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http://www. tandfonline. com/loi/ctas20 Foresight in an unpredictable world Ilkka Tuomi a a Meaning Processing Ltd.
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8 september 2012,735 751 Foresight in an unpredictable world Ilkka Tuomi*Meaning Processing Ltd. Merenneidontie 24 D, 02320 Espoo, Finland Unpredictability has two main sources:
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http://www. tandfonline. com Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:52 03 december 2014 736 I. Tuomi are active generators of novelty
At least since the 1970s it has been understood well that even when the world unfolds in a completely deterministic fashion under well-known natural laws,
Haken 1981. For all that we know, physical nature can be indeterminate. Social scientists (Goffman 1959;
Giddens 1984; Luhmann 1990; Beck, Giddens, and Lash 1994) have emphasised further the point that reflexivity in thought
and action creates a delicate balance between predictability and unpredictability in social systems and interactions. As soon as we have an explicit theory of human or social behaviour,
it influences the way we think and live, thus, in general, making the theory obsolete and prediction futile.
which in competitive markets remains the only source of profits. 1 Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:52 03 december 2014 Foresight in an unpredictable world 737 Epistemic uncertainty Integrating the numerous extant typologies
2003) distinguished two sources of uncertainty. Epistemic uncertainty, according to these authors, is uncertainty due to the imperfection of our knowledge,
Following van Asselt and Rotmans (2002), they characterised variability uncertainty as‘ontological uncertainty'.'2 The ontological uncertainty of van Asselt and Rotmans and Walker et al. is about uncertainty of attributes associated with given objects.
what used to be a beast can one day become cattle. The nature of the beast Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:52 03 december 2014 738
I. Tuomi depends on our relation with it. If we run as fast as we can
For example, the idea that radical innovations emerge as‘hopeful monstrosities'that only gradually realise their true promise (Tushman and Anderson 1986;
Mokyr 1990, chap. 11; Bower and Christensen 1995) assumes that we know the dimensions on which we will measure their‘beastliness'at the point of their emergence.
In practice, such‘ugly ducklings'of evolution can be defined as ugly ducklings only retrospectively, when we already know that they are not (Tuomi 2002;
Taleb 2007. In contrast to this biblical ontological model, below we adopt a model of constant creation that relies on a different ontology.
In this model, innovation occurs when social practice changes. The history of innovations and technical change shows that‘heroic innovators'are located often in the downstream.
when a potential user group finds a meaningful way to integrate latent innovative opportunities in the current social practice (Tuomi 2002).
In models that emphasise the role of social practices and social interaction as the key loci of innovation (Engel 1997;
Brown and Duguid 2000; Tuomi 2002; Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003), downstream innovators also include creative members of communities of practice.
For example, in the multifocal model of Tuomi (2002), new technical functionalities and propensities are thrown in effect from the‘upstream'to a‘downstream'field of interacting social practices,
and new user groups and new uses mutually construct each other. Innovation and social learning in the context of the local downstream systems of meaning then become key drivers for the evolution of technology.
This view allows for the fact that some innovations are more radical and revolutionary than others.
and their realisation requires power struggles (Hughes 1983; Callon, Law, and Rip 1986; Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1987;
Latour 1996) as well as new world views, social arrangements, and systems of categorisation (Schon 1963; Fleck 1979;
Dosi 1982; Perez 1985; Garud and Rappa 1994; Bowker and Star 1999; Geels 2005. It is,
however, impossible to categorise a particular innovation based on the characteristics of a technical artefact before it is used.
The proper unit of analysis of innovation is thus‘innovation-in use'.'The same artefact Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:52 03 december 2014 Foresight in an unpredictable world 739 can be used for many different purposes in many different social practices, each with its own developmental trajectories.
This leads to a relational epistemology that is structurally different from the traditional objectivistic and empiristic models of epistemology.
It also shifts the locus of innovation from the‘upstream'to the‘downstream'.'A practical consequence of this relocation of locus of innovation to the downstream is that human upstream inventors rarely know,
or can know, what their inventions will be. The dominant constraints and resources for innovation are often far beyond the reach
and control of heroic upstream creators. Innovations become real in the context of use, and this requires stocks of knowledge
and systems of meaning that are located in communities of users and social practice. The true nature of the beast is revealed only when someone domesticates it.
Bell 1876) As Fischer (1992) has documented in detail, for many decades after the telephone was invented, itwas marketed mainly for business use.
This social use of the telephone was invented basically by housewives in the USA, in particular, by those in the Midwest, around the first decade of the twentieth century.
Henri Bergson explored this question in great depth over a century ago. In Creative Evolution, he argued that both mechanistic and teleological approaches fail to explain novelty.
According to Bergson (1983),‘they say the same thing in their respective languages, because they respond to the same need'(45).
Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:52 03 december 2014 740 I. Tuomi In Bergson's analysis,
stories of heroic innovators emerge telling howsms functionalitywas devised by clever engineers in the GSM standardisation groups in the mid-1980s.3 Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:52 03 december 2014 Foresight in an unpredictable
In practice, we create imaginations (Rubin 1998; Miller 2007) and expectations (Borup et al. 2006) that provide us temporary stepping stones on the way ahead.
We may illustrate the expansionary character of this process using alpinism as a metaphor. When a mountaineer climbs a mountain face, at each hold,
At the Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:52 03 december 2014 742 I. Tuomi level of operations, progress, in turn,
Activities, thus, can be associated with an underlyyin thought community (Fleck 1979), community of practice (Brownand Duguid 1991;
Lave and Wenger 1991), and community of practitioners (Schön 1983; Constant 1987) and with specialised systems of knowledge and meaning (Polanyi 1998;
Knorr Cetina 1999. In practice, the upward movement of most mountaineers does not occur in an inert external environment.
The environment is rarely a static result of sedimentation, and sometimes mountains feel like anthills under construction.
As many authors (Haldane 1931; Whitehead 1978; Maturana andvarela 1980; Lewontin 1983; Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991;
Nishida 2012) have emphasissed the environment subject distinction fails to account for the mutual co-determination
and co-evolution of living beings and their environments. Yet, the movement towards future occurs in a context that can often be taken to be static in relation to the time scale of present action.
In creative evolution, at each horizon of action, we rely on a temporary blueprint of the world.
This is another reason for why we need to split the élan into multiple parallel processes that occur in different time scales.
In their original depiction of natural drift, Maturana and Varela (1988, chap. 5) described the process of evolution using a metaphor of water drops rolling down from the top of a mountain.
the speculative profit opportunities of Knight or the idiosyncratic individual interests of Hayek and the more collective tacit understandings of progress highlighted by Polanyi (Mirowski 1998;
Jacobs 2000. In practice, simple tinkering may also be important. Schön (1987,31) illustrated such a process by recounting Edmund Carpenter's description of the Eskimo sculptor patiently carving a reindeer bone,
examining the gradually emerging shape and finally exclaiming‘Ah, seal!'.'Anticipation under ontological uncertainty Ontological expansion makes anticipation a challenging task.
According to Rosen (1985), anticipatory systems are systems that contain predictive models, allowing future to have an impact on the present:
The stimulus of my action Is downloaded not just by University of Bucharest at 04:52 03 december 2014 Foresight in an unpredictable world 743 the sight of the bear,
and Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:52 03 december 2014 744 I. Tuomi Figure 1. Modelling relation according to Rosen. mathematical models that make predictive statements particularly efficient and allow,
As Bergson (1988) pointed out abstraction itself relies on memory. This means that both natural systems and their predictive models are necessarily to a large extent retrospective.
Ontological Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:52 03 december 2014 Foresight in an unpredictable world 745 Figure 2. Modelling in the context of the phenomenological veil. unpredictability,
In future-oriented research, the nature and implications of‘weak signals'have been debated actively during the last few years (Mendonça et al. 2004;
Rossel 2011; Holopainen and Toivonen 2012. We can use the above analysis to gain some novel insights into this debate.
The Bergsonian story about the emergence of the biological eye and vision is structured in three acts.
Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:52 03 december 2014 746 I. Tuomi A similar story underlies the GSM short messaging example Engineers first define a standard that allows short messages to be delivered using the GSM control channel.
where the‘objects'of the world provide the ultimate foundation for analysis (Hiltunen 2008). Here Nishida's (1987) analysis of the problems of objectificcation underlying the more recent work of Shimitzu and Nonaka (Nonaka, Toyama,
and Hirata 2008), still represents the state of the art. Although ontological expansion makes future an unpredictable place,
this does not mean that we cannot say anything interesting about the future. It may be impossible to have facts
so that we are better able to live in an unpredictable world (Miller 2007). In strategic decision-making, it is possible that the traditionalansoffian analysis of weak signals mainly produces fictional certainty that leads to managerial overconfidence and blindness to true novelty and uncertainties.
and that they are able to predict the future also now (Bukszar 1999). A potential approach to reduce such misplaced overconfidence is to explicate both the underlying Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:52 03 december 2014 Foresight in an unpredictable world 747 assumptions (Rossel 2009)
and the narrative structures (Wright 2005) that are used to make sense of the issue at hand. As decision-making tends to be inherently a political process,
it is believed often that conflict can be reduced by decision processes that emphasise data and facts. The above discussion indicates that such approaches have limited only potential in future-oriented analysis.
and standardised interpretations do not exist (Regnér 2003). Instead of emphasising the‘objective'in future-oriented analysis, decision processes and future-oriented analysis therefore should methodologically emphasise domains that are labelled conventionally‘subjective'.
Ogilvy (2011) has argued recently that scenario developers and decision-makers have to learn to maintain an agnostic attitude
as the data are collected on categories that used to be important in the industrial economies and value production models of the twentieth century.
Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:52 03 december 2014 748 I. Tuomi In general facts exist only for natural systems that have associated measurement instruments and established encodings and decodings between the natural system and its formal model.
For example, ageing may become a‘grand challenge 'when we assume an industrial age model of factory-based production, industrial era life patterns and health services,
For a critical historical review of key contributions, see Mirowski (2009. 2. Ontological uncertainty has been defined in several different ways by different authors.
For example, Lane and Max-field (2004) distinguished between truth uncertainty, semantic uncertainty, and ontological uncertainty.
and access to the telex network has already been discussed in the first GSM plenary meeting in Stockholm in 1982 (CEPT-CCH-GSM 1982).
however, lists mobile-to-mobile SMS as an‘additional service'(CEPT/GSM 1985). In recent years, both Friedhelm Hillebrand and Matti Makkonen have been described as the‘inventors'of SMS (Wallén 2008;
Milian 2009. In its present form, SMS emerged only after 1992 when Nokia introduced the first SMS-capable phone. 4. Leont'ev's activity theory was based on Vygotsky's theories on cultural historical development (Luria and Vygotsky 1992).
A similar three-level structure emerges when we analyse the communicative meaning of sentences. We cannot derive the communicative meaning of a sentence by adding up word definitions,
and we cannot define the meaning Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:52 03 december 2014 Foresight in an unpredictable world 749 of a word by adding up letters.
The letters are used to‘implement'the words, and words are used to say things; the meaning of a sentence,
however, cannot be reduced to its constitutive letters. The meaning of activity, similarly, cannot be deduced from observed acts. 5. Cf.
Louie (2010), Poli (2010), and other articles in the same special issue of foresight on anticipatory systems.
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28 aug 2012. To cite this article: Denis Loveridge & Ozcan Saritas (2012) Ignorance and uncertainty:
influences on future-oriented technology analysis, Technology analysis & Strategic management, 24:8, 753-767, DOI: 10.1080/09537325.2012.715477 To link to this article:
8 september 2012,753 767 Ignorance and uncertainty: influences on future-oriented technology analysis Denis Loveridge*and Ozcan Saritas Manchester Institute of Innovation research, Manchester Business school, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK Future-oriented technology analysis (FTA) deals in phenomenological ignorance
Staton (2006) drew out the poverty of foresight if Derrida's claim that foresight does not say much about the future is accepted.
denis. loveridge@mbs. ac. uk ISSN 0953-7325 print/ISSN 1465-3990 online 2012 Taylor & francis http://dx. doi. org/10.1080
/09537325.2012.715477 http://www. tandfonline. com Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:56 03 december 2014 754 D. Loveridge
and sometimes interlocking, role of ignorance (Roberts and Armitage 2008; Roberts 2012) and uncertainty in underpinning quantitative and qualitative thought in FTA.
There is an evident paradox in characterising, if indeed that has any meaning, the‘future, 'something that does not exist even conceptually or perceptually,
as much is shrouded in various forms of ignorance, especially the unknown unknowns1 form (Rumsfeld 2002). The paper sets out to pay much attention to the situations that may confront FTA practitioners,
typified in Section 2, in the future, which emphasises the need for extensive learning: this is expanded in Section 3. Section 4 introduces some important issues that are referred to infrequently in FTA,
The co-joining of quantitative and qualitative information is exemplified by the T ohoku earthquake and tsunami on 11 march 2011 north east of Japan.
an extreme case of the combination of an Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:56 03 december 2014 Ignorance and uncertainty 755 unusually severe earthquake and tsunami,
what Taleb (2007) has called picturesquely a Black swan event as Richter scale 9 earthquakes were known events, though there had been only four more powerful ones in human history.
which the business has either strong or weak interdependencies or interlocking arrangements of a quite different character (Cagnin and Loveridge 2012).
Retracing ones steps to Derrida's criticism, real foresight (Loveridge 2001), perhaps more so than its institutional practice, can have much to say about the future recognising that ultimately the future is a‘black hole'.
a matter of importance to satellite communication, following the 2011 earthquake. No doubt it Will be downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:56 03 december 2014 756 D. Loveridge
and O. Saritas argued that this is not what FTA is about, but when there is talk of‘managing the Earth'for this or that‘grand challenge'(all of
as described by Staton (2006), creates the impression that the umbrella is for immediate protection from inclement situations rather than trying to see beyond them into‘what comes next'.
All this may or may not involve formal processes for bringing together quantitative and qualitative information that goes beyond the Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:56 03 december 2014 Ignorance and uncertainty 757 conventional‘synthesis report'.
'The latter may, or may not, recognise the nature of the expertise and uncertainties involved revealed in the next section. 4. FTA and subjective behaviour:
methodological issues and metaphors FTA assumes that its processes have an innate capability to deal with dynamic situations made up of many interconnected themes, each
Cooke (1991), Lipinski and Loveridge (1982) and Amara and Lipinski (1983) have described all similar processes for elicitiin expert (subjective opinion from either individuals or small groups.
the individual probability distributions can be joined (there are technical difficulties) using the procedure set out by Lipinski and Loveridge (1982).
while occurring over decades or centuries, bringing life changing events where an appreciation of existence alone will bring the situation into a liveable perspective.
Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:56 03 december 2014 758 D. Loveridge and O. Saritas Throughout FTA,
Casti (2010) is only the most recent person to question the frequent assumption that science
How often the nature of measurements is dissected according to the NUSAP2 system (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1990),
1989) developed the two-dimensional framework shown in Figure 1. Meredith's notions can help FTA practitioners'position methods to guide their role and use.
and conversely of ignorance, on the Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:56 03 december 2014 Ignorance
and to get past their dichotomy by placing knowledge in a broader context of its contribution to social evolution Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:56 03 december 2014 760 D. Loveridge
's matrix is a subset of a much larger set (Popper 2008. Consequently, it enables judgements to be made on the mix of methods to be used.
these judgements place less Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:56 03 december 2014 Ignorance and uncertainty 761 emphasis on philosophical matters and more on practical ones of concern in FTA,
that may include prioritising important areas of intervention, though prioritisation is underdeveloped an art. The next section illustrates how knowledge relevant to FTA can be elicited showing the practical implications of many of the issues raised above. 6. Combining quantitative
and qualitative information an example of elicitation The events involved in the 2011 earthquake north east of Japan illustrate the importance of the STEEPV set and within it,
Figure 2 (Loveridge 2009) illustrates a scheme for undertaking the essential learning processes. Elicitation of opinions and combining them is a central feature in FTA.
though thatwas the more important aspect Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:56 03 december 2014 762 D. Loveridge
and O. Saritas Figure 2. Learning scheme (reproduced from Loveridge (2009) by courtesy of Routledge).
and Loveridge 1982) as it can only be summarised here. In 1977 1978, the Institute for the Future (IFTF) carried out a study of the future of the UK,
'The full outcome of the study remains confidential to this day, but its sponsors (16 major companies and a UK Government department) agreed to publication of the methods used.
Scenario style photographs portrayed the UK at two time slots, 1985 and 1995. Interviews are used so often to obtain opinion that the procedure is regarded as mundane,
this raised the subsidiary question of their individual levels Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:56 03 december 2014 Ignorance
and Loveridge (1982)) that permitted an understanding of their level of expertise. The headings of the self-assessment criteria were:(
The outcome of self-ranking can provide weighting factors for each‘expert'(Amara and Lipinski 1983.
Verbal equivalents to different probability levels (Alpert and Raiffa 1982) were used during this part of the elicitation to seed the interviewee's thinking processes.
Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:56 03 december 2014 764 D. Loveridge and O. Saritas 7. Future influences on FTA All the foregoing has lain within the conventional boundaries of FTA
and Ravetz 1990)) to establish its veracity. These are‘straightforward'matters but do they remain so in the face of the political and social worlds'demands for immediacy that underlie the mode of living of modern society?
In 1983, Loveridge was only the then latest person to raise questions along the following lines:‘
of which far exceed those of the 1960s or 1970s. Kurzweil (2005) is only one among many to claim that the‘singularity,
'when computer‘intelligence'or at least computer power, may exceed the capabilities of the human brain,
and acceptance, bringing Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:56 03 december 2014 Ignorance and uncertainty 765 a new social role for computation and computers.
'In a sense, these are a throwback to the 1970's debates about the world problematique but seem now to be seen as a series of silos rather than as a global phenomenon.
The interdependence of the silos of‘grand challenges'adds dimensions that were appreciated in the 1970's
For that appreciation to return the current global circulation climate models (GCM's) may need to be seen as simply a module in a much bigger global model.
and that which cannot be at the time Downloaded by University of Bucharest at 04:56 03 december 2014 766 D. Loveridge
Notes on contributors Denis Loveridge is an Honorary Visiting professor at the Manchester Institute of Innovation research (MIOIR) at the Manchester Business school after 44 years in industry.
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