Anticipating Surprises in the Behavior of Complex Systems

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Anticipating Surprises in the Behavior of Complex
Systems

• John L. Petersen
• The Arlington Institute

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Time of Great Change

• Increasing discoveries
• Increasing capabilities
• Increasing complexity
• Increasing rate of change
• Increasing interdependence

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Do you want to live forever?
Dr. Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey
University of Cambridge
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Current 60 year-olds could live 200 years!
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Peak Oil
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Emergence in complex systems can produce events
which can be quite negative, particularly in this
day and age of biotech, infotech, global
pandemics, and terrorism
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Events Increasing in Scope

• Nuclear power
• Environmental change

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Big Question How do we anticipate these futures?
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We cant predict the future, but we can prepare
for it Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine
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Ilya Prigogine

• The future is not given. What is an event? An
  analogy with 'bifurcations', which are studied
  above all in non-equilibrium physics, comes
  immediately to mind. These bifurcations appear at
  special points where the trajectory followed by a
  system subdivides into 'branches'. All branches
  are possible, but only one of them will be taken.
  One does not generally see a single bifurcation
  in general, a succession of them appear. This
  means that even in the fundamental sciences there
  is a temporal, narrative element, and this
  constitutes the End of Certitudes', which is the
  title of my last book.

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Event 1
Future
Event 2
Future
Future
Event 3
Future
Event 4
Actual Future
Event 5
Future
Event 6
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Paradox of the Problem

• The process of the evolution of the future is too
  complex to predict.
• When we arrive at any point in the future, we are
  able to look back and follow a line that shows us
  how events, trends and wild cards converged to
  get us to the particular future.
• In effect the clues and/or dots are there to be
  connected, but their significance is too subtle
  or uncertain for us to comprehend their
  connections.

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Opportunity

• Number of potential significant future states is
  rather less than the total and is therefore
  theoretically tractable
• No known successful effort to systematically
  catalogue a full spectrum possibilities
• Even identifying a handful of unanticipated
  potential events of great significance could be
  very valuable
• New technologies make some of this possible

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. . . but not Shell scenarios
Anticipating surprises seems possible with
SCENARIOS
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Four Worlds
ARISK
BCANDYLAND
Aggregated Competition Fragmented Society
Aggregated Competition Cohesive Society
DDUNGEONS DRAGONS
CQUEST
Fragmented Society Splintered Competition
Cohesive Society Splintered Competition
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Scenarios defined

• Patterns of plausible, potential futures that
  would have significance for a particular
  individual, group, or organization.
• End states, not evolutionary processes

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Alternative Futures
Two Front War
9/11
UNCERTAINTY
Iraq War
Mortgaging the Future
Learning
UNCERTAINTY
The Great Islamic War
No Learning
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Surprising futures are most disconcerting!
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Surprise anticipation

• Driven by 9/11
• SARS
• Tsunamis

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Surprises

• Futures that emerge quickly, without much early
  notice
• Low probability/high impact
• Wild Cards

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Anticipating Wild Cards
RULE 1 If you havent thought about it, you
havent thought about it.
Wild Card Rule Books
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Anticipating Wild Cards
RULE 2 If you dont think about a wild card
before it happens, all of the value of thinking
about it is lost.
Wild Card Rule Books
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Anticipating Wild Cards
RULE 3 Every significant event derives from
precursor events, each of which leaves tracks
Wild Card Rule Books
Corollary There are early indicators for
everything
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Anticipating Wild Cards
RULE 4 Accessing and understanding information
is key
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Anticipating Wild Cards
RULE 5 Extraordinary events will require
extraordinary approaches
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Q What is surprise anticipation?

• A Surprise anticipation is collecting and
  identifying indicators of potential future events
  that would have particularly significant
  implications for the assessor

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Current TIA Components...
Clear Forest
MiTAP
Geo-Spatial and Network Visualization
Themelink

OnTAP
Analyst Notebook
Groovy CIM
Alias-iTAP
Policy/Operations Plane
Nora
Renoir
AIM
Act
Verona
Genoa II
Language Processing
Proximity
Structured Argumentation and Collaboration
Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery Analysis
Groovy TAG
HID
Genisys
Query Resource Allocation
Human and/or Automated Feedback Loop
Distributed Sensor Feeds
Model
Model
Model
Model
Sensor 1

Unstructured Data
Entity Link
Network Group Link
Condition Lng Proc Sort
Entity Extract

Sensor 2

Sensor n
Distributed Databases
Analysis Plane
Structured Data
WAE
EELD
Condition Lng Proc Sort


TIA Reference Model

TIDES/EARS
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Surprise Anticipation

• Determining potential events
• Establishing particular significance
• Collecting information
• Identifying indicators
• Relating indicators to events

Real Event Search / Monitoring
Scenarios
Potential Events
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Human sense making five domains
Complicated
Complex
Sense Analyse Respond
ProbeSenseRespond
SenseCategorise Respond
ActSenseRespond
Chaotic
Simple
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Human Mind and Anomalies

• Humans make sense based on patterns.
• We see the world as a series of observations and
  fill in the gaps with past experiences.
• According to Dr. Gary Klein, human decision
  making is matching a pattern with past
  experience.

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Another Way of Looking at it

• According to Pierce, the mind is a network of
  habits.
• These habits become strong, and established
  patterns/beliefs lead the mind to certain
  expectations.
• Most of time, we anticipate correctly.
• Sometimes, however, novelties anomalies arise.

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Intuition

• People are set up to be capable of endless
  information accumulation and indexing finding
  information and connecting it to the next piece
  of information that's all anyone is doing.

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Counter-espionage
Strategic Technologies
Terrorism
Conventional Threats
Economic Threats
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Weak signals are found most frequently in the
edge of chaos.
Total Randomness
Pure Determinism
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Identifying Weak Signals

• Weak signals oscillate within the edge of chaos.
• By their very nature, weak signals cannot be
  quantified in the way we quantify trends,
  surveys, and hard data.
• Weak signals must be amplified.
• Weak signals cannot be dealt with through
  matrices and/or ranking. Through dialogue and
  conversation, blind spots will be identified.
  After this identification, new perspectives and
  ways of thinking will be exposed and applied.

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The beginning of a new era
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John L. Petersen

• The Arlington Institute
• johnp_at_arlingtoninstitute.org
• www.arlingtoninstitute.org