It's not about what we know, but what we don't know. Policy must be adaptable in an unpredictable future

Engineering is entering a new era where instead of pretending you know everything, you need to be able to clearly articulate everything you don't know. Josef Oehmen is one of the spearheads in the development of adaptive solutions, which is about how to design solutions for an uncertain future. "'Adaptive solutions' can be used politically to implement policies that are robust and flexible enough to deal with the unforeseen challenges of the future," he says. 

"Would you rather be a polar bear or a rat?" Josef Oehmen asks rhetorically. "The immediate answer is probably a polar bear, but if you think about it, the choice is probably a rat," says the DTU professor and continues:

"The polar bear is only effective in a stable environment. Its ability to survive in the harsh Arctic conditions is impressive; it is specialized and highly efficient in its specific habitat. But this efficiency is also the polar bear's Achilles heel - if the environment changes even slightly, the polar bear is in danger," Oehmen explains in American with a slight accent that reveals his German origin. 

"The rat, on the other hand, symbolizes adaptability. It lives in almost every environment on the planet and quickly adapts to new circumstances. It may not be the most efficient in a specific habitat, but its ability to survive in changing conditions is a huge strength."

A constantly changing environment is exactly what engineering as well as politicians have to operate in today. Adaptability and flexibility are key attributes for survival and success, which is exactly what the design for adaptability strategy is all about.

"The evolution of engineering is moving from a fixed 'one-size-fits-all' approach to a more flexible, adaptive model. We face complex and wild problems that require more than linear, predictable solutions." 

In his career, Oehmen has gone through exactly the same evolution. He started as a classic mechanical engineer, but throughout his career at the Technical University of Munich, ETH Zurich and MIT, Oehmen has developed a unique understanding of the need to further develop traditional engineering. Today, Oehmen is an associate professor at DTU, where he heads the Master's program in Design and Innovation. Here, Oehmen has a particular focus on how to manage risk, uncertainty and ignorance in complex megaprojects.

The cost of doing nothing

To address the three factors, you need to assemble teams where members come from a wide variety of backgrounds. This means they can combine many different perspectives and considerations on the same problem.

"If we only wanted to solve a problem one man, then design wouldn't be necessary. But then we would forever build watches with a thousand or fewer parts, because that's what we can handle alone as humans. When it gets more complex than that, we need to explore how we can bring people with different expertise together," he says and continues:

"I research how we can see technical design in a more holistic perspective, and when you zoom in further, I'm interested in how to deal with risk and uncertainty, including flexibility and adaptability."

This is where the break with previous thinking lies. Classical thinking is often based on the unspoken assumption that you can analyze your way out of a problem. 

So if there is a technological risk, you invest in analysis and technology development and wait to act until you are more certain. If there is a political or market uncertainty, you wait until it is clarified.

"And that's great," says Oehmen, who is actually a big fan of technocracy, and continues boldly: "if the cost of doing nothing is zero. But what we're starting to realize is that, especially when we look at the green transition or other wild problems, there's actually a significant cost of doing nothing. And then what do you do?".

Flexibility and adaptability

In dealing with the urgent need for transformation, we need to take a closer look at the two words that Oehmen highlighted: flexibility and adaptability. These are concepts that Oehmen has studied the practical application of when examining how the Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping developed their strategy for green transition, and therefore we will illustrate the words based on the center's strategy.

"When the center started researching how the green transition could happen, they were very clear in their statement. For us to do things at the technical level, we also need to look at business, financing and insurance, and at the political level. It's not about one single thing, because if that was the problem, they would have solved it a long time ago. It's about how we bring together a community that looks at it from an integrated point of view, something that nobody is doing today. No single stakeholder has that mandate. So they took it upon themselves to bring all the relevant disciplines together."

It was the combined force of people who had to come up with ideas on how the green transition could take place, where together they could find the best solution from all perspectives.

And this is where the concepts of flexibility and adaptability also come into play. Flexibility is about developing solutions that can adapt and serve different purposes in the face of a changing reality. In the center's green transition strategy, this was expressed through their strategy of facilitating research into multi-fuel vessels. Here they supported research into ships that could use both methanol, which is a low carbon fuel, and regular bunker oil. 

This significantly reduced the risk of building ships for which there is no market for fuel. 

"One of the big challenges in that field was that there was a chicken or the egg problem between the production of low carbon fuels and the production of ships that can use those fuels. If you're the owner of a ship, you look at the fuel supply and say, 'Guys, I'm not going to buy a ship that uses methanol until you can guarantee that there will be a sufficient supply of methanol. In turn, fuel producers will say, 'I will develop production capacity for low carbon fuels as soon as you guarantee there is a market for it."

For a few years, shipowners and fuel companies stared each other in the face and the general opinion was: 'Let's wait another 10 years for it to settle down'. 

"The key here was to break the deadlock through the idea of flexibility and adaptability," says Josef Oehmen and continues: "Industry partners approached engine manufacturers and asked if they could develop an engine that could use both methanol and bunker oil, so the methanol producers were sure that there would be a buyer ready when production was up and running."

 But if the idea of adaptability and flexibility is to be incorporated into the civil service, it requires uprooting some of the old ways of thinking, says Oehmen. 

 Old institutions, new problems

One of INVI's main theses is that today we are trying to solve 21st century problems with 20th century tools and 19th century institutions.

 According to Oehmen, a relic of 19th century institutions that directly oppose adaptable solutions is the way we write contracts. 

"We need to move away from pretending we know everything and instead clearly articulate what we don't know," says Oehmen, stating that this is a whole new schism that we need to move towards, also in politics. 

In this way, we can develop a flexible political contract structure and establish a political framework that can accommodate flexibility. Such structures enable the creation of solutions that specifically address people's needs. Flexibility is the key word here; it's about adjusting to changing priorities and being open to new information.

"The root of the problem is that we formulate very specific requirements. The way we formulate the contracts is based on the assumption that we have an extremely high degree of clarity about what the need is."

Want to read more about adaptable solutions? 

Then we have linked to some of the relevant research articles below:

Case study on Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping: Making the green transition resilient: adaptability by design

About the adaptive approach in one of the world's most ambitious green energy projects: Success by Design: The Need for an Adaptive Risk Governance Framework for the Danish Energy Island Program