How anticipatory governance can help us with unpredictability

Systemic disruption ­– the cascade of constant disruptions across our hyperconnected world – forces us to confront unpredictability.

The COVID-19 pandemic served as a stark example, and was followed by energy crises, supply chain disruptions and inflationary pressures unseen in decades. Indeed, the US Treasury has admitted its lack of understanding regarding these “unanticipated” economic shocks.

Even the technological realm isn’t immune, evidenced by recent large-scale outages caused by innocuous software updates. The recent CrowdStrike incident underlined how a single oversight can trigger major disruptions – even without complex artificial intelligence (AI) interactions or malicious intent. Systemic disruption is being acutely felt everywhere today.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the world’s inherent unpredictability. Any one event – or an intersecting confluence of changes – can rewrite the world’s economic landscape, altering the fate of industries, professions and nations.

Events presented as “historic” or “unique” are becoming commonplace. In this environment, where “unprecedented” becomes the norm, our understanding of the world must evolve.

In today’s unpredictable world, we outline pathways to become future-savvy using the AAA Framework, which represents “antifragile, anticipatory and agility”.

This framework defines the skills to be developed for an unpredictable world, as standard playbooks become increasingly ineffective:

At the onset of Russia’s military action in Ukraine, cyberattacks disrupted satellite networks, including those owned by US Viasat.

Conversely, Starlink’s network of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites remained operational. By providing Ukrainians with continued internet access, Starlink's distributed architecture provided antifragility by eliminating a single point of failure.

For our AAA taxonomy, we borrow the term “antifragile” from Nassim Nicholas Taleb: “Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”

Building resilience for climate change, cybersecurity, technological, infrastructure, health and geopolitical risks is a prerequisite to surviving and thriving through unpredictability. Building antifragile foundations is like building an immune system, where the focus moves from the probability to the amplitude of potential outcomes.

We often discount the dangers of low-likelihood events, even when their magnitude would be catastrophic. However, their abnormally high impact makes them more dangerous than we account for. They might be rare, but they can be big.

The “fragile” has an asymmetric relationship when it comes to adverse changes. This means that the fragile suffers a disproportionate amount of downside from shocks – and doesn’t capture the opportunities of asymmetric gains.

With an increasing number of asymmetric risks and opportunities, organizations and their governance bodies may need a Chief Existential Officer (CEO²). The CEO² is responsible for acting upon low-probability but high-consequence existential risks, and accompanying opportunities, that may stretch past typical planning cycles.

Existential foresight goes beyond day-to-day business risks to include AI, biosecurity, climate, cybersecurity, geopolitical and societal paradigm shift risks, which all display asymmetric outcomes.

By developing anticipatory thinking, we can proactively imagine possible futures and inform decision-making today:

As “rare” becomes less rare, anticipatory governance allows better preparation for any future eventualities, while aligning decision-making to unleash impactful changes.

There is an increasing cost of assuming a predictable world, given the inverse relationship between predictability and uncertainty. The surprise we experience from disruption is inversely tied to our anticipatory thinking, willingness to question and preparedness.

Agility, the third pillar of our AAA Framework, explores bridging our longer-term strategy with the present. Uniform, centralized and hierarchical organizations are not agile. These fragile strategies do not respond well to constantly changing circumstances.

Reconciling different time horizons with decisions today requires cognitive agility, alongside curiosity, creativity and experimentation.

Leadership roles must evolve as we bridge to the futures. Disruption in the C-suite is under way, as we imagine a role called Chief Bridging Officer (CBO) – defined by the agility to bridge the organization’s vision within constantly updating environments.

The CBO’s role is a journey of discovery, with the emergent and strategic agility to constantly respond to changes in the external environment. They initiate needed changes with anticipatory vision, consistent with long-term aspirations.

This “outside in” thinking requires anticipating changes ahead, rather than reacting to them, as emergencies are not equally distributed. The agility of a CBO drives our preparations, mitigations and responses to the many possible emergencies that might arise.

The value in anticipatory governance is to enhance mental agility for extreme (but plausible) changes, while rewiring how our systems are programmed. We build agile muscles for changing environments, which can represent major departures from the world we know. The purpose lies in preparation, not prediction.

In complex systems, there are no simple interactions. Changes in one area can produce seemingly unrelated outcomes in another, which can be challenging for decision-making.

The anticipatory leader appreciates that systems self-regulate through feedback. Output from one interaction influences the next interaction.

To operate in today’s unpredictable environment, we all need to be agile decision-makers. Reconciling short-term priorities with longer-term aspirations can be tricky where change is the norm.

This requires us to embrace anticipatory governance, build antifragile foundations and exercise our agency, always being ready to manoeuvre with agility in novel environments.