How Do You Give Expert Advice in Transformational Times?

Seven decades of global economic growth and relative peace have provided great wealth, liberation, and enhanced well-being but have also overrun the Earth’s environmental boundaries, created vast inequalities, and spawned disruptive new technologies. Transformational change, for good or bad, is now inevitable. This creates a paradox for expert policy advice: We need experts more than ever. Unaided intuition will fail us as society leaps into the greater unknown. At the same time, transformational change makes communication among experts, decision-makers, and the public harder. Experts will be caught by surprise by novel shifts, just like everyone else, and consequential policy decisions will often pose questions they can’t easily answer. To square this circle requires a revolution in the way experts frame their task. Experts, and the public’s expectations of them, need to shift from predicting the future—asking what will happen—to helping identify policies that will generate good outcomes no matter what the future brings.