I Don't Know

I am struck by how little today’s political leaders are prepared to acknowledge uncertainty. “I don’t know” seems to be beyond many of them.

For many years, I taught strategic planning, first as an Assistant professor at New York University, then as a Fellow at the King’s Fund College and later at the Office for Public Management. My shtick was that the traditional long-term comprehensive planning approach that resulted in master plans – famous in many of the early new town proposals in the UK – arrogantly assumes away uncertainty. I knew – from study and experience on sites - that that approach resulted too often in failure or sterility or both.

While studying urban planning at UCL’s The Bartlett – then briefly named the School of Environmental Studies – I worked for Llewelyn-Davies, Weeks, Forestier-Walker and Bor, the planners of Milton Keynes new town. Their “plan” had attracted great opprobrium at the time because – unlike so many of its predecessors, it did not have a master plan with its concocted picture of what the future town would look like.

Instead, its design was based on a flexible framework or grid of roads for public and private transport, much like – I was later to learn – the flexible utility grid of Northwick Park Hospital in north London. Northwick Park was designed expressly to facilitate adaptation, extension and rebuilding over time as clinical practice and knowledge changed. This was “indeterminate architecture”, devised by the firm’s partner John Weeks, to cope with uncertainty.

That acknowledgement of uncertainty also shaped the firm’s plan for Milton Keynes. Rather than complying to the strictures of a “master plan”, the plan for Milton Keynes emphasised organic growth and community input in future development of a city that was intended to evolve with changing needs over time. Indeed, Milton Keynes was indeterminate planning.

Lesson learned, I became an advocate of planning that accepts the certainty of uncertainty and acknowledges that we cannot reliably predict the future: planning that had to be contingent not certain, strategic not directive. Most important, planning that had to accept what we do in light of changing circumstances might constantly have to change, so long as we are able to stay committed to why we do it – to intended social result.

My alternative was multi-future planning and robustness analysis, an operational research technique that had been introduced to me by Professor Jonathan Rosenhead at the London School of Economics.

Years later, I asked Jonathan to help me devise a multi-future planning methodology for health services in Ottawa, Canada. At the time, Canada was troubled by the secession threats of René Lévesque’s Quebec and that uncertainty was central to any public service planning in Canada, especially in its capital city, which borders on Quebec. Multiple futures, multiple contingencies, and robust actions – actions that satisfy intended outcomes in as many possible futures as possible – became the key components of our planning exercise.

Uncertainty is endemic to the kinds of problems with which most top public managers everywhere must deal and – indeed – that most political leaders face every day. These are “wicked problems”, first defined (despite other’s false claims of ownership) by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber (I’ve written about these guys before), way back in 1973 (Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, Rittel and Webber, Policy Sciences (4) 1973).

Straightforward, instrumental, linear planning – Rittel and Webber observed – can work when the problems being addressed are “tame”, where information is known and where optimal solutions can be identified, like paving a road or going to the moon (the latter – oddly – having become the model for the current UK government’s “mission-led” plan for change). Rather than the certainty of tame missions, however, an entirely different approach is required when the problem is “wicked”, like eliminating homelessness or confronting criminal activity.

Wicked problems, Rittel and Webber defined, have no definitive formulation, no good-or-bad, no victimless opportunity to learn by trial-and-error. Almost all social policy problems are wicked and, by their very nature, are a symptom of another problem, with no right to be wrong and, so, essentially unique. Wicked problems – which present competing demands and messy solutions – are the agenda of public managers.

Interestingly, however, few in the current government’s leadership seem to have had to deal with wicked problems in their previous professional careers. I do wonder about whether the procedural regimes of organisations like CPS or Treasury have equipped our new leaders to deal with the “wickedness” of the world in which we find ourselves.

Maybe acknowledging that we are dancing with wicked problems – whose solutions we cannot determine today - would help. Making clear what is the intended social result in a way that people and voters (many of whom don’t have a clue what the “G7 mission” is) can understand would be a first good step.