In this very interesting article (in French) ‘L’expert et le politique face à l’inconnu‘ the authors express how there is a substantial difference between the “unknown” and the “uncertain”. In uncertainty, the context of decision-making remains somewhat stable allowing some sort of objective, analytical approach; when in a crisis, the unknown prevails: the rate at which the environment changes is faster and thus decision-making has to be done according to other criteria.
A crisis such as the covid crisis will be ranked in the ‘uncertain’ category: the knowledge and the environment changes faster than the usual environment for rational decision-making, and this is why expert groups have not always been relevant, and why political decision-making has become so important. Readability of the expertise becomes difficult, as it may change significantly in the course of time due to the fact that knowledge has changed significantly.
The most important point of the paper is that in the ‘unknown’ situation, our usual decision-making approaches are not quite relevant, but we often fail to identify that, or at least we identify it too late to be quite useful. Our organisations, reporting and decision-making processes are not fit for the ‘unknown’.
It is essential to get better at identifying those few situations that evolve so fast that they are in the ‘unknown’ category and make sure we understand that decision-making needs to be different.
