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What to Do When You Don’t Know What You Are Doing

JOSEPH F. COATES

The thesis is simple. Most people in positions of authority, whether in government, business, the third sector, or international organizations, simply don’t know what they are doing when they respond to change.

They have no adequate command of the range of alternatives before them and they generally lack full understanding of the situation that they must deal with, whether it is a problem or potential opportunity. They almost without exception have no insight or means of insight into all the consequences of the actions they would take, including those that they plan or hope for. Finally, they usually see an unnecessarily restricted range of choices. It would be regrettable to attribute their acting in ignorance to misfeasance, to stupidity, or incompetence. It is much more complex.

A second thesis is that these same people in positions of authority simply cannot know what to do. Their scope of action is so broad, the systems that they deal with so complex, and the number of forces at play so numerous that it is intrinsically beyond their abilities to understand their scope of actions and to anticipate all important outcomes.

In view of that dismal situation, what can be done to make better decisions? There is a clear solution, which we will come to, but first let’s look more closely at the situation. A conventional response to either problems or opportunities is to operate on best guesses. By the time you reach a position of seniority in any organization you are likely to be ego-satisfied with your own ability to operate on best guesses that you label professional judgment. The best guesses are, of course, usually based on a few explicit and a large number of implicit, unexamined assumptions about the future. If one considers, for example, the Fortune 500 companies that have gone belly-up, or the government projects that have failed, or third-sector opportunities or enterprises that have misfired, all share

JOSEPH F. COATES is President of Coates & Jarratt, Inc., a futurist consulting firm. Address reprint requests to Joseph F. Coates, Coates & Jarratt, Inc., 3738 Kanawha Street, NW,

Washington, DC 20015.

Technological Forecasting and Social Change 50, 249-252 (1995) 0 1995 Elsevier Science Inc. 655 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10010

0040-1625/95/$9.50 SSDI 0040-1625(95)00063-G

250 J. F. COATES

a common characteristic. The people at the top held a set of assumptions about the future that were unsound largely because they were unexamined. They were unexamined because they could rarely be challenged. Top dogs rarely welcome challenge.

Another orthodox approach to a new situation is to plan and operate on the basis of ideology. Ideologues have the curious capability of knowing the answers before they even understand the problem. Whether it is an element of a relentless war on communism in Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Cuba, or whether it is the problem of dealing with young teenage pregnancy, the ideologues tend to dominate the loudspeakers with their pre-fab solutions, which stand somewhere along the spectrum of useless to wasteful to destructive. A telling example of this on a grand scale is Robert MacNamara’s Mea Culpa on the Vietnam fiasco.

False confidence is another source of inappropriate action, especially when one sees a parallel that is not truly one. One sees a situation through too small a porthole, not appreciating its scope or complexity. The military and state department are endless sources of illustrations of this principle. Consider the failure in Somalia or the dubious situation in Haiti.

Senior people sometimes act on the basis of what they take to be research, which one always hopes would shine a sharp, bright light on any problem. But more often than not, the research they consider is partial and far from definitive. One is safest in assuming there is no definitive social science research. One only has to look at the endless stream of reports coming out of the U.S. government’s General Accounting Office to see how limited research is and how feeble, partial, and unsystematically collected information is in providing unequivocal guidance even in the implementation of federal programs. Even when physical research is concerned, the major question rarely asked is, “Precisely what assumptions underlie this position ?” After all, scientists and engineers have no special vaccine to protect them from self-serving conclusions, ideology, or tunnel vision.

Another reason why traditional solutions are carrying us down a wrong path is that many people simply reject the future as being no different from the present. For them the future is fundamentally a replay of what has been so familiar in the past. This was surely a key to the 15year decline of the automobile industry (which may now be recov- ering). This is the most common source of business failure-rejecting the notion that the future can be substantially, much less radically, different from today. It is also common in government. I recall a friend interviewing a senior person in the Department of the Interior who reported somewhat woefully that for 15 years he had worked to make the desert bloom and had learned only a couple of years earlier that his agency was raping the environment.

Related to these difficulties is the nearly universal passion to simplify. The first cousin of simplification is to organize the situation into discrete, clear, and rigid categories. It does not work in dealing with the problems of the homeless any more than it does with corporate reorganization and downsizing.

A problem characteristic of both public and private organizations is to see the range of actions available for dealing with the problem solely within one’s chain of authority. Yet, most interesting problems are too complex to be dealt with from the perspective of a single organization. What we almost always need is coordinated, integrated, and thoughtful use of resources. Bureaucratic barriers, whether in the corporation or in the government agency tend to simultaneously limit thinking about solutions and promote suboptimal actions.

The rejection of information is so extremely common as to be nearly universal. For many in authority, information is the enemy. It is toxic. It is poison for plans and

FROM MY PERSPECTIVE 251

programs. That rejection can come for any of the outlined reasons, or from what one might call, for lack of a better characterization, simple wilfulness. One can see this, for example, with many of the mainline Protestant churches, which have become internation- ally oriented and keyed into macro social change. But survey research suggests that this is not what their members are interested in. What their members want, even crave-and are being deprived of by these socially oriented ministries-is the pastoral function. Throughout the mainline Protestant ministry, the pastoral function has been replaced by vague, diffuse, remote, and hortatory addresses to larger issues. Now surely any church and most clerics could manage to bounce both balls. But the fact is the pastoral functions is neglected. The successfully competing evangelical and Pentecostal churches, if nothing else, are heavy on the pastoral side.

One sees the parallel problem with the Roman Catholics, where the steady drift in sexual behavior and in disregard for sacerdotal authority is becoming a fleeing flood from the organization’s mandates. Thirty years ago, one could tell a Catholic from a Protestant on the basis of their contraceptive practices. Twenty years ago, after a third child you couldn’t tell a Protestant from a Catholic. Today you can’t tell a Protestant from a Catholic from the word go, based on sexual practice. The failure to bring institutional mechanisms and goals into line with constituencies is a form of organizational suicide.

Ironically enough, good people have a tendency to reject information-or more properly, to reject a reassessment and reinterpretation of their goals and objectives based on information, when that information is uncongenial. Many whites, especially liberals, are distressed and fail to understand black activists on campus seeking separate black living quarters, promoting black garb and cosmetics and black organizations, and rejecting- or at least what is seen as rejecting-integration with the white student body. What these folks fail to understand is that, first, their own objectives and image of integration was wrong-headed to begin with; and second, that the historic American experience of the last 75 years in higher education is that religious/social groups have always sorted on campuses and always formed their own self-interest social groups. Those earlier groups in sorting were less visible than when the sort is associated with skin color. The ideologue with a false view of integration fails to recognize that the willingness of Blacks as well as Asians and Hispanics to self-sort is a mark of progress. It means that they have achieved such a degree of confidence in their own position that they can afford to be selective and arbitrary in the social side of their lives.

One can see the rejection of new information repeatedly on a collision course with ideology. Almost everyone deplores or at least regrets the rapid rise in divorce in the United States following World War II, and the high likelihood of divorce among newly married couples today. This is seen by many as a decay and decline in the traditional family and its values or whatever ideological icon that label may represent. Our view is quite at odds with that. The survey evidence supports without question that stable family life is a continuing, long-term objective of American adults of all ages. What divorce reflects is not a rejection of family life but, rather, for the first time in a mass society a rejection of bad marriage. It is a consequence of our prosperity, our education, our awareness of choices that one does not have to remain condemned to suffering for life from the hormonal drenched errors of one’s youth. Those blaring the trumpet of family values avoid any need to consider a more basic question, how to educate children in a heterogeneous, diverse, and mobile society to make better marital choices. How one promotes better marriage is, in my judgment, the core issue, not supporting some vague, uncertain, and historically unsound image of family values. The divorce and family values

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argument is a model of the far more general situation of misconstruing evidence because of ideology.

To sum up, the traditional failing approaches to dealing with complex issues-that is, with any institutional issues-is that the folks in charge ignore the basic premises of strategic planning that every plan, project, or program should be set up from the beginning with a monitoring element that gives continuous feedback and guidance on real-time redirection and change in plan.

What can one do in a real situation when one cannot know what to do with any reasonable assurance? The answer is straightforward conceptually. The difficulty lies in people having to exhibit an uncommon degree of humility in the face of their own limita- tions. As we see it, no plan, no project, no program by business, government, the third sector, or international bodies should ever be undertaken as final or definitive. Rather, everything should be undertaken as a continuing, unfolding experiment. The implication is that the experiment truly be an experiment-that there be continuous, appropriate data gathering, feedback, interpretation, and alterations in the program or project.

Let us recognize some real difficulties in an experimental approach to policy in the 21 st century. Legislators traditionally and almost without exception want to take definitive action, that is, to deal with an issue once and for all. That is a large source of our current problem and the basis of the current national and statehouse enthusiasm for reform. The reforms advocated are themselves as wrong-headed and condemned to failure as the errors they would correct. Corporate executives are rarely open to experimentation. To experiment, to acknowledge limitations on what they do, is from their point of view, likely to reveal them as incompetent wimps. Can a macho executive of a $15-billion corporation acknowledge that he doesn’t know what to do? And of course the hubris of the clergy, which is only exceeded by the hubris of the leadership of public interest groups, presents a gigantic obstacle to intelligent action. Consider, for example, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which for many of us is the great bastion for the preservation of some, if not all, of the elements of the Bill of Rights. To the best of my knowledge as a near-lifetime member of that organization, I have never seen it show a scintilla of humility, a drop of uncertainty, and, least of all, have any sense that perhaps there is a better way than either/or. The ACLU, perpetually locked in combat, operates on the simplistic, and hence unrealistic, world of win or lose. Victory or defeat with no acknowledgment of complexity implies no subtlety or sensitivity in action.

Complexity requires either subtlety of action or destruction of the complex for a fresh start as the only routes to success in its management. Either alternative requires the humility of continual experimentation.

Received April 21, 1995