slopes of garbage and send debris flows to inundate the shanty towns. That particular disaster, which took place outside of Manila in July 2000… was not inherent in any of the three ingredients of that tragedy; it emerged from their interaction’ (Sarewitz and Pielke, 2001 cited in Ramalingam et al, 2008, emphasis added).

The underlying message is that natural disasters are characterised and created by context. Raima Larter (an award-winning complexity blogger) has used some of these ideas to argue that Haiti was not a natural disaster but a man-made one. In fact, these approaches suggest that there is in fact no such thing as a ‘natural’ disaster, as all disasters are created by emergent interactions between crisis drivers and human actvities.

As well as crisis-specific uses, some analysts have tried to apply complexity principles to understand global disaster trends, moving beyond disasters as one-off local events towards a macro-view.

Dr Peter Walker’s work on complexity and context as the determininants of the future is one of a number of examples of from within the aid sector. Thomas Homer-Dixon has written extensively on this, most notably in the superb and influential ‘Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization’.  These works approach disasters as part of ongoing dynamic processes of global change, shaped by contextual factors such as demographic shifts, natural resource dependency, urbanisation and climate change.

The second area of relevance of complexity in natural disasters is in understanding the importance of self-organisation in the process of response and adaptation after a disaster. Professor Louise Comfort, who works in Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh, has used complexity theory to understand local responses to earthquakes and other crises.  Comfort builds on the idea of emergent crises (as described above), and focuses on the next stage – how local self-organisation occurs in the face of disaster.

Comfort’s argument is that self-organising capabilities within commmunities are central to both pre-disaster resilience and post-disaster response. Self-organisation is determined by the capacity to exchange and act on incoming information across different levels. Effective local response is based on the ’timely exchange of information’ between local actors, facilitated by social and human capital and information infrastructure. (This chimes with the best-case use of social technologies by aid agencies, discussed here a couple of weeks back.)

As Comfort puts it:  

…when the complexity of interacting scientific, social, political and economic conditions exceeds the existing capacity for organisational control, decisions taken by local actors govern the direction of the evolving process… investment in improving capacity for organisational response at the local level is likely to see the greatest benefit to the community…”

The importance of self-organised local responses echoes with the findings of the Tsunami evaluation, which found that most of the life-saving work (over 90%) was done by the local population and not international agencies. Similarly, in Haiti, despite the media attention focusing on dramatic efforts of international search and rescue teams, the maajority of the life-saving work will have been undertaken by Haitians themselves.  

The third area of relevance for complexity science is in the delivery of international humanitarian aid, where ideas of adaptation and networks are increasingly important. This is perhaps the least advanced of the three areas in terms of systematic academic research. Aid agencies, it is argued, are far too reactive and need to reform to become more attuned to local contexts and realities. And aid processes need to take account of the dynamic nature of humanitarian needs. Here too there are growing numbers of studies, for example:

The overall underlying message of much of the work covered above is that the classic ways of approaching natural disasters - seeing them as one-off events, disregarding local self-organised capacities for response, the way in which aid itself is conceptualised and delivered - tend to be based on simple, linear theories of cause and effect. 

Such theories inform many disaster-related practices in ways that echo that famous quote from John Maynard Keynes: practical people who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, frequently owe a debt to some defunct theorist. This is not just true of disaster aid, but applies to many social, economic and political issues.

In working to improve our understanding of and approaches to natural disasters - and indeed other pressing issues of our time - we may need to start to acknowledge and move beyond these implicit intellectual debts.

As is illustrated above, complexity theory gives us a set of useful starting points. How we use it to change our ways of seeing the world, and then use this to change our practices, is the real and enduring challenge.

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