Feb 4, 2015 | Systems Analysis
By Elisabeth Suwandschieff, Research Scholar, IIASA Ecosystems Services and Management Program
Vienna, Austria
We live in a world that is fluid and diverse. Yet policymakers have to find solutions to problems that are definitive and effective, able to adapt to uncertain, changing, and challenging environments. How can research help policymakers to achieve such resilience?
At last week’s 4th Viennese Talks on Resilience and Networks, I listened to a number of talks on this topic from prominent figures in politics, military, research, and the private sector who came together to discuss future potential pathways for Austria. Speakers from politics emphasized the importance of social solutions such as greater investment in education. Meanwhile researchers from IIASA and other institutions brought perspective from systems analysis methods and explained how research on dynamic systems can inform policy making.
System dynamics view
From the research perspective, IIASA’s Brian Fath and others brought a systems analytical view of complex systems and their dynamics. They explained that complex systems such as organizations, businesses, and cities go through different stages in their “ecocycle.” Understanding the cycle and process is key to influencing its development.
FAS.research Director Harald Katzmair argued that life, as a complex system, can be seen as a process of growth, stagnation, destructurization and reorganization. In a recent research project, Katzmair found that the main factor in achieving resilience was the ability of the system to remain flexible through improvisation, collaboration, behavioral change and openness. If we apply this to our understanding of the world it becomes necessary to rethink our approach to leadership in every aspect.
“Our world is not a closed system; it does not consist of one choice, one idea, one currency,” said Katzmair.
Fath said that resilience is achieved by successfully managing each stage of the life cycle, explaining that even collapse can be seen as a key feature of system dynamics, because it results in developmental opportunities. Through disturbance and adaptive change in the landscape, new landscapes can be shaped.
Applying research to resilience
Many of the research talks were mathematical and complex. How can such research help in achieving resilience on a practical level? The issue for policymakers is that they have to provide definitive solutions when actually we live in a world that is fluid and diverse – therefore we need a diversified portfolio of problem solving. That is, solutions must be broad without losing focus. They must be effective, but remain flexible and open.
Research can bring different experiences together, provide a platform and a common language that can be shared. Systems thinking is a powerful way to condense the different ways of thinking and produce a portfolio of options rather than provide rigid solutions.
The adaptive cycle (Burkhard et al. 2011)
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
Dec 18, 2014 | Systems Analysis
By Leena Ilmola-Sheppard, IIASA Advanced Systems Analysis Program
When government officials speak about risks, they are usually referring to natural disasters. And it seems in these discussions that the increasing frequency of flooding, droughts, snow storms, and hurricanes have no link to climate change nor mitigation of it.
Last week, I had an opportunity to sit and listen to discussions at the fourth annual Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) High Level Risk Forum. The objective of the forum is to initiate joint development of the national level risk management tools and procedures. National risk directors form their Prime Minister’s Offices and OECD ambassadors spent three rainy days from December 10-12 discussing risk.
The most of the time, the discussion centered around disaster risks. Whatever the theme of the session, the discussion ended up on disaster management, disaster costs, or best practices. This is a theme that was recognized to be of importance in every government. The other risks that were presented were terrorism, the Ebola epidemic, and illicit trade. The missing themes–that I had expected to be on the agenda–were technology related, financial risks and political risks.
Governments usually take risk to mean natural disasters – but missing from most discussions are climate change, technology, financial, and political risks. Here: storm clouds over England in September 2014. Photo Credit: Ched Cheddles via Flickr
Margaret Wahlstrom, Special Representative of the UN Secretary General for Disaster Risk Reduction, gave the best presentation. Her key message war that climate change related issues were not integrated well enough with risk management. Kate White from the US Army Corps of Engineers supported Wahlstrom by stating that the climate change will radically change disaster management goals, procedures, and volume of investment. There should be a strong motivation for that, she said, as disasters are coming more expensive. According to her data, the total cost of hurricane Sandy was 65 billion US$.
The Australian government calculations presented in the meeting are very revealing as well; from Australian government is spending around 400 million AU$ for disaster prevention and response, and 2.6 billion AU$ for recovery. As the Australian example shows, governments have a long way to go from words to action. Governments have not yet realized the role of mitigation, at least not in the budgeting level.
The main theme of this year’s forum was “risk and resilience.” So the word was used a lot in all of the presentations. However, the concept of resilience seems to have many meanings and concrete substance behind the word is ambiguous. Margaret Wahlstrom pointed out that there is a need for a cross-discipline understanding of resilience, as well as for a generic resilience measurement system. Concrete quantitative indicators would help policymakers to assess the development actions needed, improvement achieved, and provide justification for development actions.
The most vivid discussion concerned the relationship of the national risk management and public involvement. Countries such as the United Kingdom promote full transparency and active risk communications, while some of the governments such as Singapore focus on communicating the vision and improvement ideas instead of risks. My interpretation of the discussion is that many of the represented government experts perceive risks to be too complicated to communicate to a general audience. The Nordic countries even go beyond communication, to encourage and support self-organized actions. For example the government supported people when they started to offer shelter and places to sleep for those that got stuck on the road during the October storms of this year, the worst to hit the region in decades.
Read the forum’s summary document draft (PDF)
Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
Sep 4, 2014 | Systems Analysis
At IIASA in Laxenburg this week, renowned mathematician Don Saari laid out a challenge for the Institute’s scientists: to better understand complex systems, he said, researchers must find better ways to model the interactions between different factors.
“In a large number of models, we use climate change or other factors as a variable. What we’re doing is throwing in these variables, rather than representing interactions—like how does energy affect population?” said Saari, a longtime IIASA collaborator and council member, and newly elected IIASA Council Chair, a position he will take up in November. “The great challenge of systems analysis is figuring out how to connect all the parts.”
“Whenever you take any type of system and look at parts and how you combine parts, you’re looking at a reductionist philosophy. We all do that in this room,” said Saari. “It is the obvious way to address a complex problem: to break it down into solvable parts.”
The danger of reductionism, Saari said, is that it can turn out completely incorrect solutions—without any indication that they are incorrect. He said, “The whole may be completely different than the sum of its parts.”
Take a Rubik’s cube as an example: Saari said “If you try to solve it by first doing the red side, then the green, then the blue, you will end up with a mess. What happens on one side is influenced by what’s happening on all the other sides.”
In the same way, the world’s great systems of energy, water, climate all influence each other. During the discussions, IIASA Deputy Director Nebojsa Nakicenovic noted that current work to extend the findings of the Global Energy Assessment to include water resources could narrow the potential number of sustainable scenarios identified for energy futures by more than half.
Saari pointed out that many of the world’s great scientists—including Nobel Prize winner Tom Schelling and Kyoto prize winner Simon Levin, both IIASA alumni—reached their groundbreaking ideas by elucidating the connections between two different fields.
It may sound like a simple solution to a methodological challenge. However, understanding the connections and influences between complex systems is far from simple. As researcher Tatjana Ermoliova pointed out in the discussion, “In physical systems you can hope to observe and discover the linkages.” But between human, economic, and global environmental systems those linkages are elusive and fraught with uncertainty.
At the end of the lecture, IIASA Director & CEO Prof. Dr. Pavel Kabat turned the challenge towards IIASA scientists, and we now extend it also to our readers: How can scientists better model the connections between systems, and what needs to change in our thinking in order to do so?
Jan 7, 2014 | IIASA Network, Systems Analysis
On October 15, 2012, a young man from Bangladesh named Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis parked next to New York Federal Reserve Bank in a van with what he believed was a 1000-pound bomb, walked a few blocks away, and then attempted to detonate the bomb by mobile phone.
In fact, the bomb was a fake, supplied by undercover agents for the United States FBI. The agents, posing as radical jihadists, had led Nafis along for months, allowing him to believe they were fellow terrorists and gathering information about his plot. The cover was maintained until the moment when his bomb failed to detonate, and Nafis was arrested. Disaster averted.
Researchers at IIASA study many risks to society, from floods, hurricanes, and natural disasters, to the impacts of climate change on future generations. They use models that can help disentangle the costs and benefits of different policies that could help prevent damage or deaths, or mitigate the impacts of global problems like climate change and air pollution. Could the same techniques apply to the dangers of terrorism and jihadists attacks? Could systems analysis help inform intelligence agencies in order to stop more terrorist attacks?
Could systems analysis techniques help guide policies to prevent terrorist attacks? Image Credit: Vjeran Pavic
Yale University Professor Ed Kaplan has done just that in work that he presented at IIASA in late December 2013. His research, which has intersected with IIASA in the past through collaborations with former IIASA Directors Howard Raiffa and Detlof von Winterfeldt, uses operations research to find ways to improve intelligence operations so as to catch more terrorists, before an attack can take place.
Kaplan, an expert on counterterrorism research, refined a simple economic model of customer service, known as a “queuing model” to instead represent the evolution of terror plots by terrorists, and interaction between the terrorists and the undercover agents who are working to uncover those plots.
“The best way to stop an attack is to know it’s about to happen beforehand,” says Kaplan. That means, in large part, having enough agents in the right places to detect attacks. But how many agents is the right number?
At IIASA, Kaplan described his terrorist “queuing model,” which can be applied to show how much a given number of agents would be likely to decrease attacks. Queuing models are an operations research method used to understand waiting times in lines, such as what happens at restaurants, offices, telephone queues or even internet servers.
But in the standard model, customers want to be served, and the servers know who the customers are. In Kaplan’s terrorist model, the terrorists – customers –don’t want to be served, and the servers—the agents—don’t know where their customers are. By modifying the model to account for those differences, Kaplan can answer some tricky questions about the best way for intelligence agencies to fight terrorism.
“Even if you don’t know how many terrorists there are or where they are, you can make it more likely that they will show themselves, you can make it more difficult for them to carry out an attack,” says Kaplan.
Kaplan’s method provides estimates of the numbers of undetected terrorist plots, as well as what it would take to increase detection rates.
Using data from court records of terrorism cases, Kaplan refined his models to include the average time that a terror plot is active – that is, the time from when a terrorist group first starts a plot, to the time that they are either caught, or the attack takes place. Based on the data, he could then calculate how many terror plots were likely to be in progress at any one time. He could also estimate the probability of detecting those plots, and how much that probability could be increased by employing more agents. For example, the model calculates that by increasing FBI agents by a factor of two would increase the detection rate from 80% to 89%.
But the data also point to one disturbing conclusion: A 100% detection rate is impossible. As the number of agents increases, the detection rate increases in ever smaller increments. Kaplan says, “We have to decide how safe is safe enough. When should we stop putting money into Homeland Security, and start putting more back into education and health?”
Download Kaplan’s IIASA presentation (PDF, 2.8 KB)
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
Sep 30, 2013 | Systems Analysis
By Jennifer Chan, participant in the IIASA co-led IFA Summer School
From 9 to 13 September in Laxenburg, Austria a group of researchers and practitioners gathered for the International Foresight Academy Summer School program organized by the Austrian Institute of Technology and IIASA’s Advanced Systems Analysis program. It was 5 days of converging minds, cultures and comfort zones. We were a group of strong perspectives, to say the least, and so you can imagine how some of the conversations transpired. In a small town outside of Vienna, we had the luxury of being away from our day-to-day to learn about foresight and engagement in stakeholder consultation. The two instructors, Felicity Edwards and Ruben Nelson, from Canmore, Alberta, are both seasoned veterans and brought a wealth of information and experience to the week.
Foresight refers to looking forward to anticipate the future landscape and design scenarios to test and evaluate where solutions will demonstrate the greatest impact.
I was drawn to travel across the world to be connected to a spectrum of diverse perspectives and gain insight to how researchers and practitioners are approaching foresight and engagement. It was a pleasure to see how people from around the world approach the complex problems of the world and spend the time to improve their craft. As a Master of Design Student, Strategic Foresight and Innovation at the Ontario College of Art and Design, I was specifically excited to be working and learning from professional foresighters and consultants working at the intersection of foresight and engagement. While my work is more in engagement, I am always looking for more tools to diversify my approaches to research and to designing community consultation.
Ideas from an exercise during the IFA summer school.
Together, we discussed and worked through complex topics of language, terminology and diverse cultures from a spectrum of working styles and comfort levels with foresight and engagement. I strongly think that the most powerful take away from the IFA is that we are all working on the wicked problems of the world in different ways and if we can simple push each other a little bit than we have done more than we could have on our own.
Participants in the 2013 IFA Summer School
I left the International Foresight Academy with a thirst to learn more about how foresight can impact my work – I am the Founder of Exhibit Change, a design driven community engagement organization with a focus on the intersection of wicked problems and citizen designers. We work with community and stakeholders to identify pain points and work together to co-design the spaces that support systemic change and shifts in behavior. Working in teams, with the guidance of Felicity and Ruben made it clear that engagement and foresight are closely aligned and that the spectrum of tools is expanding and influencing each discipline. I learned a lot from the content, the facilitation methods and time to reflect on my own practices.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
Biography:
Jennifer Chan is a design strategist and social entrepreneur. Her interests are city building, education, design thinking, participatory leadership, and social impact. Jennifer has a Bachelors of Architectural Science and is currently a candidate for the Masters of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation. Jennifer’s work and research has her looking at educational design, spatial pedagogy experiential design, game theory, civic engagement; generally creating spaces for individuals to co-design experiences for public good. Jennifer is the Founder of Exhibit Change, a design-driven community engagement organization exploring the intersections of wicked problems and citizen designers. Jennifer is constantly asking “How Might We…”
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