Leadership for sustainability requires courage to admit we do not know what we do not know: that unknown unknowns exist. Socrates, the celebrated father of Western philosophy could admit it, “I know that I know nothing,” so perhaps the rest of us can too.
Modern society’s basic institutions—science, government, market, military—cannot anticipate, control, or manage the risks caused by the unknown unknowns of wicked, adaptive, dynamic systems. So leaders (i.e., all of us) must find courage to try, fail, and adapt.
Among the countless causes of unknown unknowns, two are particularly relevant to leadership for sustainability: black swans and emergent systems.
Black swans are so rare that their appearance cannot be expected, let alone predicted. 9/11/2001 presents a classic and horrific example: The US spent billions of dollars to protect against missile attacks only to be unprepared for commercial airlines piloted by suicide attackers. CFC provides another sobering example. When invented, these stable, safe coolants were declared a miracle because they revolutionized the food industry and cities like Huston Texas with refrigerators and air conditioners. No one could have predicted CFCs would destroy atmospheric ozone, increase ultraviolet radiation, and result in dramatic and unpredictable cancer, blindness, and genetic mutation. New technologies can transform humanity’s development trajectory—for better or worse—as can volcanoes, earthquakes, evolution, and asteroids. The black swans are out there.
So are emergent systems. Climate change, collapsing ocean fisheries, doubling agriculture production, plummeting water tables, and an exploding global middle class are just a few of the drivers creating entirely new bio-cultural systems characteristic of the Anthropocene. We cannot predict how these systems will behave or respond to our actions, not just because the systems are constantly evolving and thus too dynamic for science to model, but because humanity now dominates so much of Earth’s systems that any changes we make creates an entirely new system.
Denial is a typical response to unknown and uncontrollable risk: we see it in attacks on climate science. Apathy is another typical response to unknown unknowns: we see it in the political blame game that paralyzes our nation and in most of us individually when we shrug our shoulders and mutter “what can I do?” Transformation is the needed response: a new beginning, built on a new foundation.
So, what can we do? As a society we need to accept failure, and probably encourage it, because now we seem paralyzed. As a nation we might think about redirecting a few billion from the military budget to address the risks of climate change, which even military analysts recognize as perhaps the greatest threat to US security every faced.
(essay inspired by reading: Beck, U. (2010). World risk society as cosmopolitan society: ecological questions in a framework of manufactured uncertainties. In E. A. Rosa, A. Diekmann, T. Dietz & C. Jaeger (Eds.), Human footprints on the global environment: Threats to sustainability (pp. 47-82). Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press)