"We deal with wild problems by collecting data that says nothing about the future"

Our data collection has become inflationary. It gives us more knowledge, but it doesn't necessarily make us smarter, and that's a huge problem in itself. "We become so focused on documenting that we forget the key questions," says Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen, Chairman of INVI's Board of Directors and Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Copenhagen.

Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen gives his perspective on what wild problems our society is facing and what is preventing us from solving them.

- What were your thoughts when Sigge Winther asked you to join the INVI board?

"Firstly, I was both excited and honored to be asked - and I certainly haven't been any less excited since. It's actually one of the most fun things I've ever been involved in. It has lived up to the expectations I had when Sigge came up with the idea, which was that this was a way to try to create real change. Instead of doing more of the same, we step back and ask what can we learn from what hasn't worked, how can we try to do it in a new and better way."

- When you sit in your office in the old municipal hospital and look out into the world, what do you think are the most important wild problems to solve?

"The paradox is that defining what the wildest problems are is almost a wild problem. I think our society is facing some fundamental challenges that range from transforming the energy sector to hospitals to solving security challenges."

"But the crazy problem, which is actually probably the biggest for me, is primary school. I have three children, one of whom is about to finish 9th grade, the other is about to finish high school, and the last has just started university. When I look back on their primary school days, I am left with the question: Can we really not do better?"

The transformative potential of crises

- Where do you see INVI standing in it?

"INVI's strength lies in our curiosity about what the answers really are. In other words, we don't just come and say: Here's the thing, there are three solutions, and they work every time. Instead, we try to dive into this and see what we can learn about what the problems are. That way, we can describe the paths that can lead us to a solution, rather than just coming up with the solutions."

- Since the corona epidemic, you have worked a lot with crises, including writing the book 'Krisesamfundet', and you are a regular host of the podcast 'Krisecast' on Ræson. Can you put into words how you think crisis rhetoric affects society's ability to deal with wild problems?

"This preoccupation with crises that we see in politics and our society in general has a strength because it has the potential for change. In fact, you could say that many of the things that INVI focuses on are actually also crises, big and small."

"But I'm afraid we've created a political culture where you can only solve problems when we're in crisis. The problem with that is that you then wait to do something about them until things have gone completely wrong, instead of solving them at a time when it hasn't become a crisis yet. And that also means that there can be a political temptation to frame things as a crisis, because that's the only way you can really mobilize the resources to take action."

"And the result is that it ends up being a bit unimaginative, because crisis management is inherently a kind of firefighting. There's no time to experiment and give yourself permission to go for solutions that you might not see the results of for a few years. The time pressure imposed by crisis policy can do a lot, but you can't use it all the time. Also because it creates fatigue. After all, no one, neither private nor public, can stand being in crisis all the time. And neither can political systems."

- Are crises still the focus of your research, or do you also research other things that are interesting in relation to wild problems?

"I'm currently writing an article about how AI is used in war to oversee combat operations. The problem here may well be that you actually automate a lot of decision-making processes, which can seriously challenge democratic control over how we wage war. In its basic structure, it's actually very similar to the problems of primary school, although you probably have to dig a bit deeper before you can see it."

- Where do you see that parallel?

"It's basically about what do you do if you can't see a problem? Then you try to gather more information about it. But it may well be that this collection of information doesn't actually make you much smarter. We can test children in primary school all we want. It makes us smarter about what they can and can't do. But it doesn't necessarily make us any smarter about how they learn - just like having lots of information about when the Russians fired their missiles is extremely useful, but it doesn't necessarily give you the recipe for how to win the war."

"But this is not a new phenomenon. Way back in the 60s, there was a British public policy researcher called Geoffrey Vickers who talked about this problem. Vickers' point was that there are two things to consider when making decisions. One is facts and the other is your ability to assess what is important and what is not important. And the latter is largely a normative question. What do we think would be good or bad?"

"And Vickers' point was that if you think you can only solve policy problems by doing these factual analyses, you're only halfway there, because the way to solve a problem will always be a dialogue between your values and analysis on the one hand, and concrete knowledge on the other. And often, concrete knowledge will actually be the least, because the things you have to make decisions about are in the future. And by their very nature, you can't measure them."

"Oddly enough, he writes this two years before the first writings about wild problems appear. So it's just an expression that this complexity, and the ability to act in this complexity, which characterizes a modern society, is something that has been with us for a long time."

Mikkel Vedby's Christmas recommendation: Charlotte Larsen's The best and the worst of my life as a leader

There's no getting around the fact that Christmas is almost here. If you have to send out a wish for a book, what would you recommend?

"I would like to recommend Charlotte Larsen's The Best and the Worst of My Life as a Manager. It describes what it's like to lead in the individual classroom or hospital department. It shows that wild problems are not an abstraction, but something we try to deal with in everyday life. And it describes how fragile you can feel as a leader. I think that message also belongs to Christmas."