“Houston we have a problem”
There’s a saying among science-fiction buffs: “The meek shall inherit the Earth; the rest of us are going to the stars.” One or two celebrity oddballs, like Star Trek creator Gene Rodenberry, decided to take the latter half of the statement literally. Before they died, they organised to have their ashes launched into the inky blackness of space. And there they are, orbiting forever. However, for the vast majority of us, the reality is that – in life and in death – we physically remain part of this Earth. Well, that’s not entirely true. Among us are the lucky ones blessed with the right stuff, who blast off into space on quests which help us learn more about what is out there beyond the gravitational confines of this “pale blue dot” (Carl Sagan’s phrase).
We travel into space because the conquest of mountains and seas has made it one of the last frontiers full of enticing unknowns. We go there because we don’t know what’s out there. For this reason any space journey is fraught with uncertainty and danger. The astronauts and their thousands of support personnel have to rely on what they do know, which is miniscule compared to what they don’t know. Add to this their faith in the computers and other technical equipment involved in their flight, and you realise they’re taking one heck of a gamble.
Back in the days of the Apollo missions, NASA enthusiastically hurled human beings at the moon at the speed of a bullet. They were exceptionally proud of their technologies – almost as proud as the builders of the Titanic. This ended abruptly soon after the Apollo 13 space vehicle leapt from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on April 11, 1970. John Swigert, Fred Haise and Jim Lovell were at the controls of what was essentially a tall tin can boasting the same computing power as a modern-day scientific calculator!
Fifty-six hours into the Apollo 13 mission an explosion on board sent the power readings haywire. At that instant, all the certainties of the mission disappeared as the crew were confronted with an emergency situation for which they hadn’t been trained. The reaction of the mission commander on board, Jim Lovell, was the now famous quote “Houston, we have a problem”. Upon investigation, the problem was far bigger than they anticipated. One of the oxygen tanks had exploded, resulting in an almost complete loss of capability to generate power and to provide water or oxygen to the crew. The NASA officials immediately accepted that the mission to the moon had to be scrapped and everything had to be done to bring the crew home. What was uncertain was – how?
Let’s break for a minute and look at possible reactions to the discomfort of suddenly being thrust into a sea of uncertainty. The typical hedgehog reaction would be to rush back to its hole in the ground, curl itself into a ball and hope the problem would sort itself out. The reaction of a fox would be to look for the main influencing factors, see how they could be used to advantage and, in so doing, begin to cope with the new situation. With necessary apologies to Neil Armstrong, this crossing-over from the right-hand side of the matrix (certainty) to the left-hand side (uncertainty) requires one small step for a fox but one giant leap for hedgehog-kind.
At NASA ground control, the next step was decidedly foxy – to look for the main driving forces of the situation by drawing on the multiple perspectives of some of the finest brains in the space business. Unlike the rugged gung-ho frontiersmen of the Wild West, the heroes of this frontier were teams of scientists with pocket calculators and slide rules; there were no laptops in those days! Very little was known about the effects of an explosion like this on the craft and crew, so you can imagine the list of uncertainties this situation offered: How was the craft damaged? How long would the power last? How long would the oxygen last? Could the power be restored? Would the craft start falling apart? Would the explosion affect the craft’s trajectory, sending it into outer space? If the astronauts managed to head the craft back towards Earth, would the command and lunar modules be able to detach from one another? Would the damage prevent the craft from re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere? What were the dangers of another explosion? What was the quickest route to get home? And what were the realistic odds of getting the astronauts back home? Because no-one was prepared for a situation like this, the chasm between the old certainties and the new uncertainties might have seemed unbridgeable.
However, there is a continuum between certainty and uncertainty, just as there is between factors inside and outside of our control. By studying the uncertain, we may be able to break it down into elements of greater and lesser risk, of greater and lesser predictability. In the same way, between absolute control and absence of control lies the middle ground of influence and persuasion. Hence, we can travel inwards and outwards along the two principal axes of our matrix. Which is why studying the Apollo 13 mission is so fascinating. It offers us a perfect example of how people in a situation of extreme stress are still able to establish and analyse the key uncertainties, so that a sensible range of options can be mounted against what the future throws at us.
As the name suggests, key uncertainties are those variables most relevant to a particular situation and with the highest impact potential, either as an opportunity or a threat. They therefore drive the design of possible scenarios. In this regard, where a scenario planning forum raises many uncertainties, it is important that the number is whittled down to a few pivotal ones: namely the ones on which the scenarios pivot like a see-saw. For example, both of us have recently been facilitating workshops to produce scenarios which are relevant in the war against poverty in South Africa. Quite independently, both workshops chose the process through which national development strategies are implemented – will they be driven in a top-down fashion from the centre or be shaped by community demands from the bottom up? – as a pivotal uncertainty. This led to the fashioning of a third alternative: grassroots-driven development with co-ordination from on high in those areas where real value can be added.
In the 1980s, most global scenario teams selected the relationship between America and Russia as a pivotal uncertainty – would the arms race continue or would there be détente? Times change and, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the nineties were dominated more by uncertainties in the world financial and economic systems. The “noughties”, as the present decade is known, continues to be dominated by these uncertainties, which now include the tremors in the American economy. Interestingly, as far as single-business scenarios are concerned, a recent exercise selected the attitude of central banks to their gold holdings as the pivotal uncertainty for the gold market in the foreseeable future. The banks still hold over 30 000 tons of the precious metal in their vaults, which is around a quarter of the gold ever extracted from the Earth’s crust. With current demand for gold approximately matched by mine supply and jewellery and investment bars which have been melted down and recycled, the banks only have to dribble a small amount of their stock onto the market every year to ruin it. On the other hand, if they ever lose confidence in holding paper currencies like the dollar, sterling, euro and yen as their reserves and add to their gold holdings, the bulls would have a field day. As one gold expert wryly observed: “The gold price can go up or down but not necessarily in that order!” Moving to the world of black gold or petroleum, the pivotal uncertainty must be not whether but when and in what form new rules will come into force to reduce carbon emissions. The second Earth Summit in Johannesburg in 2002 may be the moment of truth.
In the case of Apollo 13, ground control and crew concluded that the two key uncertainties were oxygen supply to the crew and power supply to the craft. Without oxygen the crew would die, and without power the craft wouldn’t get back home.
Wild cards
Key uncertainties are factors which we have positively identified, but we don’t know which way they’re going to go. However, there are also other factors that we are only dimly aware of. They may represent opportunities or threats but they can’t be part of any official analysis because they’re too vague or too far away on the horizon. We call them “wild cards”, and the best way to capture them is to exercise the right-hand side of the brain, associated with creativity and spatial awareness, as opposed to the left-hand side associated with analysis. It is accepted by most psychologists that men are left-hemisphere dominant, whereas women lean towards the right. This suggests that women are always in their right minds! Therefore, when analysing situations that are fraught with uncertainties and have no established patterns on which to base solutions, it