Humanity’s Worst Threat: Poor Decision Making
May 27th, 2008 • Posted in: Commentaryby Rushworth M. Kidder
What is the most threatening global issue facing humanity today?
Is it terrorism, where advancing nuclear and biological technologies give single individuals new opportunities to create mass destruction? Or is it violence against women, which today creates more casualties than warfare? Maybe it’s CO2 emissions, which could warm the world and melt enough polar ice to raise sea levels for 634 million coastal residents. Or is it governmental corruption, which accounts for more than $1 trillion a year in political bribes? Or perhaps it’s mass migration, which by 2025 could put as many as 1.8 billion people on the move in water-scarce areas? Or is it slavery, with more slaves now than at the highest point of the African slave trade?
To chart public priorities among these and other global issues, we recently did a small pilot survey of members of the Institute for Global Ethics. Given our mission, we wanted to know which issues raised the greatest ethical challenges to our global future.
Since the questions in our survey were based on the 15 major issues catalogued in the 2007 “State of the Future” report from the United Nations-affiliated Millennium Project, we asked one of the report’s co-authors, Theodore J. Gordon, to join us for a follow-up conference call with our survey participants. Gordon, who was a founding board member of our Institute, conceived of the Millennium Project in the 1980s and remains one of the world’s most highly respected futurists. He’s been studying future issues and trends since well before 1971, when he founded his own consulting firm, The Futures Group. So we were eager to share with him our results.
Of the nine topics in our survey, our respondents clustered three of them near the top: terrorism, CO2 emissions, and mass migration. They followed with a group of five more: corruption; violence against women; global slavery; disease, AIDS, and pandemics; and imbalanced wealth distribution. The ninth issue, shortage of medical professionals, came in well below the rest. As Gordon talked us through these results and as the respondents shared their views, I sensed they were searching for some bigger, overarching theme — some common thread that made these issues significant. I also sensed an unspoken question on everyone’s mind: “Ted, what do you think is the Big One?”
His answer surprised us all. In effect, he said, it’s none of the above. Then, in three key words, he nailed the concern we’d all been circling around. “If you look at all of these issues,” he said “and ask what’s common to them all, it’s lousy decision making.”
“There used to be a time,” Gordon continued, “when I thought futures research, my field, would make its contribution by improving decision making. But I’ve abandoned that thought. We could have the best insight into what the future might be — through magic techniques not yet invented — and decisions would still be terrible!” Translation: It’s not the specific issues that challenge us, but the way we fail to deal with issues of every sort.
That strikes me as a remarkable admission for a man whose life has been devoted to advancing and promoting futures research. Gordon wouldn’t want me to hold him up to unfair comparisons, but if Einstein after decades of work had told us that something mattered more than physics, or if Cezanne had concluded that painting wasn’t what it was all about, or if Darwin had intimated that he was outgrowing his commitment to evolution, wouldn’t we pay attention?
Our leaders, Gordon emphasized, aren’t bad people. But “they don’t have a good grounding in decision making, because decision making is ad hoc.” As a result, today’s decisions often rely too much on the decision maker’s reputation or on undetermined psychological factors. Worse still, decisions even can rely on what he called “creating opportunities for the family” or on “what you had for breakfast.”
“Somewhere in the future,” Gordon observed, “a science of decision making has to emerge.” This science, he feels, must comprise such elements as futures research, econometrics, and ethics — what he describes as “a curriculum that covers the field.”
Gordon’s not telling us that the big, high-leverage issues on the global agenda aren’t important. They matter enormously and require every bit of energy that global organizations pour into them. They need public support, private initiative, and collective will. But mostly they need the new, sharp instrumentality of twenty-first-century decision making. That instrumentality includes ethics — an ability to discern right from wrong, coupled with a way to frame our toughest problems as moral dilemmas that pit two right courses of action against each other. With that in place, nothing we face — terrorism, global warming, slavery, corruption, or the rest — will be beyond our ability to correct.
©2008 Institute for Global Ethics
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[...] Kidder, whose thoughts and writings are always insightful, has recently completed a small pilot survey of members of the Institute for Global Ethics, of which he is the executive Director. The question: [...]
[...] noted in Rushworth Kidder’s recent commentary, the Institute for Global Ethics has begun gathering results from a new survey assessing the most [...]
[...] “There used to be a time,” Gordon continued, “when I thought futures research, my field, would make its contribution by improving decision making. But I’ve abandoned that thought. We could have the best insight into what the future might be — through magic techniques not yet invented — and decisions would still be terrible!” Translation: It’s not the specific issues that challenge us, but the way we fail to deal with issues of every sort. Ethics Newsline » Commentary » Humanity’s Worst Threat: Poor Decision Making [...]