In the last two months, I have read two very stimulating and hopeful books – Joshua Ramo’s “ The Age of the Unthinkable- why the new world disorder constantly surprises us and what we can do about it” and Nandan Nilekhani’s “ Imagining India- ideas for the new century”. Both urge the readers to discard the old ways of thinking and looking at problems and provide some guidance on how to navigate the emerging chaos both in international relations and in the largest democracy in the world.
In “The Age of the Unthinkable”, Joshua Ramo seeks to challenge the conventional wisdom with a completely different perspective and framework. It begins by stating that we are going to be constantly surprised by major changes in the world. Complex systems can exhibit catastrophic behavior when one part of the system can affect many others by a domino effect. This new basic volatility of the global order has been caused by the increasing number of players and the connections between them. And now even small things can trigger a big change just as an additional grain of sand can cause a sand pile to collapse. And all change produces unpredictability and surprise. The issue really is how to prepare for and manage this change.
The main argument of the book is that in this emerging revolutionary era of surprise and innovation, you need to think and act like a revolutionary. Wisdom is encapsulated in the Buddhist thought of “right view, right intention and right action”. We need to begin by challenging conventional wisdom. The right view is a holistic view of things. You have to constantly ask new questions and the goal has to be watch for change and to focus on what you cannot measure rather than on what you could. In a fast changing world what really matters is often hidden in the corners where the usual experts don’t often look. And there is a danger in too much certainty. Today there is constant process of shifting adjustment of innovation, or surprise for both good and ill.
Deep security will come from mastering the forces at work deep inside our world and will be predicated on the idea that we don’t have all the answers and in fact that we cant even anticipate many of the questions at any time. Tackling them will require a new kind of an immune system, a reactive instinct for identifying dangers, adapting to deal with them and then moving to control and contain the risk they present. Many of most serious threats we face today, and will face in the future, will start small, spread fast and be often bred at the intersection of things that look benign until combined ( e.g. jet travel and fundamentalism, home mortgages and hedge funds).
Resilience will be the defining concept of the 21 st century security and not deterrence. This will require creating systems that allow institutions to shift and learn and change. This resilience will need an ability to constantly reconceptualize problems, to generate a diversity of ideas and solutions, to communicate with everyone and to encourage novelty and even small scale revolts or crises and recoveries instead of waiting for the big unanticipated collapse.
The third change will be to augment our instinct for direct action with a new sense of the incredible power of an indirect approach. This requires that you attack your enemy’s strategy instead of his troops. As the Chinese philosopher Sun Zi urges “he who does not engage in battle is likely to defeat the enemy”. The indirect approach places a premium on patience rather than persuasion and on developing relationships to solve problems rather confrontation. Ramo argues that the new way would avoid direct conflict, use the forces already at play, manipulate so quietly as to be unnoticed, and know that no effort truly ends.
Since links accelerate the propagation of problems, the real issue becomes how to use these same links to propagate solutions. This will require decentralization for the moment you hand over power to other people; you get an explosion of curiosity, innovation and effort. Once users step into active engagement, the dynamics of the system shift forever. Users stop being consumers and become participants. The more users a centralized system has, the closer it comes to exhaustion but the more users a decentralized system has the more efficient it becomes because often they manage to put excess capacity to work that would otherwise be wasted. We owe everything to human creativity and so should work for a revolutionary spread of power that can empower as much of the world as we can. The more something lends itself to invention and imagination, the more enduringly useful it becomes. The question really is what can we do make all the people of the world peers and how can we add as many connections as possible between people and global sources of information and ideas. As a philosopher noted “what we do to others, we do to ourselves.”
Nandan (Imagining India- Ideas for the new century) too begins by looking at the old ideas. He examines the ideas and attitudes that have evolved with the times and contributed to our progress, as also those that keep us shackled to old, unproductive and fundamentally undemocratic ways.. And then moves on to what new ideas can do for
But some themes are common to both books. Both argue that we need to look anew at our emerging problems with a completely different perspective. The complexity of future life will need new and unique solutions. Harnessing technology will be essential to solving intractable social and economic problems. Solutions may emerge from new breakthroughs in information technology or biosciences. In the future the Anglo-Saxon predilection for confronting issues head-on may not necessarily be the right approach to increasingly complex social, economic or even political issues. Success may increasingly arrive by following an indirect route to the objective. And finally increasing empowerment and involvement of people the world over will be essential to our future well being and growth.
In short both books provide a blueprint for aspiring policy makers as well idealists who seek to change the world.
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