What is going on?

In March 2020, while launching a new book, I took part in a BBC radio program, along with

Mervyn King, who'd been the governor of the Bank of England, at the time of the financial crash of 2008.

He, together with economist John Kay, had also brought out a new book called Radical Uncertainty,

decision-making for an unknowable future.

The coronavirus pandemic was just beginning to make itself felt in Britain, and it had the effect of making both of our books relevant in a way that neither of us could have predicted.

Mine is about the precarious balance between the I and the we, individualism versus the common good.

Theirs is about how to make decisions when you can't tell what the future holds.

The modern response to this latter question has been to hone and refine predictive techniques using mathematical modeling.

The trouble is that mathematical models work in a relatively abstract,

delimited, quantifiable world and can't deal with the messy, unpredictable character of reality.

They don't and can't consider what Donald Rumsfeld called the unknown unknowns, and what Nicholas Taleb called black swans,

things that no one expected but that changed the environment. We live in a world of radical uncertainty.

Accordingly, they propose a different approach.

In any critical situation, they say, the key question to ask is what is happening?

They quote Richard Rumelt, a great deal of strategy work is trying to figure out what's going on,

not just deciding what to do, but the more fundamental problem of comprehending

the situation. Narrative plays a major role in making good decisions in an uncertain world.

We need to ask of what story is this a part. Neither Ramelt nor King and Kay K. Quote Amy Choir, but her book, Political Tribes,

is a classic account of failing to understand the situation. Chapter by chapter, she documents

American foreign policy disasters from Vietnam to Iraq

because policymakers didn't comprehend tribal societies.

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