“It’s inevitable that one or other of the mutations will [pass easily between humans] and H5 looks the favourite candidate. Some are saying H5 has been around for 10 years and never will but I don’t believe that.” (Professor John Oxford, cited in BBC news Magazine’s “Is Bird Flu Still a Threat?“)

As with anticipation, there is something peculiar about risks. They do not ‘happen’ but always stand in reserve. Yet risks are not simply future events; they have a presence and the presence is expressed in the language of probability. The presence of a risk shows up discursively and can be supported by a range of devices, most notably statistics, simulation models and anecdotes. Risks are made present through these devices and ‘become real’ as they mobilize concern, call for action, and thus turn into objects to be managed (Van Loon, 2002).

Risks also undergo trials of strength (Latour, 1988). Simulations and experiments are often favoured trials of strength to test ‘what happens if’ a risk is encouraged to become an actuality (and ceases to be a risk). However, life itself is also a trial of strength and the case of Avian Influenza H5N1 is just one example of what happens to a risk if it seems to be ‘failing’ its trial of strength. When that happened, new formats of mediation were deployed to translate this failure into a new virtuality, one that could be deployed to re-affirm the adequacy of the initial anticipation.

- Joost

Virtu: taste for works of art.
Virtue: power, influence, efficacy, conformity to moral principles … high merit of accomplishment, valour (from vir, man)
Virtual: what is in essence or effect(The Oxford Concise Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford: Clarendon Press.)

It is not a difficult to see a link between virtual and virtuosity, especially when considering anticipation. Great football players, for example, are able to anticipate what is going to happen next before their opponents do. This gives them the advantage of both moving themselves into the best position, as well as giving them a head start in thinking about the next move. It is even easier to see that great chess players are masters of anticipation. They anticipate what the chessboard will look like many moves ahead of the one they are in at the moment of anticipation. Likewise management also relies on a lot of anticipation. One needs to ‘see ahead’ in order to ‘manage’ the contingencies of complex being. And this needs to be translated into making the right moves ‘ahead of time’ so that all is in place when the event comes into being.

In football, anticipation is a skill or better: a combination of skills, a particular kind of virtuosity. The skills of anticipation in football are a combination of physical, tactile comportment and perception c.q. ‘insight’. These can be trained, no question about that, but they do come to some players more naturally than to others to an extent that most insiders in the football industry would define it as a ‘talent’, as something that is more implicit and instinctive. One could redefine this as an economic issue: it is more costly to train someone without talent to achieve the same level as someone with talent.

In chess, however, anticipation is a bit more explicit. It is tied to intelligence and logic; it is mathematical. It can be trained it can even be taught, even if there remains a substantial element of contingency related to the psychological nature of strategic gaming. Of course, being a great chess player also requires talent, lots of it, in the same way that not everyone can become a successful mathematician. However, this talent needs to be cultivated in a different way than that of a footballer. A footballer has to cultivate an instinct of anticipation; a chess player needs to master its logic.

Management is neither football nor chess. Being neither fish nor fowl, it sits rather uncomfortably between instinct and logic. The management literature may speak of management styles: some being more ‘hands on’ others more ‘visionary’, some more relying on instinct and impulse, others more on information, analysis and deduction. But in all of these forms, they are simply modalities of labeling specific arrangements of settings, actions and associations (Law, 2004).

- Joost