Keywords

7.1 The Nature of Interlocking Surprises

I originally coined the notion of interlocking surprises in 2018 to characterize several interaction patterns that I observed in my research on the turbulent smartphone industry around the 2007 introduction of the iPhone. Briefly, some actors in the industry experienced several consecutive and cumulative surprises, both internal and external to their organizations, some of which were responses to their own previous surprising moves. While I will refer to this business context on occasion, I found the following recent quotations particularly useful for introducing the topic to safety audience:

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    “This is what living with climate change will look like: Not just an epic, Katrina-or Sandy-scale catastrophe every few years (though probably that, too), but a relentless grind of overlapping disasters [italicization my own], major and minor. The number of disasters that FEMA is handling is about twice what it was three years ago ….” [3].

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    “The traditional disaster management cycle had a rhythm of prevent, prepare, respond, recover (known as PPRR), with breaks in between to rest and recuperate, but lately we’ve experienced a constant COVID event with an overlay of flood and fire [italicization my own] that is essentially merging” [4].

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    “We have been confronted with a series of crises, one more grave than the other,” [italicization my own] President Macron said in a televised speech to the nation late last month. “The picture that I’m painting is one of the end of abundance,” he added. “We have reached a tipping point.” [5].

These diverse commentators—and others from business, government, and academia—call attention to emergent developments that they observed or experienced, as well as to the intersections of these developments. These developments involve unexpected elements and demonstrate parallels in accounts of discoveries and innovation, such as the emergence of ChatGPT [6]. For this reason, I refer to them through the more neutral term “surprises”, as opposed to other related terms, such as crises or disruptions. Indicating gaps between expectations and reality, surprises occur mainly when the expected does not happen and the unexpected does instead [7]. Beyond being surprising, these developments often display other features, such as being complex and interlocking, evolving, recursive, multiplex, cumulative, and nested. I refer to them simply as “interlocking surprises”, a term that seems to resonate with both academic and practitioner audiences and which I define below.

The concept of interlocking surprises refers to sudden, unexpected developments that are potentially interlinked in space (e.g., across several industries, nations, geographies, or spheres—such as political or economic), in time (e.g., one surprise overlays or leads to another, or to several), or in scale or level (e.g., a surprise external to an actor that leads to a surprising self-discovery, or a local surprise that constitutes a microcosm of a broader failure).

Consistent with contemporary views on ecological surprises [8], interlocking surprises describes and helps explain how surprises (and related notions, such as disruptions) evolve, circulate, and compound in an ecology of action. For instance, the March 2011 tsunami in Japan subsequently led to an earthquake, followed by a crisis at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant, and then to a subsequent cover-up of an alarming increase in local radiation levels so as to not interfere with the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Similarly, the COVID-19 pandemic—which is still not fully behind us—involved multiple waves of infections, new variants emerging on a regular basis, successive lockdowns, growing civil unrest, and international tensions. When the tsunami happened, nobody predicted its potential downstream effects; similarly, when COVID-19 began to spread, its social and political consequences were largely unforeseen.

As these examples illustrate, interlocking surprises can vary in form and degree alike. We know relatively more about a single or “bounded” surprise affecting a focal organization, such as when an infrastructure company needs to combat a security breach. Once we move from this baseline example, we enter the realm of “interlocking surprises” in which there are few subcases about which we know less. A relatively known instance of this phenomenon involves a focal organization encountering several surprises simultaneously: A perfect storm (looking at space). Another case involves surprises affecting a focal organization when these evolve and are concatenated, cascading, or escalating (looking at time); or when an organization is both an instigator and recipient of surprise (looking at scale). While such developments are often causally related, our formulation extends to cases where they simply co-occur, yet are experienced as interlocked by the recipient system or organization.

Furthermore, each of the above cases can also involve multiple and potentially interconnected systems or organizations. Here, too, we know relatively more about how such networks may be affected by a relatively “bounded” development—a common cause of failure, such as a cyber-attack—but less on how they address interlocking surprises over time or scale. To be sure, these different forms of surprises, either bounded or interlocked, do not necessarily imply a particular degree of severity—a single “bounded” but extreme surprise or disruption, or a very rapid sequence of repeated “small” developments, may overwhelm a focal system; in contrast, multiple but mild overlapping surprises over time may not. Furthermore, interlocking surprises may cancel each other out rather than reinforce one another.

The ecological concept of interlocking surprise reflects a new ontology of surprise: It highlights surprise as indicative of a process rather than a discrete episode, and as a relationship embedded in complex networks of beliefs and practices as well as in feedback loops rather than a linear and atomistic or isolated event.

In terms of process, interlocking surprises often feature an event chain—i.e., a set of events that are temporally and causally connected. These events and developments may occur or incubate prior to the onset of the surprise and in its aftermath (e.g., grasping its significance and downstream effects and the possibility of an adaptive or morphing threat or opportunity), and subsume “perfect storms”, or multilateral developments, as special cases. In contrast to viewing surprise as a reaction, where it is bound to a few seconds, viewing surprise as a development extends to a much longer period.Footnote 1

The concept of relationality stresses surprise as a “moment” in ongoing interactions, as a circuit rather than a stimulus–response sequence, and as a struggle rather than a disruption.

Thus defined, the notion of interlocking surprises highlights a key dimension of turbulent environments related to but distinct from dimensions such as the speed and amplitude of change, uncertainty, and non-linearity. It differs from standard accounts of change as either being gradual or featuring a punctuated equilibrium: While it involves discontinuities, importantly, these are experienced as being overlaid rather than appearing episodically. As such, there is no stable or dull moment.

Interlocking surprises are a particularly timely concept. Surprises, shocks, unexpected strategic shifts, and disruptions can happen in relatively serene settings. However, they are more likely to happen as organizational environments are increasingly characterized by multilateral competition and conflict, complex yet fallible products and platforms (e.g., smart cities, the Internet of things, and autonomous cars), rapid-onset climatic events, digital convergence, and the blurring boundaries of industries and fields.

While these and other systemic features of contemporary environments are likely to normalize surprises, they also make it more likely that surprises will interlock with one another rather than occurring as localized, singular external events compressed in time. The growing interconnectedness within and between humans and devices, in addition to the tighter coupling of humans and their natural environment, will provide further opportunities for applying the notion of interlocking surprises as a descriptive term, an explanatory device, and a boundary object for communities of practice. Treating surprise as an isolated, linear phenomenon may no longer suffice.

Finally, salient developments, such as rapid-onset climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, have sensitized us to the interlocking nature of surprises as well as to their potential to devastate existing systems, test their limits, and bring them to a halt. Often, these salient developments are viewed as root causes for subsequent interlaced developments. However, from a broader ecological perspective, this root cause attribution may not be as straightforward as it appears. For instance, as research has shown, the anthropogenic destruction of wildlife and natural ecologies for agricultural purposes can contribute both to climate change and—through their transmission by animals—to a faster spread of diseases and pandemics. Similarly, while they experience surprises and shocks, organizations such as nuclear plants and gas infrastructure entities may also act as agents or conduits of calamities to other affected parties.

7.2 Key Implications

Interlocking surprises heighten several distinctive and interrelated considerations beyond those imposed on organizations by simpler surprises:

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    Operating at or Beyond Limits: Any system, even a relatively robust one, has limits; when it experiences environmental variation outside its tolerance, it can become vulnerable or brittle [9]. Capacity is particularly stretched when surprises build on one another either spatially or sequentially, turning local crises into global ones. Extreme developments—and particularly the so-called “compound extremes”—are challenging, as systems are not designed to meet them; therefore, they may lead to a tipping point, a breakdown, or a painful restructuring.

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    Complicated Resource Allocation: A central challenge inherent to disaster recovery is the need to address short-term needs quickly, but with sufficient foresight to avoid creating new (or worsening existing) long-term vulnerabilities. Policies, rules, and models concerning a current salient threat or surprise may limit the allocation of resources needed for longer-term (and yet uncertain) challenges. Organizations often design reliable capabilities aimed at addressing a typical challenge, and these designs may lead them to view upcoming challenges as akin to the wars or issues they are accustomed to fight.Footnote 2 A myopic focus may also lead to under investment in longer-term strategic response capabilities (such as responding to the current energy crisis in ways that undermine investment in renewable energy). Furthermore, due to uncertainty, leaders face one of the toughest decisions any general has: when to deploy the reserves (assuming they exist).

    Politicians, too, must prioritize resource allocation across multiple systems. In addition to the known tradeoff between production goals and safety or maintenance goals, leaders may increasingly need to allocate even scarcer resources across multiple overburdened systems and to be able to better discern, in the context of widespread complexity, any potential errors of omission and commission.

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    Strained Attention Allocation: Attention is a scarce key resource that professionals and leaders alike need to allocate. Our mental models are accustomed to serial processing; however, multiple, simultaneous, or cumulative developments can lead to divided attention, attention deficits, and derivative blind spots, particularly since there is no central entity that can sense, address, and respond to them. Prioritizing, too, becomes more difficult when organizations face several intertwined surprises. Furthermore, managers often associate surprises with external events and developments. However, surprises also emerge within organizations due to factors such as complexity, underinvestment, skill decay, inadequate maintenance, and turnover; or—in the case of a network of organizations—because of fault lines between different parties. This added internal focus may further strain decision-makers’ attention and resource allocation.

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    Ineffective or Narrow Response Repertoires: Due to uncertainty and ignorance, decision-makers may not be in the best position to allocate resources effectively. This deficiency may be exacerbated when surprises morph and adapt. Organizations may also lack the skills and capabilities needed to address new types of surprises (such as when cyber-attacks became prominent). Furthermore, when surprises and crises escalate and exhibit nonlinear, multiplicative dynamics rather than additive effects, there may be a tendency to underestimate the extent to which and speed with which the system needs to respond, and a potential for runaway or avalanche dynamics. Similarly, the way surprises are interlinked may not be fully understood, which can lead to unanticipated outcomes and overlooked side effects. When multiple disasters occur in quick succession, periods of response, recovery, and preparation for future risks may take longer than originally expected.

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    Incomplete Learning Cycles: When surprises and crises pile up, organizations and individuals do not have enough time to reflect and learn from their successes, failures, or near-failures. As a result, new rules and practices may be added ad hoc and patched without adequate testing of their relevance and effectiveness. Some lessons remain unheeded and are not fully absorbed.

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    Shifts in Boundaries and Charters: The potential blurring of challenges and surprises may require organizations to adjust previously stable interorganizational (as well as intra-organizational) boundaries and charters. For instance, a rescue organization designed for combating fires and flooding may need to reconsider divisional jurisdictions when these two types of disasters overlap. Moreover, intelligence services used to view terror attacks and enemy plans as their main charter; now, they understand the need to include phenomena such as the spread of famine and the climate crisis as important parts of their agendas. Similarly, several previously disconnected organizations may be required to coordinate their responses to tackle common disasters. Boundary issues also occur since instigators of surprise often target the interfaces between established jurisdictions. Furthermore, as they impinge on traditional specialties, boundary shifts also impinge on the safety function within organizations, requiring them to revise their charters.

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    Resource Decay and Organizational Fatigue: Accumulated stress leads to eroding organizational resilience and increased fragility. This erosion can manifest itself through fatigue, burnout, paralysis, despair, and the associated losses of trust, alertness, and mindful responses. Furthermore, redundancy measures which ordinarily help with recovery and facilitate flexible responses may dry up, leaving the focal organization exposed with fewer degrees of freedom, margins of error, and lines of action. When individuals do not see the light at the end of the tunnel, they feel less in control and can become cynical and demoralized. Consequently, organizations increasingly approach an upcoming surprise, crisis, or disruption with a deficit rather than a surplus of resources.

7.3 Potential Remedies

Received wisdom suggests that given economic, technological, and political factors, a foolproof and robust system is an idealized rather than a real possibility. While interlocking surprises do not lend themselves well to easy solutions, recognizing their nature and increasing awareness of the distinct challenges they present are important first steps.

Beyond this, one can consider two broad and complementary strategies for mitigating the potentially negative effects of interlocking surprises: (1) building requisite variety and (2) employing smart solutions. Each of these umbrella strategies—as well as the more detailed solutions they encompass—needs to be evaluated with caution: One needs to specifically consider their feasibility, potential downsides, and the possibility of their interacting with other solutions.

7.3.1 Building Requisite Variety

In this first broad approach, the focal organization or system attempts to build in the requisite variety needed to address the unique challenges presented by interlocking surprises (in addition to those presented by “simpler” surprises).

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    Anticipation, Mapping, Sensing: Organizations and individuals can use tools such as system dynamics, event system models, dynamic simulations, and graph theory to form visual and even dynamic representations of how different surprises are linked across space, time, and scale. For instance, graph theoretical models may be used to distinguish between developments that affect other developments, that are affected by other developments, or both. Scenario construction expands managers’ horizons from a linear “official future”, which may fit recurrent or bounded surprises, to different alternative futures in which uncertainties and surprises are combined (e.g., both COVID-19 and terror attacks). This technique also turns attention to “wild cards” in the form of relatively unknown types of surprises. Scenario planning and other methods, such as pre mortem analysis, can then help identify the capabilities and responses needed to deal with these future contingencies and their differential proneness to failure. These anticipatory measures may then be reinforced in training programs and drills particularly designed to address interlocking surprises.

    Viewing surprises as interlocking also opens up the possibility that a focal firm might be able to better prepare itself by observing the responses of other actors affected by surprising developments either in adjacent settings or at an earlier time.

    Organizations may also use “issue management” systems that help them monitor newly unfolding developments in real time, categorize them, and prioritize them according to their immediacy, expected duration, and anticipated degree of severity. It may be particularly useful to consider the image of “living documents” that are continually revised and updated. This image, best exemplified in an online version of a news or media article that can be amended on an ongoing basis, may help promote dynamic monitoring and more flexible forms of agenda setting and resource allocation.

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    Structural Solutions: Interlocking surprises require better coordination within and across organizations, as well as the ability to use temporary organizing to flex boundaries quickly. Premised on overlap, some types of organizational arrangements—such as matrices, loose couplings, and heterarchy—may be considered as means for coping with the complexity associated with interlocking surprises. To better prepare for the unexpected, organizations need to cultivate solutions beyond a mere sense of paranoia. The latter can be institutionalized in organizational mechanisms, such as red teams and other forms of organized contestation.

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    Resources, Skills, and Capabilities: Interlocking surprises require a broader menu of skills and capabilities. When these are not immediately available, they require the development of new ones, either internally or through alliances with other organizations. Organizations also need to be able to mobilize resources rapidly, allocate them across different time scales, and recombine and repurpose them. Furthermore, due to the cumulative nature of interlocking surprises, some resources and capabilities may atrophy only to be needed again at a later point in time. For this reason, organizations need to exercise caution when thinking of completely abandoning or outsourcing capabilities and relationships that they may need to reactivate in the future.

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    Coupling the External Focus with an Internal One: As much as they need to heed external developments, leaders and other members of a given organization also need to be attuned to internal developments, and particularly to more gradual, less obvious developments. In most cases, what will determine a system’s success in coping with a situation is the interaction between external stressors and internal capabilities. Having an internal orientation requires an honest assessment of strengths and weaknesses—including current mental models and assumptions—and their potential resilience across different scenarios. Individuals and organizations are reluctant to admit to their internal failures and often resort to facades designed to impress or calm external audiences. Furthermore, organizations are often more motivated and better equipped to fight other organizations or to combat nature rather than confront their own “dark” sides or demons, such as those manifested in inertia, hubris, and stagnation. For these reasons, the qualifier of “honest” becomes even more important for an organization.

    Honest audits may be facilitated by incorporating an outside-in focus, which involves seeking the opinions of outsiders, such as “shortlists”, as well as respecting whistleblowers. Such audits need to heed more than merely what is easily measured and quantified. Similarly, organizations may do well to examine the relevance of prior rules originally designed or adopted under different circumstances and challenges, and, in turn, to explore their potential side effects under a new contingency. A periodic “house cleaning” is required, too, as it helps verify rules’ continued relevance under varied conditions. Overall, an internal orientation along the above lines may not be easy to implement; it may require a cultural change within an organization and a different balance between control and a learning orientation.

7.3.2 “Smart” Solutions

While they may sometimes also offer requisite variety, “smart” solutions tend to be synthetic and creative and thus often contain elements of “good” surprises. I will consider some relevant examples below:

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    Robust Responses: A robust strategy in the face of multiple interlinked developments and uncertainties enables a firm to do well in the context of different possible future scenarios. While it does not provide the best design to suit all circumstances, it provides improved solutions overall. In the literature on strategic responses to uncertainty, this orientation is also called “no regret” moves. Using such an approach, organizations may develop generalized capabilities and responses that may be deployed across more than one development or surprise.

    Beyond addressing variety, robust solutions may be able to address multiple temporalities. For instance, organizations may time their responses depending on the anticipated peak load in each development. Furthermore, solutions addressing the short term may also be effective in the longer term. Developed prior to the onset of COVID-19, Moderna’s mRNA technology platform is designed to address other outbreaks and illnesses in the future. Emirates Airlines, too, has designed security checks with useful applications beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. Generalized solutions may not necessarily be technological; changes to organizational culture can be useful across several distinct challenges.

    At a broader level, and often depicted as contradictory, safety-related solutions and efficiency-oriented solutions may be regarded as complementary; for instance, when a business case can be given for a safety-enhancing solution.

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    Breaking Affinities: The human mind—as well as organizational belief systems—tends to associate certain means with certain outcomes, couple specific problems with specific solutions, and link known causes with known effects. Over time, these duplets coalesce into tightly coupled affinities and rigid configurations. The process of breaking existing affinities [10] is a powerful means for repurposing, recombining, and rearranging terms and practices. It involves loosening tight affinities, dissociating them from their familiar contexts and companions, and reaffiliating and reshuffling elements in new ways. While considered to be a broad process of discovery and creativity, this may be particularly helpful in dealing with interlocking surprises. For instance, organizations usually consider their missions and charters through the lens of their products and services. A productive alternative may focus on organizational resources and inputs instead. An energy company that has developed an internal high-speed communication network may view its business as encompassing communications, too. During the COVID-19 pandemic, non-traditional players such as Dyson and Ford developed pandemic-related solutions, making them new, unconventional players in healthcare. Such bricolage can extend to the individual level, recombining their specific skills, relationships, and the like.

    More broadly, breaking affinities supports the idea of considering conceptual (and practical) substitutes. For instance, as safety professionals well know, anticipation and resilience may partially substitute for one another, culture and values may provide partial substitutes to strategy, and trust, norms, and values may substitute for formal rules.

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    Mitigating Surprises Through Innovation and Experimentation: Innovation and surprises are close allies, both conceptually [11] and, as evidenced by their joint operation in cyber-organizations and at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), practically. Considered a surprise from the perspective of the defender, the practice of using airplanes as weapons in the tragic events of 9/11 could be seen as an innovation by the attackers. Because of their capacity to probe the future, experimentation and innovation may be effective in anticipating surprises. This suggests that the difference between the originator of surprise and the organization experiencing it can be viewed as a “delayed discovery”. Had the target of surprise been innovating effectively, they would have been less surprised and perhaps become the disruptor themselves.

    In addition, while common forms of experimentation are not feasible in safety organizations, other types may be highly effective. For instance, organizations may practice “intelligent experimentation” [12]: This results from thoughtfully planned actions that have uncertain outcomes, are modest in scale, are executed and responded to with alacrity (eagerness), and take place in domains that are familiar enough to permit effective learning. The case of interlocking surprises may also highlight the need to design intelligent experiments with an eye to potential interactions and side effects.

7.4 Concluding Comments

While they may vary in their specific manifestations, interlocking surprises are here to stay. While on their face, dealing with them seems quite hopeless, this is not necessarily the case. A better understanding of the nature of interlocking surprises, their key implications, and potential responses thereto may thus provide useful stepping stones. Other, even more effective responses are likely to evolve from safety organizations and individuals themselves as they learn how to better cope with this more complex breed of surprises.