The Missing Mediums to Solve Our Sense Making Crisis

I am not able to make sense of the complex issues effecting our societies. This is a widespread problem as are the indications that people are increasingly dissatisfied with their democracies²

This is a sense making crisis and this post focuses on the way we're trying to make sense: what mediums³ we're using or misusing.

If we're persistently struggling to make sense of the world and act wisely, we should reflect on how we are making sense, we need to think about how we're thinking. This is difficult because we're not used to thinking about how we think, and it's hard to see what we're doing habitually, and taking for granted. But I suggest that we can't hope to use the same old tools for understanding all of the new types of problems we're facing.

Let's look at some problems & questions that we're succeeding at making sense of...

We regularly successfully follow our maps, cooking recipes and other instructions to do things we previously did not know how to do. Or find out information we can use to make better decisions about what to do.

For these types of question or problems, there are well known and easily accessible mediums⁴ to support us to move from our current location to another, or how to cook some tasty food.

Specifically the medium used might be paper or a digital screen along with some search function or index, and some written text and images.

And those mediums allow us to be successful because they also perform other important roles of review, validation, improvement, and amplification.

Anyone can use and contribute improvements directly back to an open mapping service like OpenStreetMap. Closed proprietary systems like Apple maps have direct feedback mechanisms built in to them. And various sites allow people to comment on and rate their content, be that food recipes or otherwise.

Poor mapping software is generally avoided and denigrated until it becomes usable enough e.g. Silicon Valley, Season 2 Episode 6 - Sorry it's Apple Maps bad.

As are poor recipes, only the good ones are shared positively which results in their prevalence amongst the population increasing. That's what a well functioning market provides: good information about products / services / ideas enables people to choose better ones so that "good outcompetes bad".

If we want to write a poem, or quick reminder, or add up a few numbers, then a pencil and paper are useful mediums.

We could make that medium worse by tying a brick to the pencil.

From Doug Engelbart Institute via Nicky Case; Journal of Design and Science

Or make that pencil and paper better by specialising it. For the poem we could write it on a digital device with a spell checker⁵.

Or for adding the numbers we could use a calculator. If there are hundreds of numbers or we need to do complex calculations then a spreadsheet would make things even easier.

If we needed to do complex maths hundreds of times a second to control an aeroplane we're trying to fly then we'd need even more specialised mediums to make sense of, and then control, get feedback and go through repeated rounds of sense making.

We can summarise the successful process of sense making as:

1. We have a question or problem we want to solve.
2. We search for and find⁶ a suggestion for a solution we can use to solve the problem.
3. We try it out and see if it works; also known as test & validation
4. We suggest or contribute back improvements
5. And or we submit a review, or share a successful experience; recommendations which result in amplification or avoidance

In other words these are strong link problems: we don't care so much about errors, noise and bad solutions because we do not encounter them often and that's because we know that the mediums we use and the societal / cultural systems the mediums are embedded in will filter out bad solutions.

The examples above used mediums and systems to help us solve problems that are practically entirely "local" to us. We can generalise them as how we to get from our current position to somewhere else using only the information and resources accessible to us. For the map navigation example that's quite a literally explanation, but it's true for how we find "where we are" in a recipe and how we get from there to each next step until we reach the end result.

But there are other problems which are not yet tractable in the same way. For now let's use two broad categories of questions / problems we'd like to solve:

• Complicate question / problem that is answerable / solvable by an "expert" e.g. "How did the GBP to EUR exchange rate change before and after the 23 June 2016 UK Brexit Referendum?"
• Complex question / problem that will take many different expertise to get increasingly better answers / solutions for: "Why is my energy or food bill so high?", or "How can we drop waiting times for medical condition X?"⁷

These questions are local to us in that we use energy in our home, we are trying to find a job somewhere, we or a loved one are waiting for medical help. But they are not local in the information required to successfully answer them.

Your energy bill is related to billions of other people's energy usage both positively and negatively: if everyone else on the planet used 10% less your bill would likely go down, if they used 100% less your bill would go through the roof: who's going to pay to run a billion $£€ oil & gas rig, refineries, and distribution networks just so you can heat one home with methane gas and provide fuel to drive a single petrol car?

Your waiting time to see a medical expert is dependent on millions of other actors, and not limited to your own country either; for example in the UK 41% of doctors are trained outside of the UK, so the relative economic and cultural incentives to move from another country to the UK coupled with the availability of trained medical staff in that original country will effect your waiting time in the UK.

These are some of the questions our society is struggling with and are often referred to as complex or wicked problems.

If we go through the "successful process" above we'll see that we fail at every step beyond the question⁸:

1. ✅ We have a question or problem we want to solve.
2. ❌ We search for and find a suggestion for a solution: a solution we can use ourselves to solve the problem.
3. ❌ We try it out and see if it works; also known as test & validation
4. ❌ We suggest or contribute back improvements
5. ❌ And or we submit a review, or share a successful experience; recommendations which result in amplification or avoidance

The systems we are dealing with are so large that no single person can effectively direct and control them (despite many empty political promises to the contrary).

Instead we're left with indirect "solutions" such as voting for someone who is promising the solve the problem for us.

Even if we find a solution that seems to make sense from one [expert]([object Object]#note-3), someone else will dispute it with something that seems credible or at least which many other people seem to have found convincing.

It's like as a non-expert I have enough time and skill to pick up a few puzzle pieces and an expert has picked up hundreds, but this is puzzle is a few thousand pieces so of course the experts will seem to disagree with each other.

There are other problems but I'd like to focus on what I see as the core problem and potential solution. How we can both collect all the disparate data and synthesise it into a coherent whole picture - a shared understanding that we can test and refine collectively?

And for that, at the moment, the only medium that I can see which could hold all these disparate puzzle pieces, large data sets, thousands of interwoven dependencies and cause-effect relationships are simulations / digital twins.

This is not new. Simulations / digital twins / serious games are being used elsewhere. But they should be more widely used and when they are I predict that because we will be connected to all the relevant factors we will then actually make sense of complex problems, and do so fast and have fun.

And this will help subvert our existing sense-making ecosystem. I imagine⁹ a scene of a journalist interviewing a couple of experts and there's no apparent conflict because they've already intergrated their apparently disparate findings.

Or a prime minister's question time where a member of parliament is asking why a course of action is being taken that is clearly inferior to another course that could be being taken.

Perhaps that won't even happen because they'll have both taken the 5 minutes to play some simulation or listen to the outcome of playing it to either already agree on the best course of action or be able to justify why they've chosen one over the other.

Let's find out.