@glynmoody picks up a #securitytheatre story from Bruce Schneier's blog, If You See Something, Think Twice About Saying Something (May 2010).
It seems someone got arrested for reporting a suspicious package. Bruce seizes on this as evidence that the security regime is stupid - both the rules and the people executing the rule - and Glyn says "we need more cases like this".
However, as @Foomandoonian points out (based on further information posted in the comments below Bruce's blog), the original news story that prompted Bruce's scorn omitted a crucial detail - an alleged identity between the person reporting the suspicious package and the person leaving it there in the first place. Glyn replies "sure, but I'm interested in the larger point, not the *facts*..."
So we appear to have a bit of face-saving and jumping-to-conclusions here. Either the police are unfairly accusing this gentleman of having deliberately made a false report, or Bruce and Glyn are unfairly pinning the tail on the wrong donkey this time.
Bruce is well-known for his criticism of security theatre, and his blog contains numerous examples of the theatre of the absurd. A few years ago, in my post Intelligence or Fear? I used one of his examples to illustrate intelligence and stupidity, in that instance preferring Bruce's interpretation of events to that of the Australian Prime Minister.
Of course it is tempting to draw attention to any incident that seems to confirm one's strongly-held position about something or other. I've probably done this myself from time to time. But it's not so good if you just find yourself misreading the facts to suit your prejudices.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Britain in 2010
In January 1991, the Policy Studies Institute (PSI) published a report called Britain in 2010. In 12 May 2010, contributors to the original report and other policy researchers gathered at the RSA for a seminar called Back to the Future, to take a retrospective look at the report.
How should we judge this report?
Malcolm Rigg identified four criteria
Policy-makers might argue that the relative numbers are more useful than the absolute numbers. If we know what commodities and capabilities are going to have greatest value in twenty years time, then that should influence our long-term development choices. If we assume that transportation costs are low, then we can expect certain types of work (such as manufacturing) to migrate to low-wage parts of the world. If services then become more expensive than goods, then cheap labour will move to those cities where people can afford them, and in their private lives even politicians (who should know better) are tempted to pay cash or turn a blind eye to their lack of documentation. The challenge for futurologists is not to identify these links, but to work out their cumulative effect over many decades.
But as Terry Barker pointed out, numerical predictions are sensitive to the pace of change - timing and inertia. Imbalances can build up, so it is not hard to predict that some collapse or readjustment will occur at some stage, but the exact scale and timing of this event is almost impossible to predict accurately. (This is rather like predicting earthquakes and volcanic eruptions - we know roughly where they are likely to occur, and we may even be able to assign a probability to an event in a given time period. but we cannot be certain.) And numerical predictions are also sensitive to extremely small differences in starting conditions. For example, tiny differences in relative prices can have a cumulative effect after many years - thus the manufacturing cost advantage of China over Europe has resulted in a significant global shift in economic power over the past twenty years, to an extent that was not fully appreciated in 1990.
So that's an important issue that failed to emerge from the numbers. Another important trend that was overlooked in 1990 was the rise of the internet. Obviously there was some interest in the socioeconomic potential of various technologies, but much of the attention at that time was focused on workplace technologies such as robotics, perhaps over-influenced by a belief in the economic primacy of manufacturing.
At the start of the seminar, Jim Northcott had mentioned the issue of policy inertia - taking a long time to shift strategic thinking to accommodate changing circumstances and demands - and suggested that policy makers were slow to abandon the assumptions of the cold war. But the economic importance of manufacturing, and the naive belief in the value created by financial services, could also be regarded as a form of policy inertia.
In his talk, Malcolm Rigg looked specifically at housing - an area that can easily slip below the radar of policy debate. Malcolm pointed to the enormous waiting lists for social housing, suggested this was because housing policy moves much slower than housing markets, and argued that therefore housing policies needed to be more flexible. But this assumes an acceptance of housing goals, whereas the defacto policy (POSIWID) is clearly to use waiting lists as an instrument of policy. Malcolm also mentioned the actions of Conservative governments (Heath as well as Thatcher) pushing through policy decisions that resulted in increased house prices and increasing housing shortages. But policy analysts should not discount the possibility that governments might wish to influence housing markets for (short-term) political advantage.
Ben Martin talked about the relationship between forecasting and foresight. This is about creating the future, not just predicting it, and links to Fred Steward's insistence that reading current signs and trends had to be combined with articulating societal goals. Ben also talked about the parallels between policy studies and innovation, which implied that policy studies should be driven by a specific demand for policy insight, and mindful of the absorptive capacity of the client organizations.
Fred also spoke eloquently about the need for a new kind of evidence-based policy, based on practical experiments and learning-by-doing. Matthew Taylor endorsed this, and spoke of the importance of what he called civic invention - practical social action rather than merely sending pamphlets to ministers. This marriage between innovative thinking and practice is entirely compatible with our vision for the Next Practice Research Initiative.
Coming back to the numbers question, I was struck by the limitations of making forecasts in terms of traditional metrics such as GNP or growth, and I wondered about the role of policy studies in getting society to think in terms of more sustainable measures of well-being. In my question to the panel, I invoked the memory of Donella Meadows, and suggested that shifting the metrics counted as a more powerful leverage point in her model. Apparently John Kay (the economist and author of Obliquity) is currently working on this question. I look forward to seeing the results.
How should we judge this report?
- accuracy?
- relevance?
- practical effect on policy and governance?
Malcolm Rigg identified four criteria
- useful numbers
- important issues
- helpful conceptual tools
- making sense of the whole
Policy-makers might argue that the relative numbers are more useful than the absolute numbers. If we know what commodities and capabilities are going to have greatest value in twenty years time, then that should influence our long-term development choices. If we assume that transportation costs are low, then we can expect certain types of work (such as manufacturing) to migrate to low-wage parts of the world. If services then become more expensive than goods, then cheap labour will move to those cities where people can afford them, and in their private lives even politicians (who should know better) are tempted to pay cash or turn a blind eye to their lack of documentation. The challenge for futurologists is not to identify these links, but to work out their cumulative effect over many decades.
But as Terry Barker pointed out, numerical predictions are sensitive to the pace of change - timing and inertia. Imbalances can build up, so it is not hard to predict that some collapse or readjustment will occur at some stage, but the exact scale and timing of this event is almost impossible to predict accurately. (This is rather like predicting earthquakes and volcanic eruptions - we know roughly where they are likely to occur, and we may even be able to assign a probability to an event in a given time period. but we cannot be certain.) And numerical predictions are also sensitive to extremely small differences in starting conditions. For example, tiny differences in relative prices can have a cumulative effect after many years - thus the manufacturing cost advantage of China over Europe has resulted in a significant global shift in economic power over the past twenty years, to an extent that was not fully appreciated in 1990.
So that's an important issue that failed to emerge from the numbers. Another important trend that was overlooked in 1990 was the rise of the internet. Obviously there was some interest in the socioeconomic potential of various technologies, but much of the attention at that time was focused on workplace technologies such as robotics, perhaps over-influenced by a belief in the economic primacy of manufacturing.
At the start of the seminar, Jim Northcott had mentioned the issue of policy inertia - taking a long time to shift strategic thinking to accommodate changing circumstances and demands - and suggested that policy makers were slow to abandon the assumptions of the cold war. But the economic importance of manufacturing, and the naive belief in the value created by financial services, could also be regarded as a form of policy inertia.
In his talk, Malcolm Rigg looked specifically at housing - an area that can easily slip below the radar of policy debate. Malcolm pointed to the enormous waiting lists for social housing, suggested this was because housing policy moves much slower than housing markets, and argued that therefore housing policies needed to be more flexible. But this assumes an acceptance of housing goals, whereas the defacto policy (POSIWID) is clearly to use waiting lists as an instrument of policy. Malcolm also mentioned the actions of Conservative governments (Heath as well as Thatcher) pushing through policy decisions that resulted in increased house prices and increasing housing shortages. But policy analysts should not discount the possibility that governments might wish to influence housing markets for (short-term) political advantage.
Ben Martin talked about the relationship between forecasting and foresight. This is about creating the future, not just predicting it, and links to Fred Steward's insistence that reading current signs and trends had to be combined with articulating societal goals. Ben also talked about the parallels between policy studies and innovation, which implied that policy studies should be driven by a specific demand for policy insight, and mindful of the absorptive capacity of the client organizations.
Fred also spoke eloquently about the need for a new kind of evidence-based policy, based on practical experiments and learning-by-doing. Matthew Taylor endorsed this, and spoke of the importance of what he called civic invention - practical social action rather than merely sending pamphlets to ministers. This marriage between innovative thinking and practice is entirely compatible with our vision for the Next Practice Research Initiative.
Coming back to the numbers question, I was struck by the limitations of making forecasts in terms of traditional metrics such as GNP or growth, and I wondered about the role of policy studies in getting society to think in terms of more sustainable measures of well-being. In my question to the panel, I invoked the memory of Donella Meadows, and suggested that shifting the metrics counted as a more powerful leverage point in her model. Apparently John Kay (the economist and author of Obliquity) is currently working on this question. I look forward to seeing the results.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Symptoms of organizational stupidity
Here's a few to start with.
Any more? Please add comments.
Does your organization suffer from any of these symptoms? I'm looking for opportunities to test a new diagnostic tool. Please contact me.
For an example of oscillation, think of an organization that keeps madly switching between extreme centralization and extreme decentralization.
Eliot Jaques produced a theory of management hierarchy based on the idea that higher levels of management should be capable of longer-term thinking; longer-term thinking (often misleadingly called "strategic") is clearly one aspect of organizational intelligence that is valued in the management literature.
Following Morgan's comment, I'm explicitly separating out feelings and motivators (such as ambition, fear, greed, mistrust) - these may drive or inhibit action, but they can be handled in either intelligent or unintelligent ways.
| Choke | Inability to access capability when it is needed. |
| Denial | Defensive denial often follows what Freud called "kettle logic". "The problem doesn't exist, and anyway it isn't a problem for us, and anyway we're already dealing with it." |
| Guesswork | Acting in the dark. |
| Meddle | Tinkering and management interference without real understanding. |
| Muddle | Confused and bewildered by many overlapping and conflicting narratives. |
| Panic | Taken by surprise, responding in haste. |
| Policy-based evidence | Finding data to support or justify an existing decision or state, while ignoring any data that might contradict. (Contrasted with evidence-based policy.) |
| Repetition / Oscillation | Repeating the same mistakes without learning. Oscillation means going backwards and forwards between two problems without permanently solving either of them. |
| Short-Sighted / Tunnel Vision | Narrow focus on a single short-term goal, inability to consider broader or longer-term vision. |
Any more? Please add comments.
Does your organization suffer from any of these symptoms? I'm looking for opportunities to test a new diagnostic tool. Please contact me.
Notes
For the distinction between choking and panicking, see Malcolm Gladwell, The Art of Failure (New Yorker, August 2000).For an example of oscillation, think of an organization that keeps madly switching between extreme centralization and extreme decentralization.
Eliot Jaques produced a theory of management hierarchy based on the idea that higher levels of management should be capable of longer-term thinking; longer-term thinking (often misleadingly called "strategic") is clearly one aspect of organizational intelligence that is valued in the management literature.
Following Morgan's comment, I'm explicitly separating out feelings and motivators (such as ambition, fear, greed, mistrust) - these may drive or inhibit action, but they can be handled in either intelligent or unintelligent ways.
See also
Scott Berkun, Why do big companies suck?
Do banks need more intelligence?
Does it matter if clever people are quitting the large banks? Perhaps not, suggests this article by Graham Bowley and Louse Story, Crisis Altering Wall Street as Big Banks Lose Top Talent (New York Times, 11th April 2009) via John Hagel.
I think one of the critical questions here is how the intelligence of these "talented bankers" can be mobilized to produce banking wealth - not just for themselves but for the banks and their shareholders, as well as the country as a whole. It is not the intelligence of the individual alone that matters, but how this intelligence is mobilized to increase the collective intelligence of the organization.
Clearly there have been many failures in collective intelligence. Banks may have failed to supervise their traders and oversee their trading risks properly. The failures were not just with the banks, but with national and international regulators.
Because the warning signs were visible for those who knew how to read them. In his book The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo talks to some of the few people who anticipated the crisis (and did very well out of it). He recalls a conversation with a friend who had a key role in the Chinese banking system. "He explained to me how he had locked down his own financial institutions in 2007 to avoid just the sort of crisis now sweeping the globe. He was shocked that the United States had not seen it coming, had not acted. He had seen it, had felt this incipient crisis." (p 6)
Ramo also tells the story of Bill Browder, who spotted a small newspaper item in July 2007. "In New York an auction of debt from leveraged-buyout deals had failed to draw enough bidders and was shut down. To most of the investing world this looked simply like a small hiccup in an otherwise well-functioning financial system. But Browder recognized it for what it was: a sign that the world had run out of the ability to absorb new debt." (p 56)
Moving banking brains into smaller banks certainly seems consistent with a political drive towards smaller banks (see my post Does Britain need smaller banks?), but it raises two important questions. Do we care more about the intelligence of an individual bank, or about the intelligence of the banking system as a whole? And how does the kind of cleverness that was previously highly valued and rewarded by the large banks fit into the new kinds of intelligence that will now be required?
- Talented bankers are migrating to boutique firms.
- Risk-taking ... and innovation are spreading out. "This is a good thing."
- The country may be better off if the banking industry is less concentrated.
I think one of the critical questions here is how the intelligence of these "talented bankers" can be mobilized to produce banking wealth - not just for themselves but for the banks and their shareholders, as well as the country as a whole. It is not the intelligence of the individual alone that matters, but how this intelligence is mobilized to increase the collective intelligence of the organization.
Clearly there have been many failures in collective intelligence. Banks may have failed to supervise their traders and oversee their trading risks properly. The failures were not just with the banks, but with national and international regulators.
Because the warning signs were visible for those who knew how to read them. In his book The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo talks to some of the few people who anticipated the crisis (and did very well out of it). He recalls a conversation with a friend who had a key role in the Chinese banking system. "He explained to me how he had locked down his own financial institutions in 2007 to avoid just the sort of crisis now sweeping the globe. He was shocked that the United States had not seen it coming, had not acted. He had seen it, had felt this incipient crisis." (p 6)
Ramo also tells the story of Bill Browder, who spotted a small newspaper item in July 2007. "In New York an auction of debt from leveraged-buyout deals had failed to draw enough bidders and was shut down. To most of the investing world this looked simply like a small hiccup in an otherwise well-functioning financial system. But Browder recognized it for what it was: a sign that the world had run out of the ability to absorb new debt." (p 56)
Moving banking brains into smaller banks certainly seems consistent with a political drive towards smaller banks (see my post Does Britain need smaller banks?), but it raises two important questions. Do we care more about the intelligence of an individual bank, or about the intelligence of the banking system as a whole? And how does the kind of cleverness that was previously highly valued and rewarded by the large banks fit into the new kinds of intelligence that will now be required?
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Subsidy as Economic Illusion
@james_randerson @guardian_clark and @TimHarford debate whether nuclear power can survive without subsidy.
@james_randerson picks up a statement by Chris Huhne, the new Energy Secretary, saying there will be no new nukes without government subsidy [Guardian 13 May 2010]. Surely that means no nukes, concludes James. But as @TimHarford points out, the question depends (among other things) on the carbon price. To the extent that the energy market is already distorted by a wide range of government initiatives, the concept of subsidy is not as simple as the politicians might wish.
More generally, the notion of subsidy is an accounting convention, and depends critically on how you frame the systems of interest. During the 1984 UK miners' strike, there was a fiercely political debate about the economic viability of the pits. The two sides in the dispute (NCB and NUM) adopted broadly similar styles of argument, but came to opposite conclusions simply because they chose to scope the cost-benefit analysis differently.
In housing, the notion of "subsidized housing" commonly refers to cheaper accommodation for people with low to moderate incomes, provided with financial support from government or charity. But as Malcolm Rigg pointed out at the PSI conference yesterday, mortgage tax relief can be regarded as a form of subsidy affecting (and arguably distorting) all parts of the housing market, including owner-occupation and private rental (including buy-to-rent).
Talking about subsidies creates the illusion that there is a flow of money or other resources from A to B. But these flows are an emergent property of a particular economic or business model. And as system theory should remind us, the model is not the reality.
@james_randerson picks up a statement by Chris Huhne, the new Energy Secretary, saying there will be no new nukes without government subsidy [Guardian 13 May 2010]. Surely that means no nukes, concludes James. But as @TimHarford points out, the question depends (among other things) on the carbon price. To the extent that the energy market is already distorted by a wide range of government initiatives, the concept of subsidy is not as simple as the politicians might wish.
More generally, the notion of subsidy is an accounting convention, and depends critically on how you frame the systems of interest. During the 1984 UK miners' strike, there was a fiercely political debate about the economic viability of the pits. The two sides in the dispute (NCB and NUM) adopted broadly similar styles of argument, but came to opposite conclusions simply because they chose to scope the cost-benefit analysis differently.
In housing, the notion of "subsidized housing" commonly refers to cheaper accommodation for people with low to moderate incomes, provided with financial support from government or charity. But as Malcolm Rigg pointed out at the PSI conference yesterday, mortgage tax relief can be regarded as a form of subsidy affecting (and arguably distorting) all parts of the housing market, including owner-occupation and private rental (including buy-to-rent).
Talking about subsidies creates the illusion that there is a flow of money or other resources from A to B. But these flows are an emergent property of a particular economic or business model. And as system theory should remind us, the model is not the reality.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Changing how we think
@benjaminm quotes John Seddon "Change in performance requires a change to the system and to change the system, management have to change the way they think". But (I wondered) does he mean new beliefs and mental habits (content) or a new method of arriving at beliefs and mental habits (process)?
@benjaminm would say both: "they need to unlearn assumptions/develop new ways of 'knowing' by studying the system". @benjaminm adds that "Seddon seems admirably focussed on an intervention model based on managers/teams studying the work to discover for themselves", and recommended @dpjoyce's write-up of Jeremy Cox's workshop at the Vanguard Network Day 25th February 2010.
However, although this piece explicitly references both Chris Argyris' double-loop learning and Gregory Bateson's second-order learning, much of the rhetoric seems aimed at simply replacing one set of assumptions and beliefs (which Vanguard calls "Command-and-Control View") with a new set of assumptions and beliefs (which Vanguard calls "Systems Thinking View").
source: John Seddon, Systems Thinking in the Public Sector, Triarchy 2008, p70.
Vanguard clearly regards the new set of assumptions and beliefs as "true"; thus the question about "changing how managers think" becomes a tactical question - how do you create a learning environment in which managers adopt the Vanguard principles for themselves, without obvious coercion. So the new beliefs (content) are primary, and the process of arriving at the new beliefs is merely a secondary means to an end. This is where the Vanguard notion of "Systems Thinking" diverges radically from those schools of systems thinking that focus primarily on the process of thinking deeply about systems, and regard the insights that emerge from this process as important but secondary.
Whatever advantages Vanguard's "Systems Thinking View" may have over the "Command-and-Control View", the two views appear to be at the same logical level in Bateson terms. Simply replacing one set of assumptions with another set of assumptions is merely changing WHAT you think, not HOW you think.
So I fully agree with @antlerboy, when he commented "as a starting point, mgrs/teams studying processes is brilliant. But not same as studying 'system' / knowing..."
If you just want people to adopt a new (replacement) set of mental habits, then this calls for mental training. If you want people to adopt a new (replacement) set of beliefs, then it calls for rhetoric and indoctrination. (Which is what makes Vanguard workshops look a bit like Alpha courses.) But if you want people to change their learning style, this is a much more fundamental and difficult change.
I just did an internet search for the phrase "changing how we think", and found a number of eloquent pages, many of them trying to reframe some familiar topics.
Finally, I found some pages suggesting that various systems and technologies could alter our thinking processes, for good or ill.
@benjaminm would say both: "they need to unlearn assumptions/develop new ways of 'knowing' by studying the system". @benjaminm adds that "Seddon seems admirably focussed on an intervention model based on managers/teams studying the work to discover for themselves", and recommended @dpjoyce's write-up of Jeremy Cox's workshop at the Vanguard Network Day 25th February 2010.
However, although this piece explicitly references both Chris Argyris' double-loop learning and Gregory Bateson's second-order learning, much of the rhetoric seems aimed at simply replacing one set of assumptions and beliefs (which Vanguard calls "Command-and-Control View") with a new set of assumptions and beliefs (which Vanguard calls "Systems Thinking View").
| COMMAND-AND-CONTROL THINKING | SYSTEMS THINKING | |
| Top-down, hierarchy | PERSPECTIVE | Outside-in, system |
| Functional | DESIGN | Demand, value and flow |
| Separated from work | DESIGN-MAKING | Integrated with work |
| Output, targets, standards: related to budget | MEASUREMENT | Capability, variation: related to purpose |
| Contractual | ATTITUDE TO CUSTOMERS | What matters? |
| Contractual | ATTITUDE TO SUPPLIERS | Cooperative |
| Manage people and budgets | ROLE OF MANAGEMENT | Act on the system |
| Control | ETHOS | Learning |
| Reactive, projects | CHANGE | Adaptive, integral |
| Extrinsic | MOTIVATION | Intrinsic |
Vanguard clearly regards the new set of assumptions and beliefs as "true"; thus the question about "changing how managers think" becomes a tactical question - how do you create a learning environment in which managers adopt the Vanguard principles for themselves, without obvious coercion. So the new beliefs (content) are primary, and the process of arriving at the new beliefs is merely a secondary means to an end. This is where the Vanguard notion of "Systems Thinking" diverges radically from those schools of systems thinking that focus primarily on the process of thinking deeply about systems, and regard the insights that emerge from this process as important but secondary.
Whatever advantages Vanguard's "Systems Thinking View" may have over the "Command-and-Control View", the two views appear to be at the same logical level in Bateson terms. Simply replacing one set of assumptions with another set of assumptions is merely changing WHAT you think, not HOW you think.
So I fully agree with @antlerboy, when he commented "as a starting point, mgrs/teams studying processes is brilliant. But not same as studying 'system' / knowing..."
If you just want people to adopt a new (replacement) set of mental habits, then this calls for mental training. If you want people to adopt a new (replacement) set of beliefs, then it calls for rhetoric and indoctrination. (Which is what makes Vanguard workshops look a bit like Alpha courses.) But if you want people to change their learning style, this is a much more fundamental and difficult change.
I just did an internet search for the phrase "changing how we think", and found a number of eloquent pages, many of them trying to reframe some familiar topics.
- @Adam Westbrook, It’s time to change how we think about “news”
- Doriah Williams, Changing how we think about climate change
Finally, I found some pages suggesting that various systems and technologies could alter our thinking processes, for good or ill.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Enemies of Intelligence
Post partly based on Chapter 3 of Organizational Intelligence by Harold Wilensky, published in 1967, in which he identifies a number of factors that can impair organizational intelligence.
Wilensky argues that if there is an organizational structure and leadership that can contain the rivalry and construct the big picture, then healthy competition can have a positive effect on intelligence. He cites Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who appears to have managed this reasonably well. However, successes of this kind are probably the exception rather than the rule.
Centralized intelligence can create a false illusion of reliability (Wilensky's example is the CIA's misreading of the Bay of Pigs episode), and therefore a single point of failure.
However, Wilensky does advocate some degree of centralization and concentration, arguing that distribution of intelligence (especially geographical distribution) risks spreading the intelligence too thinly. While we may agree that some clustering and communication is still valuable, we no longer have to assume this means geographical proximity. We may also note that Wilensky was writing at a time when only a minority of the workforce would have had a college education, and despite his concerns about status quoted above, he does sometimes talk as if he expected the main contribution to organizational intelligence to come from the educated members of the workforce. Nowadays, we should want organizational intelligence to be more rigorously inclusive.
Secrecy has the following pitfalls
So these are among the factors we'll be looking at when assessing an organization for intelligence. Please contact me if you want to carry out an assessment for your organization.
Hierarchy and status
- Hierarchy encourages concealment and misrepresentation (for example, hiding bad news).
- Low status knowledge and insight is undervalued. For example, the warning signs of Pearl Harbour were seen and understood by subordinate officers, but this intelligence did not reach Army and Navy chiefs.
- Emphasis on loyalty and conformity - stifles new ideas and critical questions.
- Steep promotion ladder creates divide between those focused on personal career advancement and those focused on personal survival.
- Flatter hierarchies
- Single issue task forces (IBM identified as an early practitioner of this approach)
- Alternative communication channels
Specialization and rivalry
- Fragmentation of knowledge and insight - nobody has the "big picture".
- Fragmentation of responsibility - nobody willing to tackle the difficult issues. For example, in 1950, nobody had the courage to tell Truman and McArthur that they might be mistaken about China's strategy for Korea. (This also links to the status question, see above.)
- A more recent example is the rivalry between the CIA and the FBI, said to be a contributory factor in the intelligence failures prior to September 2001.
Wilensky argues that if there is an organizational structure and leadership that can contain the rivalry and construct the big picture, then healthy competition can have a positive effect on intelligence. He cites Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who appears to have managed this reasonably well. However, successes of this kind are probably the exception rather than the rule.
Centralization and concentration
Intelligence (sense-making, decision-making, learning) too remote from What-Is-Going-On (WIGO). (Note that Wilensky's appreciation of the limitations of central intelligence predates by several decades the Power-to-the-Edge doctrine.)Centralized intelligence can create a false illusion of reliability (Wilensky's example is the CIA's misreading of the Bay of Pigs episode), and therefore a single point of failure.
However, Wilensky does advocate some degree of centralization and concentration, arguing that distribution of intelligence (especially geographical distribution) risks spreading the intelligence too thinly. While we may agree that some clustering and communication is still valuable, we no longer have to assume this means geographical proximity. We may also note that Wilensky was writing at a time when only a minority of the workforce would have had a college education, and despite his concerns about status quoted above, he does sometimes talk as if he expected the main contribution to organizational intelligence to come from the educated members of the workforce. Nowadays, we should want organizational intelligence to be more rigorously inclusive.
Secrecy
A lot of intelligence activity places undue emphasis on secret sources and secret deliberations, not just in the military sphere but also in the commercial sphere. Wilensky argues that this emphasis can have a distorting effect, and points out that some extremely successful intelligence activities during the Second World War were based on detailed analysis of public sources.Secrecy has the following pitfalls
- secret information is more difficult to verify
- unverified secret information is often given more weight than verified non-secret information
- secret information is restricted to a small circle of people with appropriate security clearance
- people with alternative opinions don't get security clearance, so the system perpetuates a narrow viewpoint
- lack of critical appraisal, intolerance of alternative views
Doctrine
Besides an obsession with security, Wilensky identifies two other unhelpful doctrines that may be embedded in the organizational culture.- An obsession with facts (naive empiricism). The notion that intelligence should be based on simple facts, uncontaminated by interpretation or agenda. Wilensky attributes this notion to a kind of anti-intellectualism, an antagonism towards ideology or theory, and an exaggerated belief in practical experience.
- An obsession with prediction and probability. The notion that intelligence is trying to establish some degree of certainty about the future, and therefore an emphasis on closed questions (Will China attack Korea? Does Iraq possess WMD?) rather than open questions (What factors may influence China's policy in the region?) Because intelligence analysts can't provide Yes/No answers to these closed questions, they end up being forced to assign probabilities to future events, although these probabilities are fairly meaningless and unhelpful.
So these are among the factors we'll be looking at when assessing an organization for intelligence. Please contact me if you want to carry out an assessment for your organization.
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