Month: April 2010

When We Just Don’t Know

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I have often wondered why Forest Service scientists and managers talk about risk and uncertainty, yet don’t wander into the territory of “novelty, surprise, and ignorance.” My studies in decision-making and economics inform me that risk and uncertainty are the domains of games where probability distributions are well-known. Another realm, the realm of novelty, surprise, and ignorance is where many business and organizational management decisions live. That is why I’m often railing about “wicked problems”, and about how to make sense of the organizational, environmental, and social contexts we dwell in. Today I want to explore the wilds of “organizational ignorance.” In short, I want to take a look at what to do when we just don’t know.

To make my case, I want to examine a little article that I found a few years ago on the subject, titled Managing Organizational Ignorance, by Michael Zack. The only time I mentioned it before on internet chatter, best I can tell, was when the Forest Service was trying to wed Planning with Environmental Management Systems. (my Forest Service EMS/Planning blog chronicles are here). Here is what I said:

[A]s we continue on this EMS journey maybe we ought to spend more time exploring novelty, surprise and ignorance. Study adaptive management, and read in detail books like Panarchy, Supply Side Sustainability, Compass and Gyroscope, Discordant Harmonies, and more. And don’t forget to wander over and read Michael Zack’s Managing Organizational Ignorance—either right now, or later after you’ve worked yourself into a frenzy over EMS and come up short.

Zack begins with one of my favorite quotes, from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, “Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?” [Note: Postman’s book ought to be required reading for everyone in the U.S.—to better understand our current plight w/r/t ignorance]

Zack builds his thesis around four knowledge-processing problems, each describing a unique form of “organizational ignorance”:

  • Uncertainty: not having enough information;
  • Complexity: having to process more information than you can manage or understand;
  • Ambiguity: not having a conceptual framework for interpreting information;
  • Equivocality: having several competing or contradictory conceptual frameworks.

Each problem describes a particular form of organizational ignorance, calling for a particular knowledge-processing capability. Each in some way also represents a fundamental organizational or strategic management problem. Taken together they define the range of knowledge processing capabilities an organization must have to manage its ignorance effectively. These four knowledge problems can be categorized along two axes: 1) the nature of the knowledge being processed, and 2) whether the solution is to acquire more knowledge or to place restrictions on what you have.

Here is Zack’s table, summarizing the relationship between the knowledge problems and information processing (gathering, restricting, analyzing, etc.):

Zack sums up with:

The four knowledge-problems framework provides a powerful lens for viewing information processing, communication, and knowledge management in organizations. It suggests several prescriptions and conclusions.

  • Organizations must be open to novelty and anomaly. Only by acknowledging its ignorance can an organization put itself on the road to learning. Organizations must recognize and accept that there are events that may be difficult to explain because no one understands them well enough. …
  • Knowledge management today focuses primarily on solving problems of complexity and uncertainty. It aims to share and exploit what is known within well-defined circumstances and contexts, and is dominated by information technology. Expert systems apply codifiable but highly complex sets of rules; best practice databases attempt to share less structured but well-documented expertise; point of sale systems attempt to provide rapid feedback for managing market uncertainty, while e-mail and discussion databases do the same for internal uncertainty. Much less effort has been spent worrying about the ambiguous and equivocal situations resulting from more profound forms of organizational ignorance. To truly manage knowledge and expertise, however, organizations must make sure that their members work toward building a shared fundamental understanding of the situations and problems they face. Meetings and teams, as well as informal opportunities for engaging in sense-making conversations that raise good questions, challenge the status quo, and directly deal with ambiguity and equivocality are all essential. Solving convergent, well-defined problems requires having a shared understanding in place first. It is therefore critical for organizations to be aware of and to solve problems of ambiguity and equivocality before diving into the more structured problems of uncertainty and complexity.
  • Information technology can play an important role in managing information and knowledge, when it is appropriately applied. This requires diagnosing the nature of the knowledge problem beings solved. Information technology makes sense in cases of uncertainty and complexity, but much less so for dealing with ambiguity and equivocality
  • Organizations need to go beyond their own boundaries to find the knowledge they need to help them make sense of the world. Where the organization is relatively ignorant…, it should include [constituents] in the sense-making process. In doing so, the organization will also develop a shared understanding and basis for ongoing communication with its [constituents]. As ambiguity and equivocality give way to uncertainty and complexity, the organization can more easily migrate to more structured technologies to communicate and coordinate with its external partners. … Organizations may use information technology to exchange data and information, but they will need to use social interaction to exchange knowledge in building a shared understanding about their commercial relationships.
  • Senior executives and managers must interact freely with those at lower levels of the organization in sensemaking and problem-solving processes to discover what the organization as a whole truly knows. It is not enough for managers merely to catalog organizational knowledge by creating a “knowledge map.” Rather, they must sense the organization’s knowledge and ignorance by engaging all organizational levels in the process of resolving the four knowledge problems.
  • Like managing knowledge, managing organizational ignorance requires an appropriate culture. In general, the organization must create an environment in which it is acceptable to publicly admit that one does not know something. Multinational organizations I have observed find this to be particularly problematic in certain national cultures. Managing complexity requires a culture in which it is acceptable to identify and support experts and seek their advice. Resolving uncertainty requires a culture supportive of open, clear and extensive cross-boundary communication, and a willingness and ability to bridge various languages (both professional and national) in use across the organization. Resolving ambiguity requires the ability to confess ignorance and confusion. Managing equivocality requires an environment in which it is acceptable to disagree about interpretations and which accepts diversity of views as well as useful and productive consensus.
  • Each of the four knowledge problems suggests a different set of processes, roles, information technologies, and organizational structures for their resolution. … Often … problems are intertwined. [An organization] must be flexible enough to modify itself dynamically to deal with the knowledge problem at hand. …
  • Even the non-routine or unpredictable aspects of the four problems can be managed, or at least anticipated, in a routine fashion. Where ambiguity or equivocality routinely arises, organizations should create standing mechanisms to address them. Provisions must be made for face-to-face conversations to occur among those most relevant to resolving ambiguity or equivocality. Those responsible for executing the resulting interpretations must also be involved so that those interpretations can be meaningfully communicated. Uncertainty can be routinely handled by anticipatory mechanisms for exchanging information; complexity can be handled by anticipatory mechanisms for locating knowledge.
  • The four problems suggest a framework for managing organizational learning. Ambiguous and equivocal problems often represent non-routine events about which the organization lacks sufficient knowledge. The process of resolving ambiguity and equivocality, however, is the stuff of which organizational learning is made. Ambiguous and equivocal events, if encountered enough times, eventually become familiar enough to be migrated to more routine processes. Organizations must have the ability to evaluate events to determine if they are interpretable or not, route them to the appropriate resolution process, and eventually migrate those that become familiar to routine processes, thereby reserving the organization’s capacity to continually handle novelty and confusion. [Emphasis (bold) added by Iverson]

Is the Forest Service ready to deal with Zack’s four knowledge-processing problems? Do they help make better sense of “ignorance problems” than traditional rhetoric of “risk and uncertainty”? Have Forest Service managers/scientists/staffers already been dealing with these problems albeit in different frames? In short, what do you think?

K.I.S.S. in Rule Form, Part 8

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The proposed K.I.S.S. rules are based on the premise that the Forest Service is revising forest plans, not promulgating new plans from scratch. This premise implies a rebuttable presumption that the existing plan’s provisions are satisfactory. NFMA supports this approach to plan revision.

For example, NFMA requires the Forest Service review timberland suitability decisions “at least every 10 years” and “return lands to timber production” when the Forest Service finds that “conditions have changed.” Thus, only if “conditions have changed” does the FS review its previously-made timberland suitability decisions. This mandate appears best met by adding to K.I.S.S.’s “new information or changed circumstances” assessment a new provision, as follows (addition is in italics):

36 CFR 219.3: Assessment of New Information and Changed Circumstances

(a) The revision shall assess (the “assessment”) new information and changed circumstances and conditions in the unit that are relevant to the decisions made in the land management plan. If the new information or changed circumstances and conditions warrant amendments to the land management plan, the land management plan amendments shall be assessed as a part of the vegetation management and timber harvest program’s NEPA document. If the land management plan amendments, singly or in combination with the vegetation management and timber harvest program, require an environmental impact statement pursuant to Section 102(2)(C) of the National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”), 42 U.S.C. § 4321 et seq., an environmental impact statement shall be prepared.

(b) The assessment shall determine whether new information or changed circumstances warrant a review of lands the Forest Service has classified as suitable or unsuitable for timber production. The review shall focus on, but is not limited to, lands proposed for timber harvest in the plan revision’s vegetation management and timber harvest program.

Religion and Public Land Zoning?- Let’s Not Go There

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Here is  an interesting story in the LA Times today about a movement to decide the right use for public lands as celebrated in a religious service.  Now, my personal opinion is that mixing religion and politics has presented more problems than it has helped.  Theoretically it should help, because religions are about goodness, but in the real world,  it sometimes has hurt because some beliefs and ideologies can make people more intractable and less willing to compromise.

Some time ago, I was invited to give a talk at a Festschrift for my adviser for my post-doctoral work, Dr. Gene Namkoong, who was then teaching at UBC (University of British Columbia). I was in a group of speakers with a medical ethicist.  He said that while people have varying strongly held moral principles, that when specific cases in the hospital occur,  people with differing principles often agree on the right thing to do.

Reflecting back on our week of  the Science Forum and the National Roundtable, and the role of collaboration, one of the tensions was the role of local collaboration compared to the need for national groups to be involved in discussions.  This discussion is likely to carry throughout the development of the Rule.   Where is the right balance between pragmatism, compromise, and ideology? And who decides what is the right balance?

As for me, my blogdom spiritual adviser is Francis of Assisi, who sought to understand more than to be understood, to bring hope where there is despair, and to seek peace where there is conflict.

First National Roundtable is Completed

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The first of three National Roundtable meetings on the planning rulemaking process ended today with a short closeout.  The full notes of the two-day meeting will be posted on the Forest Service planning rule website by the meeting facilitator, the Meridian Institute.  The majority of the attendance at the meeting were representatives from interest groups and Forest Service employees.  An unofficial count of meeting participants included 24 Washington Office Forest Service or USDA employees and 8 regional Forest Service employees; 3 retired employees; 20 representatives from wilderness, wildlife, or environmental coalitions; 5 timber or woodland owner representatives; 2 motorized recreation representatives and 4 aircraft association representatives; 2 mining representatives; 2 representatives from other Federal agencies; 3 representatives from community groups; 2 representatives from States; 1 academia member; and 15 consultants.

During the closeout, participants were invited to step forward and give closing thoughts about important takeaway messages and key questions to keep on the agenda as the series of roundtable meeting continue.  These include:

  • We need to believe that we can do this in a way that captures the essence of the challenge, but brings elegance and simplicity.
  • However, this will be challenging.  The idea of simplicity is alluring, but for instance when you edit a paper from 25 to 6 pages, that’s more challenging than keeping the paper long.
  • Remember the Precautionary Principle.  This is first set of plans to deal with climate change. 
  • We need a clear definition of terms in the rule.
  • The word collaboration means to collaborate.  These roundtables are a series of ongoing dialogue and discussions, but we don’t have time here.  This is a robust public outreach, left hand side of NEPA triangle, which is good, but we probably need to call this what it is, and be careful in using the word collaboration.
  • The Rule should ask the right questions about ecosystems and describe how to do the planning process.
  • There is a need for humility and recognition of how short our current understanding will last, which calls for simplicity in the rule. 
  • Climate change is a difficult issue to struggle with, and the questions will continue to evolve. 
  • We need to stress the collaborative part of planning.  The all lands approach demands a collaborative approach.  This is not just for the development of the plan, but this is ongoing and includes a large array of people. This is especially important in urban interface areas where Forests are fragmented.
  • A key question going forward is the issue of adaptive governance, and how the regulations can help enable that and make that work.  The all lands approach is about collaboration at that level.  Can we have a crosswalk between climate change and adaptive governance?
  • It’s important to understand flexibility within the larger framework of accountability.  We need flexibility without giving Forest Supervisors carte blanche.
  • We need to address long standing institutional barriers to adaptive management and monitoring.
  • There is a lack of clarity about where the Forest Service is going, and there is some cloudiness and confusion. The planning rule can help clarify what the Forest Service is about.  Forests today are more valuable to society than 60 years ago. 
  • Elevate recreation as a substantive topic of the rule.  Consider recreation in the realm of active management.  Make the rule broad and flexible, but keep the majority of decisions local, and keep it defensible so it’s not bogged down in litigation.
  • Remember the context of the current 6th great extinction of species.  It’s important to maintain ecosystems in response to this global crisis.
  • Think about ways to improve species management, such as the presence/absence paradigm mentioned in the science forum.
  • Think about the public use of lands and effects on ecosystems.

More information on the meeting will be posted on the Forest Service planning rule website and blog.

Talking Across the Concrete- Abstract Divide

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Words are essential to communication, whether in blogdom or in person.  One  reason it’s important to discuss topics with others is that you can find out through discussion that words can  mean different things to different people.  You might be in agreement about concepts and simply word them differently.  

 I am a more literal and concrete kind of person, and many people in planning are more visionary- a kind of Myers-Briggs sensing compared to intuitive kind of thing.

Concrete and Abstract

  • A concrete word or image is specific and sensual: it evokes a material reality.
  • An abstract word or image is general, and communicates an idea; it expresses a connection that is mental rather than sensuous, sometimes one that is not immediately obvious.

 

First, Martin and I have always disagreed about the need for “thresholds” in NEPA documents, and specifically for forest plans which incorporate adaptive management. I have always thought that that was too vague, and there are too many possibilities with no particular reason for choosing a target level of a given thing.

 But as we were talking today in our small groups at the Roundtable, we were talking about area occupied by species and talking about establishing a target of acres of habitat occupied (collaboratively) – and if the species would go below that – a chosen number of those acres based on monitoring- , the Rule could require the collaborative group to get back together, and figure out some different approach to species protection as  an amendment. To me, the inhabited acres would be called a target and lower limits, lower limits. But looking back on it,  I think I might, by lower limit,  mean the same thing as a threshold. But without going through an example with Martin, I didn’t get it. Assuming that is what he meant. But he can weigh in here.

Second, the idea of ecological sustainability being pre-eminent never appealed to me. Strictly pragmatically, I thought we can’t always make the most protective decisions (like fencing all the people out of the Angeles National Forest if they have too many environmental impacts). But talking to Professor Wilkinson, he meant it in a visionary, righ-brained way, as a goal which people could figure out through collaborative efforts and reinvent their interpretation through time and with learning. My original thought was “ecological sustainability” was an analytical idea, and the problem was that you could do all kinds of analyses of everything and never prove something was sustainable.

Something like forest planning, and planning rules involve people from a wide array of backgrounds with different meanings for the same words. That is why it is so important to have conversations with others across different views,  including the concrete/abstract divide.

K.I.S.S. in Rule Form, Part 7

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K.I.S.S. in Rule Form, Part 7

Keeping-it-simple-sweet means omitting matters from the NFMA rules that are satisfactorily covered by statute. For example, a section of NFMA (paragraph i) separate from the planning rule sections (paragraphs g and h) requires that permits (e.g., special-use permits) and contracts (e.g., stewardship, sale of timber) “for the use and occupancy” of the national forests be consistent with the plan.

There is no need to repeat this requirement in the planning rules themselves. The law speaks for itself. Forest Service employees can read the law. And the courts have routinely enforced paragraph (i) without reference to the identical 1982 NFMA rule. So I’ve deleted item 7 (“Ensure that, subject to valid existing rights, all outstanding and future permits, contracts, cooperative agreements, and other instruments for occupancy and use of affected lands are consistent with the revised plan”) from the K.I.S.S. purpose and principles post.

K.I.S.S. in Rule Form, Part 6

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No NFMA provision has transformed (and bedeviled) national forest management more than the law’s mandate to “provide for diversity of plant and animal communities based on the suitability and capability of the specific land area.” 16 U.S.C. § 1604(g)(3)(B). The consensus view of the federal courts (citations upon request) is that NFMA’s diversity language is a substantive limit on the Forest Service’s discretion – procedural analysis and models alone are insufficient to meet the law.

In its 1982 (and original 1979) rules, the Forest Service met the diversity mandate by requiring that plans ensure the viability of animal species, which is accomplished by identifying and protecting management indicator species. This approach to meeting the diversity requirement was never challenged in court. Those courts that have commented upon the viability/management indicator species approach have done so favorably. Regulatory efforts to eliminate the viability/MIS rule were defeated in 1982 (by Congressional pressure) and in 2000, 2005, and 2008 (in the courts).

It is with this history in mind that I suggest the following diversity rule language. This provision relies upon the 1979/1982 rules, but with fewer words and more discretion in the methodologies individual national forests can use to meet the law’s substantive mandate.

36 CFR 219.7: Plant and Animal Community Diversity

(a) Plan revisions and the vegetation management and timber harvest program shall ensure habitat sufficient to support viable populations of existing native and desired non-native species in the planning area. Methodologies for assessing and ensuring species viability shall consider and be appropriate to 1) the scope and scale of the plan revision and program decisions made; 2) the ecology of the plan area; and, 3) the biology of the species.

(b) Plan revisions and the vegetation management and timber harvest program shall, to the degree practicable, preserve the diversity of tree species similar to that existing in the plan region.