An event is a sudden, unexpected, unpredictable change in a situation. We can use the work philosophers have done on how this happens to better recognize and respond to events.

There are two steps required for laying out the world in a way that shows up sites for events, and three in responding to one.

• Create an encyclopedia of a situation. A situation is composed of elements. In a country, these elements might be the individuals living in the country, and in a company the workers and assets that comprise it. As will become clear in the next step, it is important that this encyclopedia of the situation is exhaustive. We will call these elements presented in the situation.
• Understand the state of the situation. How are the parts of the situation organized and represented? In a country, this might be the representation of individuals as voters, taxpayers or recipients of benefits. In a company, it might be an organigram or a process-overview for how the money is made.

At this point, you can look for discrepancies between the two ways of analysing the situation. In particular, look for elements that are presented, but not represented. In a country this might be the undocumented and in a company it might be people doing meaningful work every day that are not represented at the level of the company’s strategic vision. These discrepancies then have the potential to lead to events. An event is a moment in which the discrepancy becomes glaringly clear and unsustainable. This might be the undocumented forming themselves as an interest group in their own right (for example by striking), or the realization that the largest gain in efficiency came from a script by a system admin who was merely deemed “support staff” until then. Once an event has occurred, the next three steps are necessary to keep the event alive.

• Name the event. The particular event at its particular time and place needs to be named so that one can be faithful to it. This might be the move from calling something “social unrest” to “the October Revolution” or establishing the term “digitalization”
• Force the event. This means taking the previously unrepresented elements and bringing them into representation. There will often be resistance to this.
• Practice fidelity to the event. There will be betrayal of the event – in a business this might be people saying “It was all just hype” and in a state it might be trying to reduce a revolution to simply the same rioters from years ago doing their thing again.

In dealing with an event, various things can go wrong:

• We may create phantom events. These are not actually events but are mistaken as such. In a company context, consultants will always want to declare events, and in a society, it’s the habitual revolutionaries that see in every outburst a new beginning.
• We may milk the event. This means trying to get more out of the event or at a faster speed than it supports. An event moves at its own pace and we must focus on being faithful to it rather than trying to throw our own goals onto it.

References

Badiou, Being and Event