Thank you for this interesting essay. I am especially intrigued by the pragmatist undertone of the exercise planners. There is a lot of emphasis on experiental and tacit knowledge in contrast to a priori certainties about how crises are managed.

There are couple of questions I would like to ask about the selections that these planners make. First, which people are enacted, which are not? In your text this line seems to be marked by the category of “Nature”: even though various institutions can enter the exercise, most do it as sort-of external forces. It is interesting to notice the complete absence of normal lay people in the enactment, maybe that could change in the future.

Second, how are different kinds of people presented, whether they are enacted or belong to the category of “Nature”? Are there certain vulnerable groups (e.g. citizens) or even harmfully unpredictable groups (e.g. media)? I have noted these kind of valuations in the crisis management over here.

Thirdly, I find important that they are creating plausible rather than likely scenarios and that this is increasingly central. One could use an explanation from Ulrich Beck and Christopher Lau (2005, 531) on this: “(T)he institutions that are initially forced to cling to the old order are finding it hard to deal with the new fluid and hybrid forms, pluralizations and ambiguities that now exist. (…) The one common factor shared by the different modes of response to the institutional crisis facing the foundations of modernity is an acceptance of the need to make decisions and draw new and different boundaries.”

I am intrigued by how these these kinds of exercises reflect on boundaries, such as the distinction between the domain of natural causes and phenomena – where issues of responsibility are absent – and the domain of societal decision-making and responsibility.

References

Beck, Ulrich & Lau, Christopher (2005). Second modernity as a research agenda: theoretical and empirical explorations in the ‘meta-change’ of modern society. The British Journal of Sociology 2005 Volume 56 Issue 4.

(1) On the distinction between the genealogy and the question of effects: I agree that the effect is the main question, but found it interesting that there is the most explicit reflection on how to achieve certain effects (such as the emotional involvement of participants) in the 1950s and 1960s discussions – which is why the historical material is there. I agree with SJC that at least part of the sought after effect is to transform the disposition of participants toward preparedness.

(2) Why so many exercises today? There may not be a single answer to this. But it does seem that they are one available ‘solution’ to an increasing central problem: potentially catastrophic events that cannot be prevented. Which begs the question of why this apparent problem has become more central. Ulrich – any thoughts?

(3) The role of “stress models”. This is very intriguing. One doesn’t find explicit reference to the psychology of stress in the discussions of exercises or scenarios I’ve seen. However, it is the case that “system resilience” is something that organizations are striving for (as opposed to system-vulnerability). So it would certainly be worth looking into the question of how the genealogy of stress (which as I understand from Allan Young’s work comes out of animal physiology and the work of Hans Selye) and resilience links up to thought on organizations and social systems.

Apropos of Carlo’s point, it is interesting to think about how different forms of enactment work in different contexts. In my paper on enactment, I was trying to understand how enactment is linked to technologies for calculative choice. In this case, the lack of adequate historical data was indeed quite important, because the main way that experts generated frameworks for calculated choice relied on *lots* of historical events. Here it seems that your point (which I agree with) is that probability simply isn’t the most important question (not that it cannot be figured out — although that might be true also). It seems like you are describing imaginative enactment as a way to generate a certain regime of living — a certain mode of self-conduct. So the “problem” is not the lack of historical data. Rather, it is that of keeping key decision-makers “prepared” — in an ethical sense — for events that simply don’t happen very often.

It seems to me that the “effect” is really the main issue in these exercises. I have never been convinced that the lack of historical data is the main problem to which these exercises provide a solution. I mean there certainly is enough historical data around for pandemics and for terrorist attacks. So in terms of diagnosis, I am really not convinced by the first-order identification of the problem.

It is also interesting that Nature now stands not for natural laws but for unpredictable outcomes. This, I guess, is where chaos theory comes in.

The “how” approach suggested by Foucault is very helpful but ultimately there is also a “why” question. Why are we seeing a proliferation of these exercises today? I was wondering what your view on this is.