Anticipation in Action

The term anticipation in action is inspired by Donald Schön, who showed how professionals and other practitioners work on the basis of “reflection in action.” Similarly, anticipation in action combines extrapolations based on experience, guided by overall attitudes or preferences: for instance, precautionary or risk embracing, and ongoing action, taking possible consequences and further effects into account. Anticipation in action includes intelligence about what might happen, supported by monitoring and learning, and early signaling (promising or warning) and, ideally, some insight into the strategic games that are played around early signaling (second-order anticipation). The title of a report of the European Environmental Agency, “Late Lessons From Early Warning,” edited by Poul Harremoës, is indicative of the recognition of the importance of early warning, as well as of how anticipatory knowledge is a part of actor strategies and reactions, and how its fate is determined by the existing, emerging, and overlapping strategic games. Anticipation in action is an aspect of human life and is visible in ongoing actions and interactions. It can become institutionalized and professionalized. Action-related anticipatory knowledge is increasingly important in our societies. There are anticipatory approaches to compensate for uncertainty, like collective insurance, along with risk assessment and prudence. Institutionalized anticipation arrangements, like government planning bureaus, are also put into place.

Anticipation taken as a separate cognitive task, as in how to “guesstimate” the future, has become professionalized. The emergence of forecasting in the 1950s and 1960s and subsequent simulation modeling, and the way this was enacted in some policymaking is a clear example. This is a modernist venture, with a long tradition of planning, and an even longer tradition of risk mitigation through insurance (starting with cargos of merchant ships in the 15th century). A massive amount of technical-professional work is involved. Its actual uptake is predicated on practices of anticipation-in-action in various domains. Ulrich Beck's diagnosis of the “risk society” can be read as a repositioning of technical-professional expertise, as part (and a contested part) of reflexive modernization.

For newly emerging technologies like nanotechnology, anticipation in action is an integral part of their dynamics. There are expectations, leading to hype. There are visions and scenarios, up to trillion dollar market projections, without much checking of their robustness. The fact that hype occurs is recognized, but rarely counteracted. What does happen is reflexive reference to Gartner's hype-disappointment cycle, and lessons are drawn about the need to preempt, or at least mitigate, disappointment.

[Page 17]Clearly, self-fulfilling as well as (hopefully) self-negating anticipations can occur. Sometimes these are part of strategic games that reinforce certain trends and developments. Moore's Law of regular increase in density of units on a “chip” (an integrated circuit) and of the speed of microprocessors is an example: its regularity over the last four decades depends on the continuity of the strategic game among the chips producers and their government and research and development allies, which use Moore's Law as a reference in their roadmapping exercises and strategic decisions.

Anticipatory claims, in general and about nanotechnologies, can be contested. By now, this is already in place for modeling as a decision support tool, and for concrete applications in water management and traffic management. Extrapolations from models are inevitably speculative. Models of global climate change are a case in point, and their discussion shows how clashes of interests and powers are an integral part of anticipation in action.

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