An Interview with Dr. Nadya Bliss

Dr. Nadya Bliss is the
Director of the Global Security Initiative at Arizona State University. A mathy
computer scientist, Bliss spent 10 years at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a
prestigious Federally Funded Research and Development Center, before coming to
ASU. New America and ASU have an extensive partnership in a number of areas,
including in looking at climate change and other natural resources challenges.
Last week, we deepened that partnership by formally adding Dr. Bliss to our
team as a non-resident Senior Fellow in the Resource Security Program. Sharon
Burke, Senior Advisor and Director for Resource Security, interviewed Dr. Bliss
about her work.

Burke: So, it
feels strange to be welcoming you to the New America team, since we’ve been
working together for more than a year now, I think. Nonetheless, welcome
aboard!

Bliss: Thank you –
I’m excited to be working together.

Burke: So, you are
also the Director of GSI at Arizona State University. Can you tell us about
GSI?

Bliss: GSI is the Global
Security Initiative, which supports ASU’s charter of impactful
interdisciplinary research. In fact, there are a number of such
university-level initiatives (meaning, they sit outside traditional academic
hierarchy allowing us to bring together various departments and disciplines).
Two other major ones are the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute for
Sustainability and the Biodesign Institute, and GSI. We all focus on interdisciplinary
challenges and approaches, though I like to describe GSI’s focus as “wicked
problems” in security.

Burke: What do you
mean by wicked problems? Are we talking about the Land of Oz?

Bliss, rolling her
eyes politely: Wicked problems were formally defined in a 1973 paper
by Rittel and Webber, “Dilemmas in the General Theory of Planning.”

Burke: That is not
a very exciting title.

Bliss: Maybe not,
but the content was and still is very exciting. The point was there were these
messy problems that don’t have neat solutions – interconnected problems and
equally interconnected solutions. In the paper, they actually defined 10 properties
of a wicked problem, the first being there’s no definitive formulation of a
wicked problem.

Burke: Is this a
trick?

Bliss: No, not
all. Look, if you think about something like building a rocket – what Rittel
and Webber called a “tame problem.” It is complicated, but you know what
you want it to do, you know what you have to do to build it — there are
parameters — and you know what the risks are to building it. You can approach
this with a traditional engineering methodology. But with a wicked problem,
it’s not that concise. A good example is climate change: this is a phenomenon
that defies easy categorization. It has an effect on infrastructure, on the economy,
on human health, on stability – and all at the same time, but it’s not all that
clear how it’s all connected. When you try to pick apart all of these elements,
there are propagating effects.

Burke: Okay, but
how does that translate into a work stream or a research agenda at GSI?

Bliss: We have a notion
of borderless domains – areas we work on, but that aren’t necessarily sharply
demarcated. Our four borderless domains are cyber security, climate security,
urban security, and health security.

Burke: Are those
the only four such borderless domains?

Bliss: Oh, no. But
those are the ones we are focusing on. And that doesn’t mean we won’t also
bring in other areas, by the way: that’s the benefit of being based in a
research university. It’s really a borderless domain itself.

Burke: So how do
you actually work on a problem with no clear formulation and no clear solution?

Bliss:  The idea is not to neatly pull apart a wicked
problem and say, there, we solved it.

Burke: Though that
would be nice.

Bliss:  The idea is to provide better tools for
understanding and addressing complexity – the analytics and the processes for
better decisions. So, for example, what information, data, and ideas do you
need to make better decisions about water scarcity in a desert climate, such as
Phoenix? Can you make better decisions about an emerging famine in a developing
nation? Can you make better decisions about trade agreements in the context of
a changing climate? That doesn’t mean GSI only works on wicked problems, but we
do tend to focus on problems that have messy aspects that require bringing in
disciplines from across the university.

Burke: I’m still
not sure I understand how you actually look at these problems. What’s your
approach? How do you avoid getting so enmeshed in complexity that you can’t
provide any useful insights?

Bliss: We have
cross-cutting response areas or research foci – robotics and autonomy,
analytics, decision making, and human and social conditions. If you go back to
the  Rittel and Webber paper, one of the
properties of wicked problems they define is “The planner has no right to be
wrong”. What does that mean? Essentially, you can’t fully test out a hypothesis
about how one would address a wicked problem. For example, say you are trying
to address the complexity of something like a transportation network in a city.
The planner can’t just build it out and then say “Nah, that is not going to
work, let’s start from scratch.”

On one side, this sounds messy and why do we even bother
with these. BUT, it actually gives us a measurable way to make progress. If
“the planner has no right to be wrong”, we can focus on helping the planner –
better anticipatory tools to identify vulnerabilities in a computer system, or
lack of resilience in infrastructure, or properties of trade networks that can
potentially contribute to conflict, or weakness of our healthcare system in
responding to an epidemic. Our research foci drive these.

Burke: Do you have
a favorite wicked problem?

Bliss: The thing I
really like about this wicked problem formulation is that it explicitly accepts
that all these things are interconnected, so in some ways, they’re all my
favorites. You might say my favorite problem is the integration of all those
wicked problems, such as how climate change interacts with new patterns of
diseases and how resilient infrastructure can mitigate some of the stressors.
Or how the emergence of famine can lead to political instability.

Burke: And the
point is…

Bliss: The point
is ultimately we want to make better decisions. In real life, and increasingly
so, challenges are complex, and we don’t want to run away from that complexity.
We want to look at it honestly.  We have
a tendency to ignore complexity. But our society has gotten to a point where we
can’t ignore it anymore. Energy, security, economy, globalization, health and
so on – it’s all interconnected. You can’t talk about Zika, for example,
without talking about the changing patterns of everything from mobility to environmental
factors. And this kind of study absolutely requires bringing together diverse
disciplines, which is the point of GSI.

Burke: How does
this fit into resource security?

Bliss: It doesn’t
make sense to talk about water, energy, and food security as separate concerns
– they all affect each other. You want to find a way to maintain analytical
rigor, though, and that’s what we’re striving for.

Burke: Why partner
with New America?

Bliss: We want our
work to be impactful for decision makers, so it makes sense to partner with New
America – we get to bring together academic rigor with effective policymaking.

Burke: Is the U.S.
Government set up to deal with wicked problems?

Bliss:  Our government is well positioned to start
addressing wicked problems, but it’s not there yet. There’s been a great deal
of discussion about removing stovepipes, but it has to be taken to a whole new
level. I’m really excited about this partnership, because I think it has the
potential to help transform how we approach these problems, from a policy
perspective.

Burke: I think we
have a lot of work to do, right?

Bliss: Right!