Custom and Practice

I stand here today as a result of a long series of accidents, mistakes and misjudgements. Not all of them have been mine. However, this is not the occasion for recriminations, and I, for one, plan to make the most of what is still to come. Nevertheless, I will try not to be bland. Nobody, I am sure, thinks that I was elected President to be statesperson-like. Other people can do that better. So I will do my best to be forthright and in case anyone should feel provoked, I have waived my right to a respectful post-Address silence. Please feel free to start an argument immediately with luck it could last at least two years. It is customary for those who have been elected to any post to claim a mandate for their proposed changes (though this is harder for those elected unopposed). Naturally I do so too the more so since I came out ahead of not one but two competitors for the post of President. However, when I have rehearsed this claim during my year as President Elect, a surprising number of people have revealed themselves as hyper-democrats. "Split votes", they have murmured, or "minority rule". To which one response might be to point out that on this argument, the current Prime Minister's authority would be highly suspect. On reflection, however, I prefer to take a less exposed position, namely that my mandate is, at any rate, better than anyone else's. You will notice that I have already broken one of the great Unwritten Rules, which is "Keep politics out of operational research". (The other rules are "Keep politics out of sport", and "Don't bring religion into politics".) I intend to continue the trespass during the rest of this Address. Not because I wish to shock, but because it can't be helped. Politics is already there within O.R., and only a limited number of worthwhile statements about the practice and the future of operational research can be made without touching on the political domain. Indeed, to talk, write and act as if there were no politics in operational research is itself a distinctly political posture. These statements must stand for the moment as assertions. The justification will be provided in what follows. The subject of this Address, Custom and Practice, covers the questions of who O.R. works for ('custom'), as well as what we do and how we do it ('practice'). These were, by and large, the issues raised in the statement with which I offered myself for election. Since this must be the basis for my claim to a mandate, it may be helpful to quote a key section of it here. Thus: "If elected, I would regard this as a mandate for initiatives to find a more significant social role for operational research. We need to expand the range of O.R.'s clients it is not only business, military and government who have problems of decision-making under uncertainty. We need to make the Society more of a forum for the profession to question its assumptions and methodology, which currently exclude it from the larger and messier problems". This passage alludes to the three topics I wish to discuss here, namely who O.R.'s 'customers' are, how we go about helping them, and with what sort of problems. I will take them in sequence, though in reality the three issues are intermeshed. I should also stress that the thoughts expressed here are preliminary and provisional. Any defects I intend to blame on the general paucity and poverty of O.R. discussion on these issues.