Beyond Answers Presented by AI: Unlocking Innovation and Problem Solving Through A New Science of Questions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Stefaan Verhulst and Hannah Chafetz: “Today’s global crises–from climate change to inequality–have demonstrated the need for a broader conceptual transformation in how to approach societal issues. Focusing on the questions can transform our understanding of today’s problems and unlock new discoveries and innovations that make a meaningful difference. Yet, how decision-makers go about asking questions remains an underexplored topic. 

Much of our recent work has focused on advancing a new science of questions that uses participatory approaches to define and prioritize the questions that matter most. As part of this work, we convened an Interdisciplinary Committee on Establishing and Democratizing the Science of Questions to discuss why questions matter for society and the actions needed to build a movement around this new science. 

In this article, we provide the main findings from these gatherings. First we outline several roles that questions can play in shaping policy, research innovation. Supported by real-world examples, we discuss how questions are a critical device for setting agendas, increasing public participation, improving coordination, and more. We then provide five key challenges in developing a systematic approach to questions raised by the Committee and potential solutions to address those challenges. Existing challenges include weak recognition of questions, lack of skills and lack of consensus on what makes a good question. 

In the latter part of this piece, we propose the concept of The QLab–a global center dedicated to the research and practice of asking questions. Co-developed with the Committee, the QLab would include five core functions: Thought Leadership, Architecting the Discovery of Questions, Field Building, Institutionalization and Practice, and Research on Questioning. By focusing on these core functions, The QLab can make significant progress towards establishing a field dedicated to the art and science of asking questions…(More)”.

Nudges and Nudging: A User’s Manual

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Cass Sunstein: “Many policies take the form of nudges, defined as liberty-preserving approaches that steer people in particular directions, but that also allow them to go their own way Some nudges attempt to correct self-control problems. Some nudges attempt to counteract unrealistic optimism. Some nudges attempt to correct present bias. Some nudges attempt to correct market failures, as when people are nudged not to emit air pollution. For every conventional market failure, there is a potential nudge. For every behavioral bias (optimistic bias, present bias, availability bias, limited attention), there is a responsive nudge. There are many misconceptions about nudges and nudging, and they are a diversion…(More)”.

These Words Are Disappearing in the New Trump Administration

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Karen Yourish et al: “As President Trump seeks to purge the federal government of “woke” initiatives, agencies have flagged hundreds of words to limit or avoid, according to a compilation of government documents.

The above terms appeared in government memos, in official and unofficial agency guidance and in other documents viewed by The New York Times. Some ordered the removal of these words from public-facing websites, or ordered the elimination of other materials (including school curricula) in which they might be included.

In other cases, federal agency managers advised caution in the terms’ usage without instituting an outright ban. Additionally, the presence of some terms was used to automatically flag for review some grant proposals and contracts that could conflict with Mr. Trump’s executive orders.

The list is most likely incomplete. More agency memos may exist than those seen by New York Times reporters, and some directives are vague or suggest what language might be impermissible without flatly stating it.

All presidential administrations change the language used in official communications to reflect their own policies. It is within their prerogative, as are amendments to or the removal of web pages, which The Times has found has already happened thousands of times in this administration…(More)”

How to Win a War Against Reality

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Review by Abby Smith Rumsey: “How does a democracy work if its citizens do not have a shared sense of reality? Not very well. A country whose people cannot agree on where they stand now will not agree on where they are going. This is where Americans find themselves in 2025, and they did not arrive at this juncture yesterday. The deep divisions that exist have grown over the decades, dating at least to the end of the Cold War in 1991, and are now metastasizing at an alarming rate. These divisions have many causes, from climate change to COVID-19, unchecked migration to growing wealth inequality, and other factors. People who live with chronic division and uncertainty are vulnerable. It may not take much to get them to sign on to a politics of certainty…

Take the United States. By this fractured logic, Make America Great Again (MAGA) means that America once was great, is no longer, but can be restored to its prelapsarian state, when whites sat firmly at the top of the ethnic hierarchy that constitutes the United States. Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy and self-identified liberal, is deeply troubled that many liberal democracies across the globe are morphing into illiberal democracies before our very eyes. In “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future,” he argues that all authoritarian regimes know the value of a unified, if largely mythologized, view of past, present, and future. He wrote his book to warn us that we in the United States are on the cusp of becoming an authoritarian nation or, in Stanley’s account, fascist. By explaining “the mechanisms by which democracy is attacked, the ways myths and lies are used to justify actions such as wars, and scapegoating of groups, we can defend against these attacks, and even reverse the tide.”…

The fabrication of the past is also the subject of Steve Benen’s book “Ministry of Truth. Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.” Benen, a producer on the Rachel Maddow Show, keeps his eye tightly focused on the past decade, still fresh in the minds of readers. His account tracks closely how the Republican Party conducted “a war on the recent past.” He attempts an anatomy of a very unsettling phenomenon: the success of a gaslighting campaign Trump and his supporters perpetrated against the American public and even against fellow Republicans who are not MAGA enough for Trump…(More)”

Standards

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Jeffrey Pomerantz and Jason Griffey: “Standards are the DNA of the built environment, encoded in nearly all objects that surround us in the modern world. In Standards, Jeffrey Pomerantz and Jason Griffey provide an essential introduction to this invisible but critical form of infrastructure—the rules and specifications that govern so many elements of the physical and digital environments, from the color of school buses to the shape of shipping containers.

In an approachable, often outright funny fashion, Pomerantz and Griffey explore the nature, function, and effect of standards in everyday life. Using examples of specific standards and contexts in which they are applied—in the realms of technology, economics, sociology, and information science—they illustrate how standards influence the development and scope, and indeed the very range of possibilities of our built and social worlds. Deeply informed and informally written, their work makes a subject generally deemed boring, complex, and fundamentally important comprehensible, clear, and downright engaging…(More)”.

Research Handbook on Open Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Handbook edited by Edited by Mila Gascó-Hernandez, Aryamala Prasad , J. Ramon Gil-Garcia , and Theresa A. Pardo: “In the past decade, open government has received renewed attention. It has increasingly been acknowledged globally as necessary to enhance democratic governance by building on the pillars of transparency, participation, and collaboration (Gil-Garcia et al., 2020). Transnational multistakeholder initiatives, such as the Open Government Partnership, have fostered the development of open government by raising awareness about the concept and encouraging reforms in member countries. In this respect, many countries at the local, state, and federal levels have implemented open government initiatives in different policy domains and government functions, such as procurement, policing, education, and public budgeting. More recently, the emergence of digital technologies to facilitate innovative and collaborative approaches to open government is setting these new efforts apart from previous ones, designed to strengthen information access and transparency. Building a new shared understanding of open government, how various contexts shape the perceptions of open government by different stakeholders, and the ways in which digital technologies can advance open government is important for both research and practice…

the Handbook is structured into five sections, each dedicated to highlighting important facets of open government. Part I delves into the historical evolution of open government, setting the stage for the rest of the Handbook. In Part II, the Handbook presents research on the core components of open government, offering invaluable insights on transparency, participation, and collaboration. Part III focuses on the application of open government across diverse policy domains. Shifting focus, Part IV discusses open government implementation within different geographical and national contexts. Finally, Part V introduces emerging trends in open government research. As a whole, the Handbook offers a comprehensive view of open government, from its origins to its contemporary progress and future trends…(More)”.

Reconciling open science with technological sovereignty

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by C. Huang & L. Soete: “In history, open science has been effective in facilitating knowledge sharing and promoting and diffusing innovations. However, as a result of geopolitical tensions, technological sovereignty has recently been increasingly emphasized in various countries’ science and technology policy making, posing a challenge to open science policy. In this paper, we argue that the European Union significantly benefits from and contributes to open science and should continue to support it. Similarly, China embraced foreign technologies and engaged in open science as its economy developed rapidly in the last 40 years. Today both economies could learn from each other in finding the right balance between open science and technological sovereignty particularly given the very different policy experience and the urgency of implementing new technologies addressing the grand challenges such as climate change faced by mankind…(More)”.

Nurturing innovation through intelligent failure: The art of failing on purpose

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Alessandro Narduzzo and Valentina Forrer: “Failure, even in the context of innovation, is primarily conceived and experienced as an inevitable (e.g., innovation funnel) or unintended (e.g., unexpected drawbacks) outcome. This paper aims to provide a more systematic understanding of innovation failure by considering and problematizing the case of “intelligent failures”, namely experiments that are intentionally designed and implemented to explore technological and market uncertainty. We conceptualize intelligent failure through an epistemic perspective that recognizes its contribution to challenging and revising the organizational knowledge system. We also outline an original process model of intelligent failure that fully reveals its potential and distinctiveness in the context of learning from failure (i.e., failure as an outcome vs failure of expectations and initial beliefs), analyzing and comparing intended and unintended innovation failures. By positioning intelligent failure in the context of innovation and explaining its critical role in enhancing the ability of innovative firms to achieve breakthroughs, we identify important landmarks for practitioners in designing an intelligent failure approach to innovation…(More)”.

Cities in International Decision-Making

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Agnieszka Szpak et al: “…argues that cities are becoming more active participants in international law-making and challenging the previously dominant nation-state approach of recent history.

Chapters explore key literature and legal regulations surrounding cities, providing the latest information on their international normative activities. This book includes multiple interviews conducted with the official representatives of cities and various international institutions, such as UN-Habitat, the EU Committee of the Regions, and the Congress for Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe. The authors investigate how, despite their strong role in international relations and international law implementation, the importance of cities has still not been adequately reflected in the structures of the Council of Europe, the EU and the UN. Ultimately, the book finds that cities have more impact on policy-making than on decision-making processes…(More)”.

Disinformation: Definitions and examples

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Explainer by Perthusasia Centre: “Disinformation has been a tool of manipulation and control for centuries, from ancient military strategies to Cold War propaganda. With the rapid advancement of technology,
it has evolved into a sophisticated and pervasive security threat that transcends traditional boundaries.

This explainer takes the definitions and examples from our recent Indo-Pacific Analysis Brief, Disinformation and cognitive warfare by Senior Fellow Alana Ford, and creates an simple, standalone guide for quick reference…(More)”.