Science emanates from philosophy – intended as a certain way of interpreting the world and our actions upon it. As technology and engineering derive from science, they implicitly embed philosophical paradigms and preconceptions, too. And, as business becomes increasingly engineered and intertwined with technology, such preconceptions percolate into business mindsets and strategic decisions.

A powerful, subtle and diffused preconception is that steady-states are all that matter. “Steady-states” refer to situations that are fixed, stable, and not much changing. They label periods without much dynamics, or at least slow one, where “business as usual” works relatively fine, long-term planning is sufficiently easy and a few adjustments every now and then allow to steer one’s course along a planned path. In science and engineering, steady-states are often desirable, can be studied in full depth with calculus and well-established instruments, are usually controllable and easy to teach.

Most Western engineering curricula are based on steady-states. Similarly, in business, steady-states are welcome: they are controllable, amenable to simple risk management, and tractable.

The financial planning is rather straightforward, and shareholders can be immediately briefed. They are often implicitly taught, too. Steady-states resonate with habits and usual mindsets.

Steady-states can often be (artificially) identified retrospectively, by identifying periods and epochs that share some common characteristics, and can be separated and labelled clearly. For instance, “la belle époque” is seen in the collective imagination as a cohesive and unique period, with a beginning and a clear end, and a community of purpose that is not stained by major upheavals. Similarly, the “roaring 20s”, the “legendary 60s”, or any “golden age” implicitly refer to the identification and labelling (a posteriori) of steady-state periods. Much more complicated is, however, the identification and labelling of periods in real time. In fact, as any person living in the “belle époque”, during the 60s or in any other era may tell, change is ubiquitous. Change progresses over days, months and years. Whatever is not told, sweeps under the carpet of history between eras, and connects the so-clearly-defined-periods, is change.

Change is often an unwelcome guest. Science and engineering speak of “transients” – the periods (hopefully short) that a system takes to settle to a steady-state. Transients are difficult to analyze and compare, benefit from few properties, and are quite intractable and seldom predictable. Silently, this idea percolated into society and business, as transients should be made brief and buffered. They disappeared from the books of philosophers and historians. Only a few intellectuals dared to address the problem of transients, of the gray areas between settled culture, of the ridges and gaps where conflicting systems, ideas and norms collide. Albeit with due nuances, we find scientific “transients” in Michael Foucault’s “interstices”. Interstices are shadows, are gaps among cultural elements, are anything that is less defined and unclearly labelled.

In time, they are periods of turmoil, that seem quiet but possess change. They are the moments where the dust is up in the air, until settling again – sometime. Interstices can be moments of confusion and disorientation for businesses and people alike.

They happen in fieri, when there is no time to look behind and say “oh but that was clearly period X”.

As the world of today embraces faster change – think of the blinking surge of AI, of the speed at which information and misinformation spread, of the accelerated pace of startups (hatched in “accelerators” for business!) – interstices and transients become the norm. Thriving in change becomes an asset, and governing the gray zones is strategically advantageous.

Ethics and interstices: ethics has, and fills interstices

Towards interstices, ethics has a double stance.

First: ethics has interstices. Ethics is not static. Despite the quest to define an overarching and “steady” ethics, taken by intellectuals and philosophers over the centuries, numerous ethics coexist and evolve. It is not a mere matter of relativism (at any given time, there is more than one ethical paradigm that support a certain culture, and each one is relative to such culture).

It is a matter of change: ethics is dynamic. It can be redefined, adjusted, integrated with other ones. It feels turmoils and re-definitions, and is adjusted by pulling and pushing forces within “swarms” of actors.

The emerging ethics is a product of integration, multiplication and compromise.

Ethics is a historical product. As long as it evolves, it faces transients and interstices.

Tremendous efforts are necessary to reach agreed-upon steady-states – which then inform governance and law-making. Managing such interstices means being ahead of confusion, and surfing human-centric trends.

Second: ethics fills interstices. If change management aims at transiting from one “steady-state” to another, ethical strategy explicitly navigates transients and interstices. If law compliance aims at passively adjust to fill the gray areas, ethical strategy proactively anticipates the gray areas and modulates the incoming changes – changes of different nature and speed.

For instance, technological change may currently be more rapid than social change (in some countries more than others); information change may become slower at times; business disruption may accelerate or pause.

Ethical change, in general, is slower. It means that, for each interstice in other domains, ethics is usually at “steady-state”.

This is a great advantage: since transients are hardly predictable and controllable, optimization is challenging, and engineering situations almost impossible.

Instead, step-wise adaptation, incremental adjustments, and reactive/proactive actions can navigate people and companies through.

If rooted into “steady-state” principles, the task becomes easier. Like having a north pole during a storm at high sea. Ethics can be the compass. Once defined, ethical principles help defining brands, and provide companies with intellectual and paradigmatic instruments to navigate interstices.

Grasping and handling the ethics-interstice relationship requires re-thinking engineered project management into humanism – the understanding of basic human principles and values undermining business and social actions. It involves ready mindsets rather than optimization protocols. Nonetheless, it provides powerful paradigms to act and react during transients and turmoils, and to face hypes and fades with a firm grip of more stable “steady-states” factors. It handles intellectual and fundamental cues to move on and navigate uncertainty.

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PART 2 – The Ethical Interstice as Distributed Innovation and Sustainability Booster – via collective intelligence and ethical engineering.