IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2023 - 58

Opinion
Opinion
Calling in the System: Rethinking
Approaches to National Security and
Intelligence
Mariana Zafeirakopoulos
Design Lab
University of Sydney
Darlington, NSW 2008, Australia
 When it comes to problems that have a social
dimension, there are often strong and opposing positions.
This friction can actually help create change
in the system if harnessed correctly. Ross [4] advocates
for an approach that involves " calling in " the
system to be able to build a culture of learning and
understanding rather than beginning by " calling out "
human rights injustices.
Ross [4] sees that " calling in " is an important aspect
when it comes to teaching justice by working through
the root causes of social disharmony. The term " calling
in " originates from Loan Tran's work on the harms
of " othering " that stems from " cancel " culture or " call
out " culture. The idea behind cancel or call out culture
is that individuals or groups of people should express
aloud-whether verbally or in written form-how
other people should behave when their actions do not
necessarily align with their own morals, values, sense
of justice, or worldview. The approach stems from a
perceived realm of expertise-the idea that any one
person or group has answers about how we should
be in the world and knows what is right and wrong.
By contrast, the " calling in " approach is concerned
with understanding, bridging gaps, seeing the world
from different perspectives, and creating closeness by
understanding people's experiences, fears, or perceptions
about the world. By creating this new human and
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2023.3277080
Date of current version: 7 July 2023.
58
1551-319X © 2023 Crown Copyright
relational way of understanding the world, we will have
more ways to grapple with problems that are open, networked,
dynamic, and complex [3].
Exploring human relationality is not usually associated
with national security-which, in the Australian
context, also includes serious and organized
crime issues which are the domain of law enforcement.
We step into this discord and explore three
questions pertaining to the human dimension of
national security issues: First, how might we categorize
the current approach to national issues? Second,
what are the limitations of this thinking and, finally,
what might an alternative look like?
To help answer these questions, Snowden et al.'s
[5] Cynefin framework will be used as guidance for
how problems are approached. The Cynefin framework
has its origins in 1999 and was inspired by several
approaches including theories of complexity and
systems thinking. It comes from the Welsh word for
habitat, drawing from the idea that there are different
types of problems each with its own approach. The
way one approaches a problem depends on how one
perceives the problem. Since its inception in the late
1990s, practitioners have played with and applied
the framework to different contexts and continue to
evolve the framework through reflective practice.
The Cynefin framework states that there are four
domains of problem types, surrounding a fifth which is
confusion or aporia. Figure 1 shows the four problem
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5499-7358
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2023
