O Tribunal Constitucional como instituição deliberativa

IGNORING THE UNKNOWN

In 2003 the Plain English Campaign conferred its annual “Foot in

Mouth” award to then U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for this pronouncement: “There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know.” In his tortuous way, what Rumsfeld was saying is that stuff happens and

sometimes we just have no way of anticipating what could go wrong. He was, in fact, missing the point, which is that stuff happens and we have to do everything in our power to anticipate what could go wrong.

Rumsfeld and his generals had confidently predicted that the U.S.

invasion of Iraq would begin with shock and awe and end with flowers and candy as grateful Iraqis flooded onto the streets to greet their

liberators. And so, less than two months after the first barrage of bombs rained down on Baghdad, President George W. Bush stood proudly on the deck of the aircraft carrier ^USS Abraham Lincoln beneath a banner that read “Mission Accomplished,” cocked a thumb into the air, and declared, “In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

What the war planners hadn’t predicted was that the candies and flowers would be replaced by roadside bombs and guerrilla raids in a war that would drag on for years, with tens of thousands of lives lost and trillions of dollars spent.

In an age of volatile and unpredictable social and political events, planning for victory is not enough. We must also plan for failure. What would happen if everything in your carefully devised plan went awry?

Would you be ready to respond quickly and effectively? Like Rumsfeld’s generals, many businesses today develop their plans based solely on a trajectory towards success. Sure, they might include different outcomes, based on reaching 100 percent of their goal or perhaps 80 percent or even just 60 percent, but the overall assumption is that the plan will succeed at some level. In a way this makes sense. It’s necessary to

define your goal and plan the best route for achieving it. But it makes no sense in a highly unstable socio-economic environment not to plan also for failure.

Rumsfeld and his generals should have taken a page out of the political handbook, where disaster planning has been part of smart campaign planning for years. Political consultants do it because they know that disaster will inevitably strike. They assume the path to

victory will not travel in a straight line and that it’s necessary to handle the detours without losing momentum. A significant part of the

campaign-planning process is taken up with scenario planning that tries to anticipate every conceivable thing that could go wrong and then puts in place action plans for those things that are most likely to go wrong, the most plausible disasters. These plans might even include draft

communication materials that can be used in the event of a crisis. These documents are then filed away, ready to be pulled out at a moment’s notice should disaster present itself. Most of the time they’re never needed.

Why do political strategists care so much about planning for failure?

Because they live in a world of opposition, not just from other political parties but also from the media, special interest groups, and ordinary citizens who have an issue they feel zealous about. They have to

consider all the negative things that others could say about them and be ready to counter those with ideas and arguments of their own.

Historically, marketers haven’t had to deal with the same problem.

That’s because most of the opposition they face is from their

competitors. Sure, if you’re an auto company, you might have the competition saying, “Our cars are better than your cars,” but none of them are going to say that all cars are bad. They’re not going to attack the category as a whole. Because there are so many outside groups attacking political parties, they often face the real dilemma of “a pox on all your houses.”

Marketers can no longer live in this closed bubble. The digitally connected world has changed all that. The advent of social media means it’s not only possible but also highly likely that brands will face attacks from all angles and any number of sources, not just from their category competitors. These days, brands need to be ready for whatever might happen. They have to anticipate the unknown unknowns.

The reason campaign strategists spend so much time on planning for failure is because it’s incredibly liberating. If you’ve tried to anticipate all the things that could go wrong, it means that when the unexpected happens the team will not be struck by panic and paralysis. It means they can continue working towards their primary objective while dealing with the crisis in a calm and logical way, because they will have already thought through the issues and options and might even have responses at hand.

RUNNING THE WAR GAME

To see how this process works, I’ve come to a charming three-storey Georgian edifice on the eastern periphery of Toronto’s downtown core, a few minutes away from the heart of the city’s financial power centre. On the second floor of the building, which was Toronto’s first post office and predates the incorporation of the city itself, are the offices of Crestview Strategy. Crestview is a Canadian public affairs agency whose slogan is

“We make, change and mobilize opinion.” Its three founding partners are all experienced political operatives, none more so than Chad Rogers, who pops his head out of the office door to greet me as I head up the short flight of stairs. Rogers is something of a contradiction. Although he’s in his late thirties, his slightly formal way of speaking makes him seem older than his cherubic face suggests. From the waist up he’s all yuppie conservatism, wearing preppy tortoiseshell glasses and dressed in a pink check button-down shirt. Below the waist he’s rebel

metrosexual in blue jeans, colourful striped socks, and tan brogues with bright blue rubber soles. But there’s no contradiction in his political views, which skew firmly to the right.

Rogers has worked for Conservative Party senators and members of the Canadian Parliament and has been an adviser and political

strategist on numerous Tory election campaigns. In 2003 he advised Conservative leader John Hamm during the provincial election

campaign in the Atlantic province of Nova Scotia, which saw the

Conservatives win re-election despite facing massive voter unrest. He has also worked with governments and political leaders in emerging democracies from Iraq to Kyrgyzstan. Along with his partners at

Crestview Strategy, he advises global companies like Coca-Cola, Facebook, and Target on how to manage their public affairs issues in

Canada. Rogers is a passionate advocate for planning for failure. A big part of his job is trying to figure out all the unfortunate things that might happen, before they do.

“One of my favourite tools,” says Rogers, “is to run a full war game.”

(The bellicose nature of political conflict seems to encourage jargon like

“war room” and “war games.”) No doubt the American generals who so rapidly took control of Iraq had war-gamed just such a forceful

overthrow. What they clearly hadn’t done was war-game the occupation that followed. For Rogers, war-gaming is a form of planning that allows you to play out all the scenarios of what could go wrong and all the things your opponents might do to undermine your campaign.

He prefers to start this process of planning at least two years before an election is called, usually at a two- or three-day retreat that brings

together a group of campaign planners who will take on the roles of various opposition parties and groups and imagine how they might

attack the campaign’s message. He explains, “Teams will be assigned to play the various actors that will realistically exist in the space: Liberals, New Democrats, Greens, the press corps. They will have to spend time in advance understanding their positions, their biases, how they behave.”

A proposition is then put in front of the group and the teams are given a couple of hours to develop their cases. “People come back into the room and present and then we debate. Is it realistic? Is it rigorous enough? Let’s attack the person who’s presenting. Were they robust enough in their thinking? Out of that debate would come further edits and then let’s go again.” This iterative process gets repeated until the group feels it has developed an optimal set of messages for the

campaign, including a ballot question. “You’re capturing everything over the weekend that could go into your master narrative. You’re experimenting with all the smart things you could try,” says Rogers. If that weekend effort doesn’t produce the desired result, they’ll do

another and another until they finally get to where they need to be.

Why go to this extreme effort to figure out all the scenarios of what might go wrong, when most of them will likely not happen?

“Ultimately,” he explains, “there’s a big pitfall out there waiting for you that someone else is going to figure out.” Better to figure it out yourself and be ready to deal with it.

One benefit of having run through a disaster scenario beforehand is that it saves time if and when disaster strikes. Political campaigning, Rogers notes, is about four things: time, people, money, and ideas.

“Time is the variable you can control through good planning,” he says.

But there’s a second benefit to planning for failure, a psychological one.

“There is no decision-making time available to you in the midst of crisis.

And if you haven’t prepared for it, you’re going to have both the emotional, psychological trauma that it’s a crisis, along with real decisions to make. So the only way is to do it in advance.” Imagining what could go wrong not only prevents you from being paralyzed during a crisis, it can actually be empowering for the team, Rogers says. “It becomes validating that the team has control. The team has actually spent time envisaging this might happen. And you can calm down your own folks, you can move on to your message.”

The psychological benefit of imagining the worst (for example, the candidate is found to be engaged in infidelity) allows the team to remain focused in the midst of crisis. If you’ve already surfaced and given voice to everyone’s anxieties and greatest fears, chances are you won’t be left looking crippled or indecisive when the worst happens. The benefit is clear, says Rogers: “Crisis planning and war-gaming means you have a team that doesn’t get spooked.”

Plenty of corporations do crisis planning — or at least say they do.

They have crisis management teams and PR agencies on standby in the event of disaster. But crisis planning isn’t the same as scenario

planning. Crisis planning is like a fire drill. Every department knows what to do when the alarm goes off: who are the team captains, what are the exit routes, where does everyone muster once they’ve left the building, how do we carry out a head count. Scenario planning is like trying to figure out what conditions are necessary for an actual fire to break out, how close you are to those conditions today, and how the organization might respond if fire does break out. Scenario planning is a more complex and nuanced exercise.

Scenario planning is also distinct from forecasting, which tends to be primarily a financial exercise. Forecasting has also become a devilishly difficult thing to do. In post–Second World War America and Europe, thanks to steady and predictable growth, forecasting was as simple as plotting growth for the past few years, then placing a ruler on the page

to project growth for the coming few years. But after the recessions of the seventies and eighties (both triggered by oil crises), business forecasting became about as accurate as political polling is today.

EMBRACING THE UNKNOWN

In the years leading up to the 1973 oil crisis, it was in fact an oil company that figured out that forecasting had its limitations and decided to replace it with scenario planning as a tool for long-term strategic planning. Royal Dutch Shell assigned some of its brightest business planners to the task. Among them was a Frenchman by the name of Pierre Wack. Almost fifteen years after the creation of the scenario-planning team, Wack would write a series of articles for the Harvard Business Review, outlining the work he and his team had done.

As described by Wack, the Shell planners began by defining which elements affecting their business were predetermined — that is, events that had already been set in motion, where one can predict the future consequences. For example, if a massive earthquake happens in the middle of the ocean near a coastline, a tsunami is almost certain to

follow. One can predict the ripples of certain events. However, there are also uncertainties — events that might affect your business but that you can’t accurately predict. These are Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns.

Here’s what Wack has to say on the issue of uncertainties: “It is

essential to try to put as much light on critical uncertainties as on the predetermined elements. They should not be swept under the carpet.”

Confronting the uncertainties, rather than dismissing them as being outside our capacity to predict, is what defines the difference between scenario planning and forecasting. Next, the planners separated out those elements that would happen from those that clearly could not.

This further narrowed their options and allowed them to focus more fully on the most plausible scenarios. This process of embracing uncertainty and narrowing down the plausible options allowed the Shell planners to do something no other oil company, government, or corporation had done — anticipate the 1973 oil crisis, with its supply constraints and skyrocketing prices. In its own account of those events, Shell notes, “In 1973 the global economy was shocked by a major oil crisis. Shell

wasn’t.” Even more impressively, the Shell planners were also able to anticipate when the opposite happened — an oversupply of oil and a

dramatic drop in prices in the early 1980s. This allowed Shell to inoculate itself against these unprecedented upheavals in the oil industry and the global economy as a whole. Scenario planning had shown itself to be a powerful business tool.

This approach represented a radical shift in mindset. It moved away from the forecasting world view that believed the future is knowable and we should be able to predict it, and towards a scenario world view that believed the future was uncertain and we should embrace that uncertainty. It suggested that judgement and intuition have as much of a role to play in future planning as facts do. This is the opposite of the Rumsfeld doctrine, which holds that the unknown unknowns are beyond our contemplation.

Today, forty years after it was first introduced, scenario planning is an integral part of Shell’s business-planning process. And it has given the company, time and again, significant strategic advantage over its

competition. The Shell approach now includes a large and sophisticated

“global energy model” that uses computer simulation to show the

interactions across a complex matrix of energy, politics, and economics, and across geographies and industry segments. It’s a daunting task. As Martin Haigh, one of the senior energy advisers on the current Shell scenarios team, says, “We have a very ambitious remit in the team, which is to try and cover the whole world, all countries, all the energy sources available — and the long term.” The Shell process has become so widely admired that numerous other companies have embraced it, and countries from China to South Africa have turned to Shell to help them develop scenarios for their own futures.

The Shell scenario-planning approach is not about providing answers;

it’s about allowing the company’s managers to imagine the future. It shakes off the business-as-usual impulse that is so easy to fall back on when managers engage in strategic planning. It challenges

management’s comfortable assumptions about the future and it

uncovers the biases in their world view. But its greatest legacy might be that it has created a culture of forward thinking at Shell. The result is an environment in which future unseen events are factored into everyday decision-making and strategizing. What that means is, if disaster does strike, the chances are pretty good that the Shell management team has already contemplated the eventuality and hypothesized about