Situations and problems
I have been thinking and reading about systems recently, reviving an old preoccupation, and came across Denis Loveridge‘s book Foresight: The Art and Science of Anticipating the Future. A lot of what Loveridge covers in the book is relevant to questions that arise in relation to deliberative dialogue: the nature of expertise, the policy-making process, scenario planning, the roles of reason and intuition, the value and limitations of models and more. What I found particularly interesting is his insistence on referring to situations and not to problems. The latter, he says, invite the promise of solutions. They’re essentially logical in structure, reductive and can be viewed in their totality. The problem solver is outside the problem they are trying to solve (or at least, thinks they are). Problems are computational: I used to solve formal logic problems at university and I’ve been solving problems recently, trying to style this website.
Situations, Loveridge says, are “never ‘done with’…but simply change their context and content after every intervention” (p19). You’re always in a situation and its complexities are irreducible to a set of discrete and solvable problems that you can map from the outside. The boundaries of a situation are uncertain, dynamic and open to debate: determining them is a practical task, and involves art and pragmatism as well as science, calling for negotiation, compromise and dialogue.
Loveridge puts the idea of the situation to play in his discussion of the interaction between Science and Society and the interactions between sciences and societies, referring to Weinberg’s notion of trans-science and issues “that hang on the answers to questions that can be asked of science and yet cannot be answered by science” (p20).
This is where dialogue comes in, such as that supported in the UK, by Sciencewise. Public dialogues have been held on topics ranging from the use of drones to the principles which should guide publicly funded research bodies when working with industry to generic design assessment (GDA) for new nuclear. I’ve run a fair few myself, on topics ranging from drugs, to stratified medicine, mitochondrial DNA, bovine TB, global food security and nanotechnologies.
The topics addressed in public dialogue are often classed as “wicked problems”, such as those discussed by Josephine Suherman-Bailey, in a blog for Involve. Josephine describes the value of public dialogue and open policy-making as elements in tackling these wicked problems. She talks of them in much the same way that Loveridge talks of situations. Situations cannot be described from a single policy perspective, and nor indeed by policy-makers and “experts” alone. Wicked problems – situations – are non-mechanistic systems, as Involve also describe, in Room for a View, making forecasting and prediction difficult if not impossible.
In many dialogues, we tend to bring in “the public” as a discrete sample, expose them briefly to “experts”, including policy makers and then leave. The people we talk to in their guise as “the public” are not part of the process by which we determine the boundaries of a dialogue nor part of deciding how what we’ve learned from them translates into policy, how it is weighed against other inputs or what underlying values might be betrayed if input from the public is tweaked to make it more policy-friendly or more in line with views from other interested parties.
Publics participating in dialogue are given a pre-determined perspective on the situations on which they are asked to deliberate. But what is the pre-determined perspective on the situation we are in now?
Deliberate Thinking 
