World-Wide-Matel

Influence means changing behaviors. Changing attitudes, raising awareness and altering opinions are all important but ONLY to the extent that they lead to changed behaviors. Research shows that the link between most attitudes and behaviors is sometimes weak and sometimes not present at all. (Most of the people who hate us don’t try to harm us and many of the people who try to harm us don’t hate us.)   

Those were some of the surprising things I heard at a presentation yesterdy. The guy said that we have to look for the drivers of behaviors, which may be very different from what we think they are what people say they are or even what the people involved themselves believe they are.

He gave the example of a middle aged man who buys and expensive car. If you ask him why he wants that Corvette or Jaguar, he will probably tell you (and believe) that it is because of the performance, the fine leather seats, the comfort and reliability etc. What he is really doing is trying to impress others.   

Many times the drivers of behaviors involve social inclusion. People want to be part of a group and/or improve their status within it. The reasons they give are often rationalizations.  It is hard to find the accurate reasons by asking the people  involved, since they are often deceiving even themselves, but ask the neighbors and acquaintances. The middle aged owner of a muscle car thinks he is just interested in the vehicle.  His neighbors know that he bought it to show off his wealth or impress women with his still youthful and powerful outlook.  

Our public diplomacy goal is to have deep influence on large groups and this is very hard. Nobody else really does this. When you look to the advertising world, you see that they are usually trying to influence shallow, short term decisions. They want to sell a product or service and that requires little in the way of long term influence. Politics is not much better. The whole campaign culminates in a single transaction, which costs the person nothing and requires no long term commitment.  As politicians learn to their sorrow, the extreme love the voters profess for them on Election Day usually will not translate into long term behavioral change and will not even guarantee a repeat of the same behavior two or four years down the road.

This is why public diplomacy remains an art and not a science. It is complicated by the fact that we are working in other cultures, but knowing the culture is also not enough. (I am always suspicious of those “experts” who claim to know what 1.2 million Muslims or a billions Chinese are really thinking.  Experts like that are a blight that should be avoided.)  We Americans know our own cultures very well, but how many of us can accurately predict, let alone influence the behaviors of our compatriots six month in the future? We have to understand before we can influence, but where to start?

It is good to look at what people have been doing for a long time and accept that they have a good reason for doing what they do. It may not be a correct reason from our point of view.  It may not even be objectively accurate, but it is a driver of behavior because it serves some useful purpose from the point of view of the person doing it.  

So the first task is to identify the driver of behaviors we want to encourage or slow down and then address them, recognizing that the ostensible driver is probably not the real one.   Our confusion about the stated driver and the real ones is a reason why many of our outreach efforts produce the results they do.   

A terrorist might say that he wants to kill to avenge some earlier perceived wrong, but he is not telling the truth (even if he believes it).  Put in a pragmatic way, removing his ostensible grievance would not change his behavior, although it might impel him to revise his grievance list.  I thought of last week’s talk by Ghaffar Hussein on understand radicals.

So … what do we do?

First we admit that it is not easy. Public diplomacy is not a science, but it can benefit from some scientific methods. The first should be to have some firm behavior based objectives. A goal to “change attitudes” or “raise awareness” is not sufficient. I have to admit that it would be hard for me to come up with objectives for many of our general public diplomacy programs, but the task is easier when we are talking about countering radicals.  We might define goals such as “cut donations to radical groups,” “reduce recruitment,” or “eliminate offers of safe havens.” After that, we need to formulate a hypothesis about how this might happen as a result of our work. This would be something we could test.  We don’t do this very often and the speaker  offered that some of our attempts at Muslim engagement don’t really do much of anything, since the real drivers of behavior are not our attitudes toward Islam, and even if they were we would not have the authority or credibility to address them.   

The proliferation of information on the web has proven a wonderful laboratory for social research, since you can see relationships, sometimes literally graphically. The web has shown itself to be a decent measure of non-web behavior, but so far is less useful as a driver.  Some of this has to do with us. Very often we are not present in the places where influence is exerted and if we are there, we are not authoritative enough to make an impact.

Influence and authority are not fungible. This is a bit of a change on the web versus earlier times. You used to have influence or authority because of the influence or authority of the sender. We listened to the official BECAUSE he was the official.  Here the USG is acting from a position of disadvantage. Most of the people we want to influence don’t respect our authority in the subjects at hand. Star power has also greatly diminished. A celebrity can draw a crowd, but influence only follows from having something compelling to say. Now the power lies in the reception of the audience. And it is not only how many listen to you, but more importantly WHO.   Most people are not influential.  You want to get the respect of those who are. You have to appeal to the influencers and to do that you have to have something THEY will consider new or useful. 

Technologies can help us identify the influentials and the links among them. We can see the content, topology (links) and dynamics of networks in ways and detail we never could before.  LES (latent Semantic analysis), the stuff Google uses, does a great job identifying patterns. Language reveals biases and ideologies and so these systems are very useful.  But the computer cannot read.  It just sees a bag of words and sorts them based on their proximity. We need to see or create useful taxonomy and there is no structured or permanent taxonomy, so we just cannot let it go by itself. There is no garden w/o the gardener and nobody has yet invented a perpetual motion device.

Once again we come back to the human factor.  Humans influence humans. Our systems can supplement and enable human expertise, but they cannot replace it. We still have to set the goals and monitor the progress because if we don’t know where we are going, we probably will end up someplace else. Our technologies will help us get to the wrong place faster.

Posted by Broadnax at 02:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Americans are generous people when it comes to both charitable giving and volunteering.    You can find some of it in our cultural roots. Philanthropy and volunteerism are prominent in what you might call the British diaspora. But there is also something in the structure of American society.  Some of it has to do with the absence of the types of government programs we find in many other countries and there is the effect of our tax system. 

The absence of government argument cuts both ways. You can argue that individual Americans must step in because of government neglect, or you could argue that aggressive government intervention crowds out of preempts charities by individuals or groups. Both have some validity. Some of the same things get done everywhere but who does them is different.

Many things done by volunteers in the U.S. are government functions, even government monopolies in other places. Around my house, citizens do a lot of the work to maintain the local parks. In some parts of Europe (and even some American cities with strong unions) they are not allowed to do that. It is a government monopoly and no volunteer or free effort is wanted.   That may be a trivial example, but it also extends to things like volunteer fire departments, hospital volunteers, community watches, after school programs and lots of other things.  

Governments in the U.S. allow or encourage volunteerism in ways many others don’t.   This may be changing, as I will discuss below, but first let’s talk taxes.

I heard a lecture entitled “Why doesn’t the U.S. have a cultural policy?” The speaker from the Smithsonian explained that the title of his lecture was meant to mislead, because American DID have a very strong and effective cultural policy. It was our tax policy.  The citizens put up their own money, demonstrating their own real commitment and the government partnered with them by “spending” through tax breaks.

This kind of arrangement is entirely consistent with the workings of a democracy, since it decentralizes decision making and funds those things citizens throughout the country find most valuable. He contrasted this with the system used in a country like France, where a Paris-based elite decides what, where and who is worthy. This produces great fine arts, but tends to neglect non-elite projects as well as non-established artists and places that are not established cultural centers. In America, some of the most interesting cultural offerings are found in what would be called “provincial” places in other countries. In France with its centralized system, you find great culture in Paris and it tapers off drastically after that. Washington is not the cultural capital of America and, despite its own pretensions, neither is New York. The best orchestras, artists, dance troupes, theaters etc are distributed widely across the country. This is because American cultural policy allows for decentralized decision making and allows funding to follow the preferences of the people.

There is much gnashing of teeth about this cultural policy, but there is even more trouble with the centralized versions. The National Endowments for the Arts, for example, funds some questionable art.  The one I remember best is the "piss Christ" where the “artist” submerged a crucifix in a cup of his own urine. Whether or not you think this guy will go to hell and whether or not you think it is art, the idea that some government official decided that your tax money should go to something like this is odious. However, it would be significantly less controversial if an individual donor had paid for it and then wrote off part on his taxes. In the latter case, it would just be an example of piss poor art rather than pissing on the taxpayers' leg and telling them it is raining.

Our decentralized system allows for a wider variety of offering, even the bad type mentioned above.  It replaces the bureaucracy with volunteers and makes much of the funding part of a public private partnership. In short, it is a great American system.

But it is a system under attack. There is talk of cutting the tax exemptions (i.e. the “cultural budget”) for about 43.5% of all charitable gifts</a>. Volunteerism in general is under an attack by lawyers.   When I volunteer for things as simple as gardening, I am told that either I or the organizations has to take out liability insurance. Evidently our flower beds are dangerous enough that they could provoke lawsuits.

It is not the people will immediately stop volunteering or stop giving money to charity, but the general rule is that if you make something harder to do or more expensive you get less of it.  If the tax treatment is gone, you will have to assume donors will give MORE to make up for the government’s share, if you think it will have no effect. That is not likely.  People are still generous but if they have less to give, they must give less. 

IMO there are some elites who indeed DO want less charity and less volunteerism. They would prefer that many of these tasks be the exclusive purview of government or at least organized by governments, where they could bring their political power to bear. They would still call this a private-public partnership, but the government would dominate.  

In some Eastern European languages, the word volunteer has a not entirely good connotation. I know that because I was corrected on several occasions when trying to explain volunteerism in the U.S. It seems that during communist times, the government would force people to volunteer and would organize them into work details. Sometimes they were doing exactly the same sorts of things our real volunteers do in America, but they were under the harsh lash of the communist officials.  Governments have a history of commanding “volunteers.”   

The American difference has been that volunteers often “command” government resources.   The people are the senior partner in the government-private partnership.  The people drive the policy, in other words. This is usually good and should be protected.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A person’s outlook often changes more based on the perceived future than on the present reality.   That has certainly been true for me ever since I found out about my assignment in Brazil and I think this is very good.   I have been much more aware of the consequences of our Washington actions and products on our posts overseas and on our ultimate audiences there.   It is very easy to get cosseted into the Washington mind-set.   But so much of what we do here never really gets out.   We meet with each other and discuss our own urgent issues.  We sometimes provide wonderful products and services that nobody can use. 

It is very easy to be sure you know how to do something when you know you won’t really have to do it. I was aware from my past experience in overseas public diplomacy.   But my future as a public affairs officer – where I will have to USE the kinds of things we talk about here in Washington – has focused my mind on the more pragmatic aspects.    

I don’t have much confidence in the “new media” as a disembodied force.   It has to be tied to programs, people, goals and content.  But it is so easy to seek the immediate gratification of reaching large numbers of people.   It is similar to video games in that way & it is no coincidence that gaming is one of the driving forces behind new media.   The games give you immediate feedback and seem to show immediate results.  But this can be true whether or not you are making legitimate progress.   You can easily have the experience of achieving an online goal and then wondering why you spent all that time to get there.    There is a good South Park episode on World of Warcraft.  Watch it to the end. 

The combination is the key. A live speaker program, along with Co.Nx, along with Facebook or other social media, announced on twitter, with a blog about the speaker’s journey, and followed by the posting of online materials, that would work. I would also add that we would need to prepare the ground by making contacts in advance and reinforce the results by keeping up and following up later. 

Public Diplomacy is not rocket science, but it does require a diligence and a holistic approach that is continued over time and adjusted to local realities and changing conditions.  This is simple to say, but really hard to implement.    It is much easier to shortcut with social media, claim you have reached thousands and have some kind of automated response follow-up.    The short term results look great, it probably looks better in the immediate term than the holistic approach which takes time to bear fruit.   That is the seductiveness of these kinds of short cuts.

Our system encourages the short term by demanding prompt reports.   We generally write up the report of an event the next day.   What information do we have at that time?  We can count numbers of participants and the reach of the immediate placement, but we have no idea whatsoever if anybody actually thought about the program or if it opened some minds.   And our reports never follow up because the next urgent report pushed all thoughtfulness aside.    And assessing public diplomacy requires thoughtfulness.   Much of what we accomplish is indirect.  A person not at the event might have heard from a friend and that provoked an important idea.  

And time is the major factor.  It takes time for an idea to develop and mature.   I wrote about how I was influenced by a public diplomacy contact twenty-five years ago.  No measuring system would ever catch that, yet it was lasting and profound.

I know that it is a tough balance especially because in the present, you live off the work others did before you.  In the future others will benefit from what you created.

Posted by Broadnax at 01:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was cleaning out my old files and I discovered this.  I wrote it last March, but it makes sense still.  In fact, it makes more sense to me now that I have experienced Washington's reach and as I anticipate going overseas again.  I post it in unedited (since March 27, 2009) form.

We inevitably have a Washington perspective when we live in Washington, but we have to work to get beyond it because it is more dangerous than ever.   The new media gives us tools that can reach anywhere in the world in seconds.  We can bypass gatekeepers and some of them deserve to be bypassed.  But we can also bypass friends.  I am thinking of our colleagues in posts overseas. 

It is temping to just get it done; pass that information; make that connection.   We CAN do it and in making a direct connection from Washington to the journalist or blogger in the field we undoubtedly improve the short term efficiency and effectiveness of our information operation.  But this short term success comes at the expense of damaging the system that makes us effective in the long run.

When you look at the whole system, you quickly realize that the main product of a public diplomacy operation is not information.   Information is nearly free in today’s interconnected world and there is very little that we can give anybody that they cannot get somewhere else.   If information is not the key, what is?  The answer is relationships.  We are working to build relationships of trust and reliance.   Our relationships are what makes our information stick and helps put it in the proper contexts.   Our relationships are the basis of our reputations.   The connections count.

From Washington we can build electronic relationships and a type of customer base, but at best we have a relationship akin to a book lovers’ relationship with Amazon.com.   It is not multifaceted and may not be robust enough to endure really hard challenges.   When Barnes & Noble offers a better price, I abandon Amazon. 

Most of the effective long-term relationship building is done on the local level, i.e. our posts.   We can help them from Washington by providing backup and materials.  We can help coordinate our programs among posts.

But we can also harm and uncut the post and we will probably do that with the best of intentions.  When we bypass the post and reach directly into their audience, we are weakening their ability to maintain their contact network.   The worst case scenario is when powerful Washington directly provides important local media outlets with information, interviews or editorials.   It makes the people at the post look ineffective in the eyes of the recipients.   They want to eliminate the middleman.

We can also do similar things with our electronic programming.  That is why we have to be especially careful to involve posts.  I don’t believe that there has been a problem so far.  In the case of a CO.NX program, for example, we get participants from all over, but we are careful to keep the posts in the loop.   It works like a cooperative and I am convinced that IIP programs to date have enhanced and expanded the reach of our posts overseas.  But as the new technologies and methods develop, this coordination may become more difficult. 

Web 2.0 presents lots of challenges of management, coordination, communications and control.  The spontaneity, inclusiveness and reach are strengths of the new methods but also its weaknesses.  We have made a very bad trade if we create a Washington-centric network of relationships at the expense of those based around out posts in the host countries.   We have to always be aware of what we are doing and sometimes choose to be “less effective” in a particular transaction in order to maintain and grow the effectiveness of our total system.

Posted by Broadnax at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The big Washington blizzard didn’t make AEI cancel the session on new American demographics and the discussion of “The Next 100 Million: America in 2050” with the author Joel Kotkin and a panel of experts chaired by Michael Barone.

Decline overdone

Experts have been saying that America is in decline since - even before - we became an independent nation. Kotkin acknowledges that someday these critics will be correct, but not today, and he paints an optimistic picture of our American future. America has a lot of advantages going into the next generation. It starts with demographics.

Americans still remember how to have kids; it is evidently no longer a universal skill

The U.S. is unique among developed country since we have a positive rate of natural increase. It is not very much above replacement level, but that is more than others, some of which are almost in free fall. America is also an anomaly in that in some of our suburbs wealthy, well-educated women sometimes have three or more kids. (I recall reading an article about the big families in affluent Loudon County next door to us.)  

We also still get millions of immigrants. That means that the America is growing older slower than other developed countries and the American labor force will continue to grow through 2050, while others suffer greater or lesser proportional decline in their productive populations relative to their dependent ones. The interesting thing about his data was that it also shows that the world's most populous country - China - will begin to suffer labor shortages (at least for skilled labor) very soon.  The Chinese labor force will start to decline as early as 2015 (yes, five years from now) as a result of their perhaps necessary but draconian one-child policy. (Long term predictions are always tough, but by 2050 the U.S. labor force is projected to rise by 42%; China’s will drop by 10% and Japan’s labor force will decline by an astonishing 44%).

More old people, fewer young workers 

This labor force decline will be accompanied by a big growth in the elderly dependent population, both in relative and absolute terms. The world has never experienced anything like this before and our lack of models will require adaptions we cannot fully anticipate. We are truly going where no human societies have gone before.

But America will suffer these declines later and less severely than most others. In addition, the U.S. has a very robust & adaptive economic system. National power is based on economic strength, innovation and demographic clout. Among the great nations of the last generation, only the U.S. will still have these elements in abundance in the next generation.

Managing genteel decline not the same as planning robust growth

This U.S. outlook contributes to disagreements with old allies. For example, the Europeans can also make demographic projections. They see that their populations will decline and their economies will grow much slower than ours. When your population will get smaller and your economy won’t grow much, you don’t worry very much about promising cuts in CO2. You need different policies if you are managing a genteel decline than when you are planning for robust growth.

The U.S. will change internally too. The growth of the last fifty years went mostly to the coasts.   The next fifty years will see a return to the heartland. Kotkin doesn’t say that all the little praire towns will be back, but space and affordable housing will draw people away from the coasts. He says that the whole idea of suburbs has become meaningless. There is more a blending of suburbs, cities and rural areas. Kotkin foresees what he calls an archipelago of villages. More people would be connected by new media in greener and less crowded communities. It sounds a lot like the Loudoun County communities mentioned in the article I linked above.

Today's ethnic & racial categories will not mean much in 2050

Much has been said about the changing ethnic composition of the U.S. population and in 2050 the white native born population is  projected to drop to around 50% of the labor force.  But how significant will this be? Kotkin pointed out how foreign the large immigration of Irish seemed in the 19th Century.  We just forget how different earlier waves of immigrants had been and how completely they have been integrated into our society. When my grandfather and his brother Felix came to the U.S., they spoke no English and probably had never seen an American before. There is probably no population on earth today that is so "foreign." 

The younger generation doesn't really care very much about race, with vast majorities in favor of interracial marriage, so by 2050 today's categories will be as meaningless as some of the national and religious distinctions made in our grandparents' childhoods. In other words, by 2050 nobody will care. 

Still some challenges and skills mismatched

The road to this bright happy future is not necessarily certain. We have a challenge of education, not so much college but technical. We might, in fact, be pushing too many kids into college when the more appropriate skills might be technical. Our community and technical colleges should be given a bigger role as providers of final or working degrees rather than way-stations to four-year colleges. Kotkin thinks it is just a problem of incentives. We reward careers in finance and law more than we do those who actually make useful things. If that changes, so will our career paths.

We have been able to import skilled labor, but that might be slowing. We have some competition now.  Places like Canada & Australia are also pleasant and welcoming like the U.S. They are also "countries of aspiration" and they drawing in some of the skilled immigrants.  There are also now more opportunities in many source countries, as people around the world reap the benefits of market liberalization reforms of past decades. Indian engineers, for example, now may have good opportunities at home.

The general pool of attractive potential immigrants is also shrinking, as birth rates drop even in those place that traditionally had very high rates of growth, such at Mexico and parts of Asia. A good example of what this pattern can look like comes from South Korea, which a couple decades ago sent millions of immigrants to the U.S. and now absorbs its own population growth, which is now much lower than that of the U.S. 

We need more Engineers & plumbers and fewer leaf blowers & Lawyers

We Americans screw ourselves, however. Canada or Australia favor the skills their countries need.  An immigrant with skills has a better chance of getting into those places. Our immigration policies give too little weight to the skills and education we can use in our economy. We are too "fair". We don’t need to import any more unskilled labor or even worse - people who don’t plan to labor at all.  We have the right to ask potential immigrants what they will contribute to our country. Besides the relatively small numbers of bona-fides refugees, we have no moral duty to admit anybody. As long as we will limit total numbers and we have a choice, we should choose the best and the brightest, not people we need to train before they can operate a leaf blower.

Unfortunately, unskilled labor can create its own demand.  My personal complaint is against leaf blowing. That is usually a job that just need not be done at all and if unskilled labor wasn’t so cheap maybe we wouldn’t do it very often. You can learn to use a leaf blower in about thirty seconds.  We don’t need more of those things. We are better off with people with useful skills. Some jobs - such as leaf blowing - are worth less than zero. I have discussed the value of doing nothing (with specific reference to leaf blowing) here & here.

Anyway, the AEI event gave me something to think about.  I will have to buy the book and read the details. I have to say – once again – that we are really lucky to have these kinds of events offered free or cheaply to anybody with the inclination to listen. 

Posted by Broadnax at 02:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

My colleague and friend Todd Leventhal has written a paper about conspiracy theories and disinformation, which I include at this link.  I recommend you read it.   Todd is one of the foremost experts in this field and unlike many who study it only academically; Todd has been in the trenches. 

I first became aware of Todd in the 1980s when I was assigned to Brazil.  Those were still Cold War years and despite – maybe because of – glasnost the KGB was particularly active in spreading lies and planting stories in media worldwide. I  had to address lots of Soviet disinformation in the my local media.  Todd’s information helped me smack down at least some of the silliness.  

Especially troubling and pervasive was the story cooked up by the by KGB that the U.S. had created the AIDS virus as a bioweapon. The story still resurfaces from time-to-time.   It was fairly easy to debunk, since there were so many inconsistencies in the time-lines and the biology involved, but most of those who pass along conspiracy theories are not very bright or they are malicious, so that facts have less impact on them than you might imagine.  Nevertheless debunking these things early and often limits their spread.  It is like pulling weeds in a garden. It is not much fun and you are never done, but you have to do it.

Read the paper.  Todd discusses why and how rumor spreads.   Of course, false information often proliferates in the same ways that accurate information does and we have to be self-aware enough to understand that much of what we believe at any one time is not accurate.  So just thinking about these things in the way Todd does is a useful therapy for the hubris that we self-designated smart guys (wise guys?) often suffer.  It is also useful to recall that false information often seems to make more sense than truth, since the lies can be modified to make a more coherent narrative.

There is a consistent human tendency to believe that big results must have had big causes. When a great leader is killed by a lone-gunman, we almost instinctively inflate the assassin to the size of his target.  This kind of mental matching is usually unwarranted and it is not harmless, since it elevates little villains to iconic status and helps make political violence more successful.

Anyway, I will pass along to Todd any comments you want to make.   It is worth reading his paper.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I am listening to a great “Teaching Company” series on Western Literature.   (BTW – you never have to pay full price for these things.  They always go on sale.)  Western literature traditions are a little out of style these days, which is a shame because the great literature really does speak to us across the centuries.   A good education has to include some knowledge of the classics and nothing can become a classic until it has been well-known enough for a long enough time to influence thought and literature in a broad sense.   In other words, no matter how great something written a couple of years ago may be, it cannot have the power of older literature.   Maybe it is a future classic, but it is not a classic yet.

Literature extends influence beyond the grave

The guy giving the lectures explained that literature is a way of talking to the dead and getting an intergenerational perspective.  I was thinking about that as I drove down to the farm last weekend.   I was listening to “Infotopia,” by Cass Sunstein.   He was talking about markets, in the broad sense to include markets for attitudes and ideas and how they aggregate the opinions and attitudes of many minds.  Literature is like that.    He mentioned that the great economist Fredrick Hayek had contended that traditions are a type of market too and you have to be careful changing established relationships, since they are essentially long-term distilled experience, a record of how people adjusted and adapted to problems over the years.   Edmund Burke made a similar observation about morality.   I did too.  When I wrote my note Found in Translation I didn’t directly recall my literature professors or Hayek or Burke, but don’t doubt that is where the ideas originated.   One of the benefits of a liberal education is that you learn all these things and if they sink in early enough and deep enough you come to think of them as your own.   There not any really new ideas; just restatements of and new compilations. 

Reformulations

The funny thing is that those w/o the “useless” liberal education often believe they thought them up for the first time.   And they often get away with it.  Many best-selling authors and highly paid speakers recycle old stuff.  I suppose they sometimes do it consciously, other times not.    You tend to get the classics in the watered down version.  I remember reading the science fiction “Foundation Trilogy” by Isaac Asimov.  I recognized it back then as a allegory of the fall of the Roman Empire.  What I didn’t get at the time was how closely the second foundation tracked with Boethius on the consolation of philosophy. Asimov was an educated man, so I think he did it on purpose.   Generations of Sci-Fi fans have essentially read Boethius.    

BTW – I first came met Boethius way back in 1975. You can go through college w/o ever coming into contact with him at all, since he has largely "fallen out of the cannon."  I got to know him when studying Chaucer.  Boethius was a much bigger deal in the Middle Ages than he has been more recently and if you study the philosophy surrounding Chaucer's writings, you run into Boethius. I mostly forgot about him for the last ... oh thirty years. I was reminded of the details of his death by the audio program.  It was dreadful, but I guess it helped secure his position as a martyr.  After he fell afoul of the Ostrogoth King Theodoric and was executed by having wet leather straps wrapped around his head. The straps contracted as they dried and crushed his brain. It must have been very unpleasant and it is an example of man’s inhumanity to man. What kind of guy even thinks of that?  I mean really, was there a bunch of guys sitting around thinking of novel uses for wet leather straps and ones gets the eureka moment?   Well, hey, we can use these leather straps to wrap this guy’s head.

Posted by Broadnax at 04:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our communication goal is to reach targeted audiences with content and delivery methods appropriate for them. This often conforms well to what Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill said about all politics being local and local has usually meant geographically local. Far reaching media made a dent on this localism long ago, but more recent developments have the potential to essentially erase localism in geography. However, it may be replaced by an even more homogenous localism of habits and ideas. 

Diasporas & international chattering classes

Supra-national groups have always played a disproportionate role in international politics.   Diaspora communities of Jews, Greeks, Chinese, Armenians and many others have often had more in common and identified more strongly with members of their diaspora communities in other countries than they did with the phyically closer people in their countries of residence. There has long also been an international chattering class, made up of intellectuals and expatriates who see themselves as part of a wider regional or world community. This has been going on for a long time and we have adapted well in many cases to reaching these groups. 

Local need not mean nearby

The new media has facilitated the creation of new “local” communities very much like diasporas or international intellectuals, but united by less abiding characteristics and more by sometimes transient common interests and socials media.  No matter how esoteric an interest, you can usually find among the billions of people in the world a sufficiently large number of likeminded people to form a community.

Let’s take the example of a surprising community.    “The Big Lebowski” was released in theaters in 1998 to a lukewarm response.   It barely broke even in the U.S. and had it been released a couple decades earlier, it would have fallen into the memory hole and been generally unavailable except on a few college campuses.  But in the Internet age nothing is unavailable and “The Big Lebowski” acquired a cult following.   Now there is a Lebowski community.  You can market to that community and you can reach them with particular phrases.   No geographically local community could sustain this, but a media local community clearly can.

If a nation is a group of people who have common experiences, believe common myths and share common stories, what does it mean if virtual communities supplant geographical ones?

Yeah, well. The Dude abides.

Geography has not become unimportant.   On the contrary, people are often sorting  themselves geographically based on their habits, lifestyle preferences and even their political beliefs.  Fairfax, County Virginia is separted from Montgomery County, Maryland by a about a hundred yards of river water.  The topograhy is similar.  They same sorts of plants grow in both places.  They are part of the same metro area. Median incomes diverge very little.  They have similar distributions of minority populations and the educational attainments of both populations are almost identical, yet people notice signficant differences in attitudes and behaviors and these factor into some home buying decisons.  But geography is no longer the destiny it was in the past.   There is another layer on top of the physical geography (although I bet Macs sell relatively better than PCs in Maryland than they do in Virginia.)  It is possible for someone to live in one place but have most of his friends and most of the things that influence him spread all over the world.   These are also local communities that we can identify and benefit from addressing.   

Posted by Broadnax at 03:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My colleague Bill May made a good point during our recent talk at FSI about Edward R. Murrow’s fabled last three feet when he explained that his kids have virtual friends that they have never met in person and may never meet in person.  But they are still friends.  They still influence each other.  They have entered Edward R. Murrow’s three feet range but they have done so electronically.   

Putting the human space in context

Let’s update Murrow and maybe put his statement in context.   Of course, the social media didn’t exist in his time as it does today, so he was talking only about broadcast media when he said electronic media.  He was right back then and he is right today – if we talk about broadcasting.   

The three feet idea refers not to physical presence but to human engagement.   Engagement w/o physical presence was nearly impossible in Edward R. Murrow’s time; it has become easy to do today.  So we should modify the three-foot-theorem, but not abandon it.   And Murrow’s admonition about overestimating the reach of electronic media still applies.

You can't have a two-way relationship with a million friends ...

The key is engagement and engagement still requires human interaction.   I have previously written about the Dunbar number, which postulates that individual human beings cannot maintain meaningful contact with more than something like 150-250 people.  There just is not enough time in the day and we don’t have the cognitive power to do more.   Even if you could keep millions of relationships straight, the recipients might object.   Most people like to think that their friends care about them.   How much can a guy with a million friends care about any one of them?   There has to be some kind of sorting.

... but maybe machines can

There is a qualification, however. People are increasingly comfortable interfacing with machines and artificial intelligence.  For example, I feel I have a relationship with something like Amazon.com, even though I am certain that no human at Amazon.com knows my name or cares about me as a person. Amazon.com has a very good algorithm which figures out what I like by comparing my previous purchases to those of others. Google does a similar thing with search.   

Kids love their teddy-bears

They are just making comparisons and projections based on the past behavior and revealed preferences, but it sure seems like human intelligence. And just like the kid who personifies his teddy-bear, I have to admit that I have personified Amazon.com, Charles Schwab, the Nature Conservancy and many of the other organizations that play these kinds of personalization games with me. I like to think that there are humans behind all this, but I don’t think there are.   Or more correctly, the humans are also part of this personalization machine.  If I call an actual person at Charles Schwab, they are very friendly and they know a lot about me – BECAUSE of the relationship we both have with the algorithm.  This is not real human contact.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If journalism is the first draft of history, some of the stuff that appears on the new media is like notes jotted on the back of a napkin.   How can anybody make sense of this cacophony of contradiction?   You can’t, actually.  Events don’t make sense until they are put into a narrative.   It is true that journalists usually get the first shot at constructing the narrative, but their perspective is limited because they don’t know how the story will end.    They usually don’t even have all the current parts and don’t understand the interrelationships.   But you have to start someplace.

The first ones to get the story out often have an advantage in shaping narratives because once you have heard a story with facts arranged in particular ways it is hard to see it any other way.   And sometimes the facts can be influenced by an information cascade, where each subsequent person is influenced  with the one before until everybody thinks everybody else agrees on a formulation that might not be true in detail and sometimes not even true in general.   That is why pressure groups and politicians are so enthusiastic about getting their talking points accepted early.

But it doesn’t end there.   Subsequent events often change the interpretation of earlier ones.   Time may be linear, where causes must precede effects, but memory is not and so perception is not and history is not.   Beyond that, truth matters and investigations and comparisons help find more truth (although I don’t think we ever arrive at THE truth, we can get closer if we work at it.)

So what is the second draft of history?  It traditionally consisted of memoirs & the results of academic seminars.  Henry Kissinger's "White House Years" or the various Bob Woodward books are other examples.  I think what we are seeing more and more today are television documentaries setting at least the intermediate narratives.   Programs like PBS Frontline are the obvious example, but lately more pervasive are the kinds of things you see on “History Channel” or “The Military Channel.”  These are often appreciated by specialists of those really interested in the facts in question, so they have greater staying power than things aimed at more general audiences.

I have been watching what I think is a rewrite of the Iraq war narrative.   The “first draft” featured U.S. troops suffering confused in a confusing environment in a war they couldn’t win.   The truer narrative that I see coming out in specialty publications and some military documentary programs is that the Iraq experience was difficult but ultimately successful counter insurgency campaign.  It doesn’t discount or overlook the mistakes, but accounts for them in context.  My guess is that MOST people still believe the old narrative, but most people really don't care that much.  The people who really care enough to find out are the ones that understand the revised one and ultimately, that revised narrative is the one that will stick after the ephemera is passed.

So in the end it is not only numbers or precedence that counts but also intensity of interest or maybe demonstrated accuracy and consistency with other contemporary and subsequent events. When we want to find out about past events, few of us go to old newspapers. We look for near contemporary analysis and this second draft of history becomes what we (a little loosely) call primary sources. And those sources shape the narrative ... usually.

Around 1274 BC the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II fought a battle with the Hittites at Kadesh, which is in what is now Syria.  The Egyptians wrote the history and Ramses left an impressive monument to his victory.   It is the earliest example we know of an attempt to set a narrative.   Most historians don’t believe Ramses, but archeological evidence is inconclusive.   The Egyptians subsequently pulled back from the region.   So even more than 3000 years after the event, the precise narrative is still in dispute. The bottom line is that no matter who won that day, the Hittites got to keep the region.   Of course, you don’t find many Hittites around anymore.  There are still Egyptians, but they have little in common with the Ramses variety.  Astonishingly, some of us still care.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It has been cold again this year but this year we are also getting more snow. They got a lot of snow in southern Virginia & North Carolina, so I wanted to go down and look at the snow on the farm.  Well, it wasn’t a lot of snow by Wisconsin standards and it will melt in a few days, but there was more than usual and it created a different look for the place. You really wouldn't guess that you were looking at southern Virginia.

I saw a couple cars in the ditch on the way down and I didn’t dare take the back roads, as I usually do.  Instead I went down I95 all the way down to Emporia and then went over on 58. I also didn’t dare drive down the dirt roads on the farm.  You can see that 623 was good in the spot above, but look near the bottom and you can see why I didn't want to drive up the farm road.  It is harder to walk through the snow but it is nice to feel it underfoot. There were a few animal track, but it was otherwise undisturbed. It is nice to have land.

It was a long trip to see it and it took longer because of the adverse weather conditions. I finished almost the entire audio-book Infotopia, which I found very interesting and useful (I hope) in my job.   This was one of the three audio downloads on Audible.com that Mariza gave me for Christmas.   It was a good gift.  Audio books make long drives bearable and even beneficial. I lose my NPR a few miles outside Washington.  I don’t like music radio or those silly talk shows that purport to give advice that will solve problems that I don’t have. Audio books do the job.

Another good audio program is “the Teaching Company”.   Alex likes them too because they are around forty-five minutes long, which fits his workout schedule.

Anyway, take a look at the nice pictures. 

Complete set of photos are at this link.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I got my “welcome to post” notification from Brasilia.   It is still more than a year in the future and it seems sort of ironic as I watch the snow falling outside my window but the future has a way of becoming the present faster than you think.  

So much advance notice is unusual.  I had my boots on the ground in Iraq about a month after I first even thought about volunteering for the job, but usually we get around a year.   Two years is unusual unless you are assigned to hard language training. 

Portuguese is an odd language when it comes to our training.  It is a “world language” and it is a fairly easy language to learn, but it is not as common as other “easy” world languages like Spanish or French.  Since it is not a  not a “hard language” like Russian, Arabic or Chinese, the FS sometimes doesn’t build in enough time to learn or relearn it as it does for officers assigned to posts with hard languages.   This system can work for French or Spanish, since there are lots of people in posts with those languages, Portuguese maybe not so much.   I don’t know if I explained that well, but it makes sense to me.   Suffice to say that for this PAO assignment they really wanted someone with good Portuguese, so this time they built in enough time to make sure of it and I am the beneficiary.

This is very exciting.  I learned Portuguese at FSI a quarter century ago and I got to be fluent when I was in Brazil for a couple years.   In those days you had to use the language all the time, since English was not that common in Porto Alegre.  But fluent is not necessarily the same as good.  You can speak very fast and fluently but not get the grammar or the words exactly right and I never felt really confident.   Diplomats should be really good at the languages of the countries where they are assigned and this additional training - with some consistent work - will put on the polish.   I hope so.

I don’t expect to speak like a native, but I want to get very good.  We have numbers from 1 to 5.  I want to get to 4 before I leave for Brazil, but the numbers don’t mean much.  I think of it in terms of foreign actors.  I want to get to the equivalent of Ricardo Montalban, but I am afraid I had only reached the sophistication of Sergeant Shultz on the old Hogan’s Heroes in my previous time.  I am not starting from zero this time.  I have been reading the WSJ in Portuguese.  I don’t get all the details, but I can understand most of the articles.  I also bought a dozen of Brazilian movies.  W/o the subtitles I would be out of luck, but even in the short time I have been doing it; the language is starting to come back.

Technological advances make it a lot easier to learn languages; at least it has become a lot easier to get the materials.  I can read Brazilian newspapers online and listen to radio and TV.  And of course Brazilian-Portuguese movies are easy to find.  There is almost no comparison to how it was twenty-five years ago.   I remember being happy to get those old newspapers and having to copy audio tapes.

Look below at what I just did   I used Word to translate the paragraph above into Portuguese and then back translated into English.  It did a decent job.  I would have to make a few minor corrections.   The strangest thing is that it translated the word Portuguese into English.   It also left out some of the subtlety, such as “I want.”  The Portuguese translation is better than the back translation to English, it has the “I want” (quero) for example.  This is understandable, since it is like making a copy of a copy.  But the translation certainly still makes sense and is a thousand times better than I could do on my own - the wonders of modern technology.  

Desta vez, quero aprender a escrever português.   Temos de aprender a falar e ler-se nos nossos cursos de língua, mas nós não aprender a escrever, pelo menos não como escrever bem.    Aguardo com expectativa a obtenção de muita ajuda a este respeito de Bill Gates.   Microsoft Word é muito bom na fixação de palavras que estão escritas quase corretamente.   Ele faz isso em inglês, parto do princípio de que é possível fazê-lo também em português.

Back translation

This time, I learn to write English.   We must learn to speak and read in our language courses, but we do not learn how to write, at least not how to write well.    I look forward to getting a lot of help from Bill Gates.   Microsoft Word is very good at fixing of words that are written almost correctly.   It does this in English, I assume that it is possible also in English.

It is really interesting the way that the machine can translate in seconds.  But somehow I am staring to understand how John Henry felt when he saw that steam drill rolling up.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There are times when my confidence outruns my competence. I cannot easily detect those instances beforehand, since blindness to the problem is essentially included in the definition. But years of painful experience have taught me how to recognize the general conditions, sort of the weather of error.

With all due modesty, I have a gift for quickly assimilating information and expressing it well to others.  With all due concern, this is a dangerous gift when not properly managed. There are two big pitfalls. The first is that it tempts the possessor not to prepare sufficiently for engagements. If you can “wing it” there is strong temptation to do just that. This is a clearly defined fault and while it is easier identified than address, it is simple (although not always easy) to manage by larding in “extra” time and care. The second pitfall is harder is more of a stealthy problem.   It is too easy to extrapolate from what you know into things that seem to make logic sense but are not really supported by the data.

The reason the extrapolation trap is so dangerous is that you MUST go to places where you may fall in, since you must make decisions and draw conclusions based on incomplete or contradictory information.   It is embedded in the very nature of decision making. If all the facts are clear and known, you don’t need to make a decision; you can just use a formula. So you have to extrapolate and there is danger in jumping too far as well as not jumping far enough.

The two bits of folk wisdom don't always work together.  You need to look before you leap (i.e. hesitate), but you cannot jump a chasm in two hops (i.e. be bold).

If you are waiting for a solution, I will disappoint you. IMO, it is a problem that can be managed but never solved. Two things have made me think about it a little more recently.  

The first is my investments. I studied stocks ten years ago and got reasonably good at investing in my small way.  Of course, it was easy to seem smart back then when things in general we headed up, but I did better than the averages.  But I don’t really pay attention any more.   One reason is that with the kids in college and forest land to pay for, I don’t have much money to invest, but the bigger reason is that I am just not interested.  When I was moving some money in the kid’s college fund, I just realized that I should not buy any individual stocks.   I just don’t know enough about it.   So I am defaulting into index funds. That will guarantee that I will not make big money, but it will also protect against catastrophic loss. That might seem like a no brainer, but it hurt my self-concept to realize that I just don’t know enough anymore and I probably will never again learn enough to go back in.   So in this case, I take refuge in mediocrity … and forestry, which is slow but steady investment. A man has gotta know his limitations.

The second problem is more serious because mediocrity is not an option. I am talking about my job. Over the years, I have studied  the components of my work, such as negotiations, leadership and communications, and tried to integrate them into a continually improving and developing performance.  Of course, I produced some failures as well as successes, but on balance I made significant forward progress. As you can see from some of my blog entries, I have tried to stay in the forefront of applying new technologies of communication to public diplomacy. But I have recently had some serious doubts about my continued prowess.

I think we can learn lessons from the past and I reach back for analogies and lessons all the way to the dawn of history.  That is why I think it is good and useful to study and think about things like the grand strategy of the Byzantine Empire, among other things.   My trust in these things is based on the implicit assumption that fundamental human relations are constant, so there is something to be learned by looking at how things worked in a variety of places, times and circumstances. Not everybody agrees. My extrapolation comes from believing that things that Thucydides wrote 2500 years ago apply to our modern age communications, albeit with greatly accelerated connections.  What if this is not true?

The new media is creating a kind of global consciousness that may be a discontinuous break with the past, a “novus ordo seclorum” to steal the fancy phrase (I am still the historian and I have a dollar bill).  Discontinuous change invalidates previous experience.

I have helped design an FSI course on the social media and it has a lot of aspects of my personality are fixed in the structure and this goes beyond the fact that I am personally giving the keynote and handling one of the big “learning organization” modules.  Although it is about the NEW social media, the premise I embedded is that social media is more an anthropology or human relations question than a matter of technology. To me the actual technologies are superfluous.   I realize that this is the thinking and design or a classic historian. Not everybody would be so dismissive of the latest and greatest techno-wiz (BTW – I use the word wiz in both its slang versions) and I fear that it might be me who is out of line.

I recognize the weather of error, but it doesn’t tell me what to do.  It could be that my anthropology paradigm is a good one, or it could just be all wet.   I will do a couple of interactive talks at the new FSI social media seminar next week.  Maybe that will give me better insight.

Posted by Broadnax at 06:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

IIP is consulting with FSI to produce a course on new and social media. I am doing the keynote plus and intro. Below is what I plan to say.  Here is a link to the PowerPoint presentation on social media.  

Not a “how-to” course

You will learn to use new/social media more effectively in this course, but this is not a “how-to” training. The beauty of the new/social media is that it is fairly easy to learn how to use. The challenge is how to use it in the context of effective public diplomacy and the new/social media’s ease of use and very ubiquity complicate the challenge. We are tempted to just start driving down the road, but it is a good idea to look at the roadmap first to figure out where we want to be and how best to get there

For our next trick

We used to ask “what are the parts of the new media?” We identified Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and others and figured out how to use them. Some of us got very good at sending out tweets and finding friends on Facebook. It is very impressive to reach thousands of people with the push of a key, but what are you accomplishing? When we first got into the new media, just getting there was hard and it was accomplishment enough. But we have moved beyond that. If we used to ask about the parts of the new media, the question now is, “what is the new/social media part of?” You will not learn a “Twitter strategy.”

Public diplomacy professionals should no more have a Twitter strategy than a carpenter should have a “hammer strategy.” Like the carpenter, we want a toolbox filled with the best equipment available and we have a building strategy that uses the appropriate tool or combination of tools to get the job done.

The human equation

This is the place where I genuflect toward public diplomacy’s patron – Edward R Murrow – who said that our technologies can bridge thousands of miles, but that persuasion takes place in the last three feet, i.e. the human space. We are always talking to humans and must consider human behavior, preferences and limitations and there are many that affect us. They will differ in various cultures and in various times. We also have to understand that our own actions may fundamentally change the challenges we face.

It is a kind of public diplomacy game theory. The very fact that we are acting changes the environment where we do our things.

A learning organization

This is why we need you and this is why I need you to participate in the talks. There really are no experts in this field, or put differently the actual practitioners, i.e. YOU are the experts. Unfortunately, none of you, none of us, has the complete picture. But we all have some pieces.

How this course is designed to be a little different

We want to pick up some of those pieces. We want to help make State more of a learning organization. Individuals learn, but in order to become a learning organization we have to harvest and synthesis the knowledge of our individual members. Tomorrow Bill May and I will lead a discussion session. I am sure many of you have been in “open discussions” where you know they have a particular goal where you will reach the received wisdom. Less devious trainers sometimes even have the final conclusions written on the flip chart, to be revealed when the group reaches the correct gate at the city of knowledge.

We will try to guide the discussion but we REALLY do not have a goal in mind; more correctly our real goal is to facilitate the learning among all of us. AND we anticipate changing our approach and procedures on the basis of what we learn. If you take this course again, it will be different. And I will write up a synthesis of the results and post it on InfoCentral’s wiki platform. All of you will get the URL and all of you can continue to comment and contribute.

The picture at top, BTW, is Memorial Bridge over the Potomac.

Posted by Broadnax at 05:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I don’t think that life runs in circles, but we kind of follow trials, maybe more like a bloodhound following scents.   The scents can be stronger or weaker.  Sometimes they are washed away completely, but more often it only seems that way.   Naturally the course of your career is often determined by your core competencies and talents.   You tend to circle around the places where you have expertise.   That is why it is so important to start along a path with lots of options, since you may be travelling that way a long time.

It is like the man who has been locked up for a long time.   Suddenly the door swings open and after years of dreaming about it, he is free.   But he really doesn’t know where to go or what to do.  The social media has done that to us in public affairs.   We always said that we would be on easy street if we could just reach people, if we could just overcome the filters of editors and government controls.  To a great extent we now can, but there is less than we had imagined.

A poor workman blames his tools

I am disappointed in the social media in spite or – or maybe because of – our success.   We (State, IIP etc) have succeeded in reaching out directly to millions of people through the new media but the results have been astonishingly banal.   A poor workman blames his tools.   The fault lies not in the social media tools we are using but in our own lack of imagination in using them, coupled with unrealistic expectations.   Social media is what it is.  We can use it well or poorly, but we cannot change its fundamental nature.   So what are some of the things we might try to do differently?  Or maybe, what are the misconceptions that are keeping us from doing as well as we could?   To use the 1990s B-school jargon, how can we shift our paradigms?

Our reach exceeds our grasp

Our minds still inhabit the old world of mass one-way media.   Despite all the protestations to the contrary, we still think in terms of television, where one announcer reaches millions of people and it makes a difference.   We CAN still reach millions with new media, but so can lots of other people.  The power of television was not that it could reach millions.  Its power centered on its capacity to dominate the attention of millions of people.   

The wealth of options creates a poverty of attention. That means that “reach” is not what it used to be. Those who just want to reach more people don’t understand the realities of social media. Reaching a million people is easy. Grasping them and holding their attention, that is hard.      

It is like yelling “hey” at somebody.   He looks in your direction.   If you say nothing or just say “hey” again, all you will end up doing is annoying him.   Social media is very good at saying “hey” (we tend to call it building awareness) but the follow up is often not there.

Reaching audiences and “Building awareness” w/o follow-up is usually worse than nothing because it allows you to stop at that.   There is a good chance you can fool people with the good numbers.  It sounds very impressive to say that your message reached a million people and you may be encouraged to think that your work is done.   All you need to is repeat this success tomorrow and the next day and you are on easy street. The most devious way to hide something from someone is to make him think he found it already. Let him go happily and ignorantly on his way.   We fool ourselves when we settle for reach. 

Less is more?

Of course the opposite end of this bull crap continuum is the contention that you didn’t reach more than a couple people, but that they were really important.   This may be true, but it almost never is.   You can test it by asking for names.   If your expensive program reached only a dozen people, you better know who they are and be able to give a creditable reason why they are so important.   

I will admit it.  I have fallen back on both these subterfuges on occasion; of course well in the past.  Sometimes I have even done it on purpose.   It is possible that your boss just doesn’t understand what you are trying to do, so you do something that you know will generate a big crowd to make him happy so that he will be happy and you can get on with your important work.   Other times, you just mess up. It is easier to claim that you got the small number of key players than these were the only guys you could round up down at the train station.

Now that I am sometimes in a position to be the boss on these sorts of things, I know enough to ask the proper questions.  Sometimes I am polite enough not to, although I usually follow up with an “amusing anecdote” so they know not to try it again.  

Getting it right more important than just getting it

My disappointment with the social media has just made me more enthusiastic about getting it right. We really will need to change some of the ways we do business.   We really do have to think about a new “community manager” role for online communities.  This person has to be like a diplomat in many ways.  That means that he/she need more than technological skills or the ability to “reach out”.  He/she also need some substantive knowledge.   If you are going to participate in a science community, you better know something about science.

We also have to get more into the human-interface.  Real social media requires real social engagement.   We cannot be social media broadcasters and we have to resist attempts to expand our social media community reach beyond what we can reasonably handle.

Many Distinct Niches Better than a Big Blob

Being overly broad is also not usually desirable or successful in building a community.   You are better off working with many niche communities made up by people really interested and committed to a topic than trying to reach a big general audience.   A niche audience allows each individual to get what he/she is looking for.   As the community develops, members begin to feel a sense of belonging.  They value the community and protect it.  A community like this will usually be self policing, since individual members will have the expertise and perceive the interest to discipline bad actors and correct bad information.

Knowing your audience is important but identifying topics rather than audiences is the key to success.   Naturally topics have to be interesting to somebody but audiences will form around topics.   Identifying audiences and then trying to find topics to attract them not only nearly impossible to do, it is also borderline silly.   It means that you abdicate leadership and allow your priorities to be set by what you think you can easily sell.   Presumably we have some of our own priorities and some of them must be advocated whether they are popular or not.

I still haven’t figured this out and I am pretty sure I never will.  But I do understand some parts of the puzzle and in true social media fashion I will rely on the hive intelligence.  I think most of what we need to know is already known or can be found by somebody in the State Department.   We just have to find each other and go from a bunch of learning individuals to a learning organization.   Social media can help figure out social media.   It is fitting.

The gate is open wide and we can see the far horizons but none of us knows where to go.  However, all together we might pick the right direction.

Posted by Broadnax at 06:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“When you say you agree to a thing in principle you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.”* I have limited confidence in the efficacy of big global agreements, but I understand the usefulness of participating and we hope our team will be very forthcoming and aggressive in the COP 15 climate talks.

Posted by Broadnax at 07:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It is great to reach out to adversaries and open a dialogue even with enemies, but in our zeal to make friends of those who have never much liked us, let’s not forget the ones who have stood with us in the past.  Good relationships also require maintenance.  When it is all said and done and when our overtures & concessions to those who don’t like us have produced what results they will, I hope we don’t look around and find we have fewer dependable good friends left.

On the left is a monument to the children of the Warsaw uprising of 1944.  Stalin encouraged the uprising, but then paused to give the Nazis time to destroy the Polish resistance.  The Soviets also interfered with relief efforts mounted by the U.S. and other allies.  As many as 200,000 were killed and 700,000 expelled or escaped, many moving through the sewer system to avoid Nazi patrols. The Nazis systematically destroyed Warsaw in retaliation.

I am upset about a little thing.  I got an email from a Polish friend about an obscure museum in rural Virginia is installing a bust of Joseph Stalin in a place of honor along with those of Churchill & Roosevelt in the D-day Monument.   Friends in Poland have noticed.  It might not matter much ... usually, but it comes on top of some recent events and missteps on our part. 

In September, we announced we were backing out of our agreement on missile defense with Poland and the Czech Republic.   Presumably, this would help with outreach to the always sentimental Vladimir Putin and the decision is justifiable on many grounds.   But we announced it on the very day – the 60th anniversary of the day – when Soviet Armies invaded Poland in 1939.  The next month, it was announced that President Obama would not attend ceremonies marking the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Although that took place in Germany, the fall of the Wall was a big deal for Poland and Poles feel justifiable pride in what they did to hasten the destruction of the Iron Curtain.  The fact that the President travels so frequently to foreign destinations made the absence in Berlin seem more calculated than it was in fact.

Then a couple days before the Obama-free Wall ceremonies, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that Poland would not be eligible for the visa waiver program any time soon.   This is a bigger deal in Poland than it would seem to us. I would hasten to add that Napolitano’s decision is sound by the criteria of the program, but if you are looking at this sequence of events from Warsaw or Krakow, it might seem like your old American friends are turning their backs.

That is why the little Stalin thing is so big.  Stalin was indeed a truly odious man.  He was our ally only because Hitler attacked him – reneging on a deal the two dictators made to jointly rape Eastern Europe. While there can be no doubt that we could not have defeated Hitler w/o the Russians, it is also true that w/o our material aid and the second front, the Nazis could have conquered the Soviet Union.   Stalin gave no more than he had to protect his own power and at the end of the conflict he gobbled up as much as he could and imposed a tyranny on Eastern Europe that long outlived him.  The murderer of tens of millions and the architect of a nefarious system that subjugated almost half the world for almost fifty years is not just another interesting and important historical figure.

This is a case where public diplomacy and the perception of events makes as much differences as the events themselves.  Objectively, our decisions were sound and need not have engendered any practical problems.  The perceptions were different.

I have been Poland-centric in this post, but I have seen similar patterns with other old friends.

“Make new friends but keep the old; one is silver and the other gold” That is a rhyme I learned in second or third grade.  

It is easy to be beguiled by the possibilities of new relationships.  But dealing with countries is not the same as kids making new friends on the playground.  For one thing, there are no “new kids”.   Every relationship already has a history, usually going back generations.   There may well be a good reason why we don’t get along well.  Sometimes we have conflicting goals.   Often our aspirations do not mesh.   Sometimes it is an identity problem.   There are leaders in the world who derive much of their personality and power from their stance of being opposed to the U.S.   If they couldn’t blame us for their troubles, the blame might fall on them.

Above is the King's Palace In Warsaw.  The Nazis destroyed it and all of Warsaw in 1944.  The Poles rebuilt.  It was in front of this Palace that President Clinton in 1997 announced our support of Polish NATO membership. Poland formally became a NATO member in 1999.

On the other hand, we have shared interests and shared identities with many countries.   Our allies in Europe, for example, remain our strongest cultural, security, trading and investment partners.   Things generally proceed so smoothly among us that we pay little attention.   Remember our good friends the Japanese and recall when we were not so good friends.   It is a lot better now, isn’t it?  How about our border with Canada?  Good thing on both sides that it is secure and peaceful.  I could make a longer list, but I would inevitably leave somebody out and feel bad about it.  But as I said up top, good relationships do not maintain themselves.  It is a lot less exciting and you cannot do something unprecedented by maintaining the familiar paths, but you often have to pay MORE attention to your friends than your foes. 

It is sort of like the unglamorous job of maintaining underground infrastructure.  It doesn’t seem very important until the water main breaks washing away your car and drowning your cat.

Another childhood story pops to mind.   Remember the Aesop fable about a dog holding a bone in his mouth?  He sees his refection in a pond and thinks there is another dog down there with a bone as big as his own.  He wants that bone too.  So he jumps into the water to take it, only to lose what he had and just come out boneless, frustrated and all wet.

Posted by Broadnax at 02:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Something of Lasting Value – A Community

I knew an interesting woman called Eva Sopher who ran the Theatro São Pedro in Porto Alegre.  She helped me understand the meaning of cultural treasures.  The Theatro was being refurbished and put under the direction of a foundation to conserve the building and protect its traditions.  They weren’t doing many plays, so the “output” was low.  If you wanted to put on plays, you could have much more efficiently done so in many other locations or built a new theater.  Donna Eva explained why we should in a different direction.

The plays actually performed, she explained, were just a small part to the output of a cultural institution.   From the cultural point of view, the preparation, rehearsals, production and venue were probably more important.   The Theatro created a cultural community that included not only the theater goers and actors, but also the myriad of others who supported the enterprise.  This was part of a tradition that stretched back centuries and with any luck would continue for centuries into the future. It was a task that was never done and could never be done.  There was no finish line.  She didn’t use the tired cliché, but I will.  The journey was more important than the destination.  In fact the real purpose of the “product” – a successful play - was to support the other parts of the community that made it happen.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It is LESS important for a speaker of English to learn another language than it has ever been.  I am aware that this statement will sound backward and xenophobic to many,  but as a person who spoke three languages fluently (Portuguese, Norwegian & Polish), one “enough to get by (German) and two with decent reading ability (Latin & Greek), I feel I have some standing about this subject.

Let me bring up the caveat right at the start.   If you plan to live in a country or stay there a long time so should learn the language.  Learning a second language is also a hallmark of a good education. Not to do so is indeed backward and xenophobic.    What I am talking about here is the usefulness of“general” foreign language ability.   This is the one that pundits fret about and scold Americans for not doing.  Their criticism actually stems from their own ignorance and/or not having thought through the problem.

Which One?

There are hundreds of languages spoken around the world.   Even if you limit yourself to “world languages,” those spoken by lots of people in several countries*, there is too big a choice.   I know from experience that learning a language well is very hard and a monumental commitment of time.  KEEPING a language fluent is perhaps a greater challenge.   You really cannot just collect languages and pull them out when you need them.  So if you don’t have a specific plan to go to a region, which language should you learn?

The question is easy for a non-English speaker.   English is THE world language.  There are You can find English speakers everyplace you go.  No other language is like that.  We Americans think of Spanish as widespread because we see so many Spanish speaking immigrants and live near Mexico.  But try using Spanish anyplace outside the Americas or north of the Pyrenees in Europe.  Even in Spain itself you may have trouble in Catalonia if you learned your Spanish in Latin America. Chinese is spoken more people than any other language, but almost all of them live in one place.  Fluency in Chinese in non-Chinese communities is uncommon. 

BTW - the Chinese are finding their relative lack of English a problem in their international relationships.   Generally Engish is the key to economic success and all over the world people are climbing over each other to learn it.   There is no more useful language.  

The Power of the Network

I could go on.  Suffice to say that if you were to be located in a random inhabited place on the earth and asked find somebody within 10 miles whose language you could understand, ONLY English would give you a significant chance of success. You might not find a native English speaker, but you would almost certainly find an English speaker.

The power of English is kind of an open secret. It seems arrogant for Americans or Brits to talk about it openly.  Language is tied up with culture and identity, so people have strong emotional interests in pushing their favorite languages.  But no matter what people say, the REVEALED preference is clear. And I don't think it will reverse, even if the relative political and economic power of the U.S. and other English speaking countries declines. 

The "network effect" is strong and self reinforcing.  BTW - the network effect refers to the accumulating advantages of adding more people.  If there is only one telephone in the world, it is useless.  The more you add, the better it gets. At some point, it becomes almost impossible to NOT join the network.  This doesn't mean the network is objectively the best.  English is not the "best" language in the world; it is just the most useful.

Switching is Hard

The power of the network is increased when it is difficult to switch and it is very difficult to switch languages.  Most people really do not have the talents to become multi-lingual in any meaningful way.  I know I certainly do not.  And even if you do have the talent for learning languages, if you don't have the opportunity for constant practice, you cannot keep them.

I think many people underestimate the difficulty in REALLY learning a language and/or overestimate their own language skills.  If you studied really hard and took four years of French or Spanish in HS, you have probably NOT learned that language. If you took a summer course in Chinese, you have NOT learned that language.  Being able to ask direction to the train station or ordering dinner is nice, but unless you can have a nuanced discussion about an important subject, you really are not there.

If you want a rough guide to how well you are speaking a second language, see how long it takes for a native speaker to compliment you on how well you speak their language.  Generally, the faster they praise your skills, the worse you are doing.  Think about that.  If you run into a person with a foreign accent who speaks English well, do you feel the need to compliment him on his English?  We only notice if there is a struggle.  I have observed this in my work.  When I first get to a country, everyone tells me how well I speak the language.  I am happy to report that the compliments become less common the longer I am there.

It takes an FSO six months to get to a basic level of an easy language like French or Spanish.  That means six months of full-time (i.e. all day, everyday, all week), small group instruction.  For a harder language like Polish it is almost a year, two years for languages like Chinese or Arabic.  And that gets you only to a MINIMUM professional level.  And then if you don't practice, it goes away.  Really learning a language is essentially a life-long effort.

Since we probably cannot learn more than one second language well enough to call it learned, or we cannot maintain it even if we manage to learn it,  the world is de-facto stuck with choosing one "network language". What will it be?

Much of international English today is exchanged among non-native English speakers.  A group of international business people from from Germany, Japan, Brazil and Egypt will almost certainly have to speak English among themselves. 

This is a great thing for native English speakers.  I remember talking to a Norwegian a long time back.  He spoke what seemed to me perfect English, but he told me that Americans were lucky because they were "never foreigners."  I didn't understand what he meant, so he explained.  Most international conferences featured English, even though most participants were not native speakers. Americans could just jump in.  Others had to do so in a second language.  I felt his pain.  I have spoken other languages fairly well, but it is never the same. 

Language Does Not Mean Identity

I understand that some people reading this might take some offense at what I say about English and the others. This is illogical and based on the idea that languages define or "belong" to particular groups and deserve respect or deference as a part of identity.  (None of my ancestry is from English speaking countries. Should I have learned Polish or German before English?) That makes language choice a value judgment.  It need not be that.  You can still study languages and cultures for their intrinsic value (defined as you like).  I studied Greek and Latin and feel I benefited greatly from getting to know the the cultures and traditions of the past.  But for as a practical matter, we are much better served by English, because that is the one we will have to use now and in the future.

So which language should an American learn if he has no plans to live or work in a particular part of the world?  It would be good to get those math skills in order.  

*    World languages would include Arabic, Chinese, English French, Portuguese & Spanish.  We used to include Russian and German too.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We have been admonished to make sure our public diplomacy products appeal to a broad gender audience (i.e. also are relevant to women, for as long as I have been in the public diplomacy business.  Our plans always include a section about reaching out to women, as they should.   But our stuff appeals less to another key demographic – boys and young men. 

If you consider who does what to whom, young men are certainly the key.   But the more “inclusive” we make the material, the less it is likely to appeal to young men.  This is not only a gender issue.  It impacts anything where people are different and that means that it impacts everything we do.

I was thinking about this during a presentation on video games and persuasion.   The most popular games – and this cuts right across cultural divides – involve something blowing up.  The only things that come close are car races and sports, and even in these games something often tends to blow up or at least give that sort of visual impression.   Somebody asked if the games could emphasize peaceful cooperation and inclusiveness.   You could do that, but then the game would appeal to a different demographic.  The general rule seems to be if a mixed gender group of bureaucrats likes it, young men won’t. 

All good marketing features segmentation, since no product appeals to everyone equally.    The more something is loved by one group, the more it will probably be disliked by others.  This statement approaches a tautology.  As you specialize and tailor to a particular set of needs or preferences you by necessity remove or modify the traits that appeal to other needs and preferences.    That is why a product that appeals to very large and diverse groups is usually bland.   It can survive and prosper as long as there are no easily obtained alternatives, but given different choices people will make … different choices.

Public diplomacy does a poor job of segmentation.    In fact, there is a significant disincentive to segmentation.   We are asked to be inclusive.   We often get the question, “Sure, this appeals to people in this particular group/region/circumstance/age/gender/income but how does it address the needs of that particular group/region/circumstance/age/gender/income.”   The proper answer is “It doesn’t.”   The things I mentioned above are ways to segment a market.    You cannot design a product for everybody.  Let me modify that.  You cannot design a SUCCESSFUL product for everybody.

If I could point to one impediment that causes us the most problem in public diplomacy, I would say that it is the lack of ability to differentiate our products to appeal to different market segments. We often got around it in a de-facto way at overseas posts, but it is not a new problem and since it has persisted for at least a quarter century, through a wide variety of different challenges and political masters, I have to conclude that the problem is systemic.   It is just very hard to be against something that is inclusive, fair, and comprehensive with a world-wide appeal.  The trouble is that no such thing exists and the search for this chimera not only distracts but actually impedes development of appeals and products that appeal to discrete segments of the audience. 

You just cannot have a club worth being a if anyone can join.

Posted by Broadnax at 06:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We hear that all the time. Today I read an article saying that America lags behind THE WORLD in processing e-waste. I heard on the radio yesterday that American higher education is at risk. You would think we lived in the worst place it world.  Yet anybody who has lived or especially worked anywhere else knows that America is one of the best places in terms of almost everything people really want. 

Is everybody just stupid for not seeing this?  Is it anti-American propaganda?  Do “they” hate us? Are we betrayed by the opinion-making elites in our own country?   I think the answer often is simpler and structurally-based on a few factors that seem neutral in themselves but produce the negative buzz we have come to expect from the chattering classes in the American and international media. 

Doom and gloom industry

There are definite concrete and often money advantages to looking at the negative side of life.  Various NGOs have organized to solve the world’s problems.  They depend on bad news to fund raise.  What are the chances they will announce that the problem they have been fighting for years has been substantially solved?  This incentive system goes double for lawyers, who can often get courts to use their coercive power to get money directly.   Of course, this doesn’t apply only to America, but it applies especially to America where the money going to NGOs and lawyers is by far the largest in the world.  It makes sense to go after the deep pockets.

Cherry picking comparisons

One of my jobs was to give talks about America to foreign audiences.  I used to start with the statement, “Everything you have heard about America is right.”   This is true because the U.S. is so big and diverse.  We have the some of the best schools and some of the worst.   We have the fattest people and the fittest people.   We also have fifty states, each with its own problems and personality.    We like to make lists and it is very easy to pick the comparison you want and usually those comparisons are negative.

The U.S. is a continental country.   In many ways, it can be compared only to other continental units, such as China, Russia, Brazil, India or maybe the ENTIRE EU. Otherwise we get inappropriate unit comparisons of the whole U.S to whatever are the best performing countries in any particular category.   It would be like comparing the average of 1000 people in various categories against the best individuals – different ones depending on the need.  We could do the same with states. For example, the relatively poor American state of Arkansas has a per-captia income about that of Germany.

There are also problems of scale.  A country like Norway has only around 5 million people and they are relatively homogenous.  Many things can be done on a small scale that cannot be scaled up. I lived in Norway for four years and thought it was a great place to be but I understood that the institutions that work for them cannot be scaled 60 times, even if all the 300+ Americans wanted to do it.

What they say, not what they do

Surprise.  Not everybody does what they promise.  This is especially true among leaders of less democratically oriented countries, since they have less of a domestic check, but it works for everybody.  My personal indicates that America promises less than many other places, but delivers more. Many countries declare the RIGHT to things and may even assign a government bureaucracy to deliver, but they don’t.  Citizens get stuck with long waiting lines or defacto rationing.   For example, I observed that people found it very difficult to get day-care in Norway.  It was a RIGHT, but there was a long waiting list.   Sometimes the problem was solved when the kid got old enough not to need it.  We have fewer official social rights in the U.S. but we can often GET things easier. 

One problem is that REALITY in America is compared with promises or aspirations elsewhere.  It is always easier to make plans and promises than to deliver results.   But it gets even worse when the promises are compared.    We lose whenever we get into a rhetorical bidding war.  Reality is more important but harder to measure.

Government v private & theories of history

The government even today has a smaller role in American society than it does almost every place else.  This goes back hundreds of years.  Alexis de Tocqueville described it in 1831.  We Americans rely much more on self-organized groups and volunteers.  No other country has such a large charity and volunteer sectors.

Related to the role of government is a deeply embedded theory of history and storytelling.  Stories have heroes and villains.   Actual events often do not.  The American system is decentralized and much more self-organized than the average country.  But people still look for some human agent even when something happens for diffuse and impersonal reason. They always find one.  That is why conspiracy theories are so popular.  It is usually not true, but we get blamed anyway.

The Katrina Effect I was listening to NPR as I was writing this an on came Daniel Schorr with a tangential example.  He was talking about the shortages of H1N1 flu vaccine and how people were blaming government incompetence. People get very high expectations that government can control natural disasters, he said, and when things work less well than can be imagined, they get angry.  It was a similar problem with Katrina. I was a little surprised that Schorr used the Katrina example. I guess as we get farther away from it, it becomes less politically charged. 

Improvement actually makes things look worse

I wrote about this in a previous note. Continuous Improvement Makes Everything Look Bad Looking Back

Anyway, these are a few of the thoughts that came to me after seeing those articles.  I am not saying that there are not bad guys out there that want to give us a hard time, but even absent ill will, we still face structural challenges.  The sad part is that there is little we can do about them.   In many ways it would be better if it was the work of our opponents. We might be able to identify them and contain their propaganda, maybe even change some minds.  With structural problems … we just have to live with them.  I would say that we can slowly change them, but I am not sure we can.  Sometimes you have to choose between actually doing something and seeming to do something. Promises are great, but it is usually better to get something really.

Posted by Broadnax at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The article I read about education in the Arab world was depressing.   There is controversy about the evolution debate in the U.S., but even in the most evolution-hostile fundamentalist environment, there is a debate.  But only around a third of adults in Egypt have ever even heard of Charles Darwin.  There is no biological science w/o Darwin.  That started me thinking about communicating with people who not only disagree with us but may not even share fundamental facts and assumptions.  

We tend to assume that our public affairs programs will resonate if only we craft them right or that a good policy will get the support it deserves.  These assumptions are not justified, overambitious and probably unnecessary.  Let’s do some reality checking by putting the challenges into familiar terms.

We have the controversy within America about bias on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC among others. Some people disagree strongly with people like Glenn Beck, Rachel Maddow, Sean Hannity or Keith Olbermann, accusing them of bias or not being “real” journalists. But let’s put them in the international perspective.  I chose examples from right and left of the spectrum and we would expect much disagreement among them, but the differences among these guys are small potatoes when put in an international context.   And their journalistic ethics and commitment to accuracy would certainly put them much above the international average. 

We have to look at the world as it is, not as we would like it to be.

So before we tear our hair out about what the world thinks about us, let’s be clear.  Overall, the world information environment is not open, not fair, not balanced and not friendly to us.  The problem is worst precisely in the places we have the most trouble and this probably is not a coincidence. It is useful to keep in this in mind when we talk about lack of popular international support or approval of America and its policies.   Or let’s put this in our own context.  Glenn Beck would get a fairer shake on the Rachael Maddow show (and vice-versa) than we get in the media in much of the world.

The world is a big and diverse place.  Of course it is true that parts of the world enjoy standards of living & openness similar to ours, Democracy, prosperity and freedom are more widespread now than ever, but the blessings of liberty are still a minority proposition among the world’s people.  The Index of Democracy estimates that only half the world's population lives in some sort of democracy, but only 14% live in full democracies.  Despite advances in democracy, more than a third of the world's population still lives under authoritarian rule.  Economic freedom is about as widespread (The most democratic countries with the freest markets also tend to be the richest and most competitive.)  And according Freedom House’s press freedom report, in 2009 only 17% of the world’s people live in places where the press is free.    In one of our key areas, the Middle East, there are NO countries with completely free media and the region has more to worry about than that.   

Let’s again take this back to our terms.  Imagine a fundamentalist polygamous community living someplace in the remote mountains.  They spend significantly more time teaching religion than science or math.   They inculcate a general impression that the outside world is vaguely hostile or at best out to cheat or disrupt the community.   We have all seen such communities in the news.  Get the picture in your head.  Now imagine that your job is to convince them of the fundamental goodness and trustworthiness of the Federal Government.  This would be a daunting task.  Now imagine that most of them don’t speak English and a significant number cannot properly read in any language.  

Much of the world's population presents a challenge like this, or worse.

That is why it doesn’t make particular sense to try to reach the WHOLE world or even very large numbers.  Most people don’t really care very much about our issues.  Others don’t really understand them.  Some are hostile to the messages or have contrary interests.  That is why it makes more sense to target carefully and make our interventions transactional. I don’t really care if people love me in general if they cooperate with me on mutually important specific issues. 

All that requires, however, that we understand our audiences, our goals and our own limitations. 

I spent a lot of time learning not to blame other for my failures. I tried to be proactive and figure out what I could do, no matter what others were doing.  This is a useful and valid outlook.  I have not abandoned it, but I have moved beyond it.  I now understand that sometimes my problems are indeed caused by others. I still have to be proactive, but mostly in ways to avoid the obstruction.  Some people cannot be brought around and it is not my fault.  There are even some people who you DON'T want as friends.  Lay down with dogs and you come up with fleas. The same goes for public affairs. Some people & groups cannot be reached - for all practical purposes - and some shouldn't be reached because of THEIR characteristics.  There are things you just cannot have and if you look carefully you find sometimes you don't want them need them.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I participated in a seminar led by guy who had been on a CORDS team in Vietnam. CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support) were supposed to do some of the development and coordination activities done by PRTs.  I was aware of CORDS but through talking to some older guys who knew about them. You cannot find much about them otherwise. It is the forgotten war and maybe the forgotten victory.

The professor pointed out that the insurgency in South Vietnam was decisively defeated after the TET offensive and CORDS cemented the victory.   After that, it became a problem of invasion from North Vietnam.  The popularly held idea that a bunch of insurgents, living with the people in the countryside, overthrew the South Vietnamese regime is just wrong.  We all remember the fall of Saigon, but we often forget that it was conquered by the armies of the North; big armies complete with armor and air support.  It wasn’t little guys in black pajamas.     

The successful counterinsurgency, including CORDS operation, was linked with the disastrous fall of Saigon and because we got the history wrong, usually w/o even thinking much about it, we were unable or unwilling to learn the lessons.  

The strategy associated with the surge worked in Iraq. We went from near defeat in late 2006 to a clear success (call it victory) a year later. I personally saw the change and felt its effects.  It was literally a matter of people dying or not. You can do all the academic analysis you want and round the words until they fit into square holes, but I am morally convinced that thousands of people are alive today because of what we did. PRTs were part of the surge and people like me contributed to the victory in Iraq. 

Our work at the PRTs may be following CORDS down the memory hole. It just doesn’t have many powerful champions and there are detractors. Some people are almost embarrassed that the surge worked, since they had so vociferously predicted its failure. Others have convinced themselves that success would have happened anyway.  Still others deny that we were successful at all since the situation is not a perfect as they could imagine. And then there are those who imply that victory or defeat in Iraq were/are just irrelevant.    

Some of the participants in the seminar asked me how State Department had taken advantage of the unique experience I had gained in Western Anbar. How had we absorbed that knowledge as a learning organization.  This is what they wanted to know.  I thought about it. I thought about it again.   The Marines invited me to Quantico to discuss my experience, several times, I told them. An independent scholar contacted me.  He had read my blog and wanted to see if I could tell him anything else.  At State Department … well, FSI asked me to present to classes of PRT folks going to Iraq.  I was on a panel with four other people and collectively we talked for about an hour.  That was good.  I sponsored my own brown bag lunch to discuss Iraq.   Five people came, all of them my friends just trying to be nice. I wrote a few entries on our State Department wiki, Diplopedia.  I don’t know if anybody read any of them, but information gets stale anyway unless it is converted to knowledge.

The follow up question was something like, “then how do you all learn?”  I mumbled about “reading in” to the cable and reports.

It is hard to be a learning organization because it is hard to turn experience into information and even harder to turn information into useful knowledge. We too often content ourselves with information on paper, or these days on computers.  We can gather all the numbers, metrics, whatever you want to call it, but it has to be converted to useful knowledge and categorized by human intelligence.  Creating useful knowledge usually means putting it into understandable context.  It usually also requires that the person digesting the information is also someone who can make decisions.  You cannot outsource your brains.

As a PRT leader, I had first-hand, primary knowledge. I sometimes didn’t know the significance of my information or how it fit into a bigger picture. It was helpful when someone had the secondary knowledge to evaluate and figure out what my information was part of. That is why a learning organization is stronger and smarter than the individuals in it.  If the information contained in individual minds remains un-harvested, the organization doesn’t learn.  It can be full of smart people who are adept at learning and improvising solutions, but it will lack the synergy of a learning organization. This is our problem.

I have been observing organizations for a long time.  You have to look at the organization as a whole with its own behaviors, not only at the separate individuals because groups are more than a the sum of individuals.  They develop a culture. We all know that individuals can learn, but so can organizations under the right conditions.

I see that many can be episodically learning organizations.  Much depends on characteristics of individuals in charge and the culture they engender. People have to talk and exchange information informally and non-judgmentally. The learning episode stops if anybody gets in trouble for being wrong, stepping out of line or presenting information that contradicts a agreed upon course of action.  But it is clearly a lot harder than just letting people talk and engage.  There has to be a way to evaluate information. Someone might be 100% honest and open, but still lack the perspective to create accurate or useful knowledge.  On the other hand, the old saying applies that even a broken clock is right twice a day, so you have to listen to everybody. 

The Marines in Iraq had become a learning organization.  I wrote about it at this link. Parts of State Department have been learning organizations during some periods.  I have been involved in some. It was exciting but those flashes of lights tend to flicker out when personnel or priorities shift. 

Maybe both personnel and priorities have shifted concerning PRTs in Iraq.  Maybe its just me.  Maybe the State Department has moved along.  Maybe the old Arab proverb applies, "The dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on. I don’t suppose my banana index translates very well anyway. It even stopped working in Iraq before I left. 

Posted by Broadnax at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The keynote speaker at the SU symposium was Keith Reinhard, founder and president of Business for Diplomatic Action (BDA).   This is an advertising professional with an impressive resume.  You can read about him at this link but you already know his work.  He wrote McDonald’s “You Deserve a Break Today” and “Two-all-beef-patties-special-sauce-lettuce-cheese-pickles-onions-on-a-sesame-seed-bun,” as well as State Farm’s long running theme, “Just Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm Is There.”

Mr. Reinhard said that American business is uniquely placed to lead in burnishing the U.S. image abroad, pointing out that Coca-Cola alone has more than ten times as many employees as State Department.  He also made some good points about travel to the U.S.  It is hard to get visas; we don’t welcome tourist well when they get here and the U.S. does little in the way of travel promotion.   All these things are true. People have been complaining about visas and trying to improve the travel situation for many years. 

(IMO, the single best thing the USG could do to improve our image is improve how potential visitors are treated, from the minute they inquire about a trip to the U.S. until they put their foot back on their home soil. Most of the components of this are within the power of the USG, but this is a complex issue fraught with conflicting interests and priorities.  I won't even try to address them in this space. Smarter people than I have tried.)

U.S. businesses are indeed very important in shaping the way the U.S. is seen abroad.  We have worked with businesses overseas and there are many venues for cooperation.  Business can help sponsor July 4 celebrations; they can be part of seminars and symposiums; business leaders often make great speakers at events. But cooperation can be oversold.  The notion that business will become involved in partnership with government to improve the U.S. image is one of those great ideas that seems always almost happening, but never quite arrives.

Business-government PR enterprises don’t go as smoothly in practice as they do in concept for some good reasons.  Most people employed by Coke, for example, are doing things like bottling or distributing the product.  This is similar for all businesses.  Businesses do business.  We cannot expect them to devote much of their time or money to helping the U.S. government do image building. They already pay taxes.  They create jobs and build prosperity.  That is their role.    

Getting too close to the U.S. government can be a problem for businesses.  Government’s embrace can be suffocating and dangerous for business and business connections can difficult for government.  

Let’s say it plainly.  If business and government form partnerships, they both hope to gain something from the joint enterprise.  Unless everybody thinks the relationship through, much of what they expect might give the impression of impropriety and sometimes might actually be unethical.

It can be too easy for particular local firms to become the “go to” places for U.S. officials.  Pretty soon it looks like the U.S. is endorsing or backing their products.  Even though nobody says so, foreigners might treat them differently because of this.   When working in Poland, I found that many people assumed that they could get better treatment for things like visas if they worked with firms somehow associated with the Consulate.   We would sometimes have to distance ourselves from a firm that was in fact actively implying such useful connections.

You can easily envision situations where closeness to the USG would be a negative.  Unfriendly foreign authorities might not be able to effectively harass our diplomats, but they can take out their frustrations on U.S. firms or their local employees.

There is also a little disagreement about how much the general image matters anyway.  The numbers seem soft and volatile.  IMO, any opinion that can change week-to-week based on external events is not firmly held or predictive of behavior.  Mr. Reinhart mentioned an article in the NYT that questioned the efficacy of a being ostensibly popular.  (He did not agree with most of it, BTW, and the extrapolations in this paragraph are mine, not his.)Things like cooperation with U.S. policies and sales of U.S. products seem unaffected by the vicissitudes of popularity.  I have come to believe that public diplomacy can be very effective in specific areas and subjects, but is less useful with the general. In fact, I think that the general questions re favorability or approval of the U.S. are almost useless, especially when done across cultures that have a variety of ways of answering questions and interacting with researchers.

All things considered, I think the best things American business can do to improve America’s image is to make quality products, lead their businesses ethnically and respect local laws, culture & customs.  We can cooperate where appropriate, and we do all the time, but business is not going to become some kind of PD auxiliary and neither business nor government should want it to. 

I know that I am giving a negative accounting.   Let me mitigate that a little.  We already have succeeded.  USG cooperation with U.S. businesses is brilliant.  I know that from personal experience. I have worked with American firms since my first post in the FS.  They sponsor many of our events and in the process build their own images and get exposure for their products.  U.S. businesses participate in our symposiums and share their experience.   We all benefit. Of course, American businesses directly sponsor exchanges, investments, technology transfers and all tolled they certainly make a much greater impression on the world than our comparatively underfunded and understaffed efforts.  They do these things for good business reasons.   

Cooperation is good and where it makes sense it has been going on since before the founding of our Republic.  Ben Franklin, our first diplomat, combined representation of government with business. John Adams was less successful as a diplomat because he couldn’t really grasp the interconnections.  Read any of their biographies and you will be struck at how similar things were so long ago.  We have been doing it.  I just don’t see how business-government cooperation can be significantly expanded in the PR area.  We in government would have to ask ourselves what business hoped to get from the expanded partnership (i.e. influence).   Business leaders would have to ask what government wanted (i.e. money). And if all of us were thoughtful and honest the answers might make us rightfully cautious in pushing too hard for more. Some things you shouldn’t do, even though you can and some separate things should not be too intimately mixed.

BTW - that is not Mr. Reinhard in the picture at top.  I just got a nice angle on the podium to show both the room and the nice day outside.  The middle picture shows some of the building on the SU campus. On the bottom is an interesting arch along the Erie Canal route.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We talked about the public diplomacy surrounding climate change at the Public Diplomacy Symposium at Syracuse University.  Karen Akerlof from George Mason based her talk on a report called Global Warming’s Six Americas, which segmented the American public by their belief in global warming and stated commitment to doing something about it. 

I will let you read the report at the link above. Ms. Akerlof pointed out that these diverse groups had more in common in their actions than in their beliefs. For example, those who were dismissive of global warming were MORE likely to do things like drive fuel efficient cars, weather-strip their houses and conserve energy in general.  You could speculate that they were more motivated by the desire to save money than save the earth, but this reveals the biggest challenges in public relations/public diplomacy – people often do NOT act on their expressed beliefs. 

Public affairs professionals like to think that if we can convince people of the righteousness of our positions their behaviors will change in favorable directions, but the relationship between good will and good deeds is not strong.   In fact the gap between what people say they want to do and what they really do is probably the single most common inspiration for literature, myths and self-help books. 

People are Perfidious 

This is the gap between what people SAY – i.e. their stated preferences – and what they DO – i.e. their revealed preferences.  People don’t tell the truth to opinion pollsters when talking about complex issues.  I won’t call it hypocrisy or dishonesty because it goes deeper than that simple explanation.   

People often don’t know what they really think because they haven’t thought through all aspects of most issues.  When asked, they to follow along the familiar ruts of what they think others approve.They might even claim that they feel strongly about it but that doesn’t necessarily indicate their own commitment or their willingness to follow through.  It gets worse when we become more political.

Politics does not REQUIRE strong commitment or follow up among most supporters.   At a cost of about an hour of their time otherwise uncommitted individuals can convince themselves of their virtue once every two or four years and then do not much but complain and make demands in between.  Politicians figured this out long ago (read about it in what Tocqueville wrong in 1830), so they flatter and pander to the uncommitted by giving them an undeserved benefit of the doubt.  Focus on a one-time easy to do action works well campaigns.  The skill level required to make a mark on a ballot or pull a lever on a machine is not high.  But is not a good way to govern or get things done in general.

A Slowly Warming Oven

Climate change is perhaps the place where the one-time, short-term rhetorical – the political campaign - commitment works LEAST well.  The diffuse, slow-motion unfolding of climate change is almost the opposite of a political process.   In climate change, you have to pay the costs up-front and personally.  However, you may never get a personal payoff and the results of your work and sacrifice may not come for many years, may not happen near you and may not be apparently connected to your actions.  In fact, I cannot think of situation LESS likely to inspire consistent action on the part of individuals. Mark Meisner, Another of the SU panelist, laid it out nicely.  He said that the climate debate is hard because of doubts related to complexity, distance, time, visibility, responsibly and consequences.  To me this just means that we’re cooked on this one.

Advocates for climate change action missed major inflection point in the climate debate that happened a few months ago.   Until this year, they had a politically based task.  They had to convince people to SAY they believed climate change was real and that it represented a danger. This task was facilitated by the easy identification of villains.  Global warming deniers (following the construction “Holocaust deniers”) could be attacked.  It was implied that if these guys would just recognize the truth, the problem could be solved.   But this is wrong. Global warming deniers did not cause the problem and they cannot fix it because global warming is a physical problem that requires real, as opposed to political, action.  AND it requires long-term commitment, not mere involvement.

The inflection point that occurred in the debate this year is that almost everybody now recognizes the problem, at least rhetorically. The convincing part of the public diplomacy worked.  Now we have moved to the “so what do we DO?” stage. This is harder. 

Easier to Identify a Problem than to Agree on Solutions

Let me lay it out.  We now agree on the diagnosis of the problem, but we strongly disagree about what we should do, when we should do it, who will pay for it and who is responsible of taking the needed steps.  We have moved beyond the political phase of the problem and are now in the governance phase. They require different skills and methods.

On the one hand, this is to the advantage of the U.S.  Other countries have sanctimoniously hidden behind the U.S. for too long.  We didn’t agree to Kyoto, but Kyoto didn’t work anyway. Those that did agree to Kyoto generally reduced their CO2 emissions LESS since 2000 than we did. It is the difference between the political and the operational paradigms.  In the political paradigm you get credit for what you say you are gonna do.  In the operational paradigm you only get credit for what you actually accomplish.  America has been doing much better in the reality than in the perception of environmental progress.  So as a public diplomat, my life has become a bit easier because we can more easily talk about our practical success.  Clearing away the cover, calling the practical bluff of our detractors will be satisfying.   

Good Decisions Require Good Information, Incentives

But my anticipated joy at rhetorical victories in the public diplomacy game is mitigated by the anxiety I feel as someone concerned about the real environment. I am resigned to the fact that there will be climate change.   We cannot avoid it.  How much it bites depends more on technological developments than on political will.  Politicians can do two things to help.  They can raise the price of carbon, which will encourage alternatives, and they can reduce opposition to nuclear power.   But both these things have political costs, so I expect less help from this sector.

The atmosphere doesn’t care if you say you are an environmentalist.  It doesn’t make allowances for the poor nor does it give credit for good intentions.   It is not impressed by celebrities.  You cannot make progress by changing accounting procedures, borrowing from the future or blaming the past.  You cannot get credit for what you didn’t do and your good works will often by obvious to nobody. In short, the natural environment is a very un-political environment. 

Fortunately, the American people are greater than American politics, or as l like to say, the American nation is greater than the American government. This is true of other countries too.  We are developing new technologies and new techniques. The imagination, innovation & intelligence of the people will produce good solutions if they have the right incentives and information. Environmental protection is one of the places where market-based incentives and information is insufficient because we are dealing with external costs and long term consequences.  Government's role is to make the needed adjustments in information and incentives, so that individuals and firms make realistic decisions.  But the authorities must resist the temptation to pick winners and losers and micro-manage.

Politicians & public affairs campaigns play indispensable support roles by creating conditions favorable to development, but they develop nothing by themselves.  

In the end, what you have done really is more important than what you say you are going to do.

Chicken & Pigs; Eggs & Ham

Do you recall the difference between involvement and commitment?  Look at this bacon & eggs breakfast. The chicken is involved.  She drops the egg and has nothing to do ever again.  The pig is committed.  His ass is right there on the plate.   Involvement can be painless and ephemeral.  Commitment is hard and permanent.  You can see why it is easier to get people involved than committed.

Posted by Broadnax at 01:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am on a panel about public diplomacy at the Second Public Diplomacy Symposium at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York on October 16.   Since it is a panel DISCUSSION I don’t want to say too much initially in order to let the discussion develop in ways favored by the participants.   The reflections on public diplomacy on the blog this week are some of the ways I am working through the issues.  Sorry for all the overlap.  I have to produce hours of thought to yield a few minutes of talk.  It takes a lot of preparation to be spontaneous.

Below is what I plan to use as an introduction.  The PowerPoint for the presentation is available at this link.

Social Media & Public Diplomacy

Above are workers constructing the new Institute of Peace building across from my office. They use a variety of tools for their work, choosing the most appropriate for the job at hand.  The TASK is the important thing.  The tools are just a way to get the job done.  A carpenter does not have a specific "hammer strategy."  We should not have a specific Facebook or Twitter strategy.  Our PD TOOLS should be used ... as tools - part of a tool box or portfolio.  Use the ones that work at the right place and time; don't develop a strategy for them.

****

You are catching me at a time of indecision.   I spent more than twenty-five years working in public diplomacy and have been a pioneer in State Department innovative use of the new media; at least they gave me a couple awards that said so.  But I have doubts.  Electronic distribution & the social/interactive media is not the game changer I hoped.  On reflection, I think we leaned too much about technology and not enough on the social and anthropological aspects of the social media. Technology has made it easy to reach large numbers of people, but it doesn’t mean they are paying attention, turning our information into useful knowledge or doing something new or different based on what they get from us.

We have to do a lot of rethinking but it is hard to think when we are beguiled and distracted by the promise of technology. So let’s set aside all the latest techno-developments and think about the SOCIAL media from the human and audience perspective. Since this will be a DISCUSSION and I have only a few minutes to provoke your questions, let me give you the seven truths about public diplomacy and social media.

1.   Social – less about technologies and more about social interactions with people. 

2.   Iterative - It is a continuous learning, iterative   process, not a plan and not something that can be delegated or finished. 

3.   Engaged – You want to influence others AND you are willing to be influenced by others.

4.   Community -based  - Build a community & be part of a community.   Figure out what you can contribute to the community.  People make decisions in the contexts of their communities.

5.  Simultaneously Inclusive & Exclusive – A community is both inclusive of its members and exclusive to others.   You attract nobody if you appeal to everybody.   You have to earn membership in any community worth being a member. 

6.   Personal - Editors and marketers have tried for years to homogenize for the mass market.   Niche markets – and the new media is just a series of niche markets – requires personality.  There is no such thing as a world product.  Even the ubiquitous Coca-Cola varies by region and country.   We engage a series of niche markets.   This means that we have to work through our country-posts, with people immersed in local cultures, politics and sensibilities and has obvious implications for a Washington-based PD messaging strategy.

7.  Fun - We underestimate the importance of fun & games.   People have choices in the new media.  They often engage because it is fun and if you bore them they will wander off.  

So these are the things that I think shape our use of social media.  Let’s talk.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Below is a draft of an article we submitted for "State Magazine."  Regualar readers will recognize some of the themes I monotonously return to in this blog.  The text clearly has that bureaucratic feel necessary when writing for any in-house publication, and I did resisted the urge to put in some of my snarky comments, but it highlights some of the good work my colleagues are doing so I think it is worth posting and worth reading.    Below that is an article I wrote for the "Foreign Service Journal" way back in 2001.  Some of the cliche terms were just starting to be used back then.  In the intervening eight years, some things have changed but the basics remain the same.  We still have not really succeeded and we will never be finished, but there is some progress.

 IIP engages new audiences with social media

By John Matel and William May

Social media is, above all, social.  The increasing popularity of Facebook, Twitter, Short Message Service and podcasts gives public diplomacy practitioners unprecedented direct access to publics, opens doors to new overseas audiences and gives us the chance to engage people around the world in new ways.  It is a opportunity and a challenge to pick the right tools.

The Department has more than 130 official Facebook pages, more than a dozen feeds on the Flickr photo-sharing Web site, nearly 40 Twitter accounts and a growing list of blogs.  The Bureau of International Information Programs is taking the lead in employing these tools for international engagement, using cutting-edge technologies to reach people, remembering always that the medium ‑ the technology ‑ is not the message. We try to match the technology to the audience and the message.

At IIP we have found that using social media effectively often requires risk taking, creativity and a willingness to be on the cutting edge of these technologies.  Fortunately, the Department’s leadership is firmly committed to seeking out and implementing these new approaches that expand our ability to engage in exchanges with foreign publics. As Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Judith McHale said recently, “[In] the right circumstances, the use of new media could be smart power at its best, as when employed in dialogue with wired constituencies.”

Global Outreach

An important aspect of the new technologies is the ability and the need to be where the customers are.  IIP’s Digital Outreach Team connects with online users in Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Chinese, inserting the U.S. government’s voice into conversations on prominent blogs and forums and engaging an often skeptical audience on their own ground.  The Iranian government has labeled the team “dangerous and subversive” for its online discussions of the need for greater openness, the economic costs of Iran’s hardliner attitude and Iran’s pursuit of nuclear capability. In fact, the team has engaged in a back-and-forth online dialogue in Persian with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s media advisor.  IIP’s blogging team gives Iranians an unfiltered look at a U.S. perspective on issues such as their nuclear programs and human rights.

“The blogging team’s willingness to address hard issues in an open and transparent way mitigates rancor and helps get our messages heard, copied and amplified,” said IIP Coordinator Jeremy Curtin.

IIP is also developing powerful new media tools for digital diplomats to allow them virtual personal contact with people worldwide.  The bureau has turned Adobe Connect business conferencing software into a multimedia-platform outreach tool that allows U.S. diplomats to cheaply and easily engage with publics via the Internet over high- and low-speed networks. 

Posted by Broadnax at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It is not surprising that an aspiring geezer like me would think that the “youth market” is overemphasized in public affairs, but let me give you some of my reasons. (BTW - notice the suspension of good taste characteristic of the 1970s in the youthful picture on the left  You can't see the platform shoes, very unpractical on the icy streets of Milwaukee.)

There is no Successor Generation, Just a Succession of Generations

We talk of a successor generation, but what we really have is a succession of generations, i.e. one after another.   Rearranging the words slightly as I just did almost completely changes the paradigm and drains a little of the urgency.   I really have to do the tedious digression in order to explain why we still view the world through this kind of generational prism.

The idea of the successor generation and the concept of generations on steroids in general is suited to a particular historical period that is now ending.   The “greatest generation,” the one that survived the Great Depression and fought World War II, is implicitly taken as the starting point.  The worldwide apocalyptic effects of this conflict and the economic depression preceding it, coupled with the never before reach of mass communication meant that people who experienced the war and its aftermath had a unique common experience that shaped them as a generation in a way not seen before or since. 

The end of the wars, both WW I and WWII that so comprehensively changed the world was a kind of a starting point for a new world. This created the idea of a generational personality and this impression was strengthened when people with the war experience ruled the world and set the pace for an unusually long time. Their numerous children were the baby boom, the largest and most affluent up until that time.  The Boomer conflict with GI-Generation parents played out as a clash of titan generations rather than normal piecemeal generational change.  This was also something very unusual, but since we grew up with it and in its shadow, we think of it as normal.  

When I joined the FS, we were in the stages of transition to the “successor generation.”  Supposedly, the new generations of leaders would be harder to deal with because they lacked strong direct memories of U.S. contributions during the war and American largess in helping rebuild Europe with the Marshall Plan.   Worse, the heroic World War II generation was going to be replaced by the generation of ’68, with its formative memories coming from the riots, disorder and unrest of those days.  Some of the former radicals still talked the talk, but twenty years of experience had made them a lot more reasonable.  Our fears that the radicals would bring down the system were unjustified (unless you meant the socialist systems of the Soviet Empire.)

The Stone Throwers of ’68 Became the Capitalists of ‘88

If the youth that rioted to overthrow capitalism in 1968 – in Europe it was even worse than it was in the U.S. - could turn into the tranquil bankers and bureaucrats of 1988, maybe capturing the youth in their formative ages is not so crucial.  But think of the even greater challenge that history just glosses over. The bureaucrats and bankers, the staunch U.S. allies facing down those rioters in 1968 had grown up during the severe indoctrination of Nazi Germany. It seems that people grow as they mature and they change with changing circumstances. Of course, maybe it is self-selecting bias, as the most extreme trouble makers just dropped out. 

There is an old saying, variously quoted, that if you are not a radical when you are twenty, you have no heart, but if you are still a radical when you are forty, you have no brain.  As I said, it is an old saying, at least a century old.  Some changes don't change or put more elegantly - plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Anyway, the big, lumpy generational changes that seemed have been the rule during our lifetimes were an anomaly.   It will not be that way going into the future.  Instead we will have more constant change spread across the generational spectrum. The need to make your impression on “the youth” in the first-formative stages of their lives will be less crucial, even if you still think it is crucial at all after looking at the history of the transitions between the self-consciously patriotic generation of ’45 and the self-described '68 radicals.   

For Everything there is a Season

Experience indicates that the best time to reach people is NOT when they are 18-20, much less an even younger age.  They just get bored. You are a lot better off if you wait until they are 28-30.   Few 18 year olds really care about politics, with good reasons.  They don’t have a real feel for what they want and they have only a vague idea of what directions their lives will take. It is like asking them to choose door #1, #2 or #3, w/o knowing what is behind.  They make better choices when they get better perspective, after experience begins to replace passion.

(BTW - I am not addressing basic tendencies and values, which seem to be established very early and may even be influenced by genetics.  Here we are talking about things that we might express in public affairs messages.)

People are very much subject to natural unfolding development.  There is a right time for everything.  You cannot teach a kid to talk or walk before he is ready and the same goes for a lot of things. It is possible to be too late, but it is more likely that you will be too early.  There are times in their lives when they are ready to hear a message or to make a change and a time when they are not.   

Most 18 year olds are not ready for serious public affairs messages.  I wasn’t.  My kids weren’t.  Reaching out to kids too early is like planting your flower seeds in February.   Most will not germinate and those you plant in April will easily overtake and surpass any that do poke up through the frost.  It is a waste to be too early.   Beyond that, you face the constraint of selection.  Only a minority of a generational cohort will be interested and/or able to act on any public affairs message.  Among 18-year-olds you have an undifferentiated mass.   To extend my garden metaphor, you are not only planting too early, you are also doing it indiscriminately, sowing seeds on rocks, sidewalks, sand and soil.   Seven or ten years later you can make much better choices since you can better see which among them are or will be opinion leaders.

Ephemeral v Enduring

Anyway, patience is a virtue and waiting until the time is right is wisdom.  Youth is overrated.  People are much more influenced by the realities of their own life cycles than by the skinny dipping they made into an ideological pool as callow youth.  If you are selling things that don’t last long, such as trendy clothes, cool games, fast food or various specific forms of entertainment, get those kids.  If you are “selling” ideas meant to last – and be acted on – for a lifetime, wait until the time is right.

Posted by Broadnax at 07:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I attended another of those meetings on public diplomacy where earnest colleagues talk about what we can do to improve, reform or fix public diplomacy. I am not saying that we should not be seeking always to improve, but I have been hearing this same story ever since I started paying attention to such things more than a quarter century ago and I think it has been going on a lot longer than that.  When Ben Franklin returned from Paris, some people gave him a hard time about his activities there and complained that we just were not making the impact we should.   The pattern is that we decry the present or the recent past and then say how we have hope for the future.  

Posted by Broadnax at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Back off Man; I'm a Scientist ...

Should scientists be politically active? Individual scientists should participate in debates as citizens. They should bring their knowledge and expertise to every subject, just like others do. But “scientists” as a group should not be political animals because there is a big difference between “A” scientist and “THE” scientist.

... Dr Peter Venkman

What is a scientist anyway? Do you have to have a science degree? Is BS enough or do you need a PhD? Do you have to do experiments? What kind of science qualifies as science? Sociologists and psychologists sometimes call themselves scientists. Political scientists even have that name in their titles. Some historians thought they were scientists. The term is very elastic.

Western civilization is based on the scientific method

Anybody who uses the “scientific method” in his work or to draw conclusions could legitimately call himself a scientist, but that would make scientists out of a lot of business people, most engineers, many farmers and almost everybody who works with actuarial tables. There is a field called "scientific management." For that matter, all those body builders at Gold’s Gym are scientists, given their constant experimentation with their bodies and familiarity with chemicals. Successful modern farmers, builders & business people certainly approach their work scientifically? Everybody could be included sometimes and any definition that includes everybody is not a useful definition. This is not what most people have in mind.

Science and politics are methods to address different problems

But even when we exclude sociologist, body builders, engineers etc, we still have a problem and the problem is that science and politics are almost polar opposites. Science is iterative. It never comes to final conclusions. It tends to narrow inquiry and make scientists experts on narrow fields. Science doesn’t permit extrapolation. Extrapolation is what politics is all about. Politicians are rarely troubled when they are not sure of the precise truthfulness of their statements. Scientists MUST be.

Science provides options, not decisions

Probably the most important impediment to science in politics is the very nature of decision making. You cannot “let science decide” because decisions are exactly what science does NOT do. Science provides inputs into decisions. Science can give you a probability that if you do X you will sacrifice Y, but somebody has to decide on the relative values. Maybe X just doesn’t matter to you. Science cannot make that decision.

Think of a decision about a medical procedure. The doctor can use science to tell you that there is an 80% chance the operation will be a success, but a 70% chance you will be incapacitated by the procedure. On the other hand, if you do something less invasive, you have only a 50% chance of survival, but you can make a full recovery if you survive. You could come up with a complete breakdown of the odds, but you still have to decide, based on non-science values, what you want to do. One person might choose the greater risk of death for the greater health later. Others do the opposite Science cannot help. Once it gives you the options and odds, the job of science is done unless new information comes to light.

BTW - when we reach a near certainty, we no longer have decision making. We all agree that we will apply the rule of physics when flying in an airplane. No matter what anybody says about alternative reality, he doesn't believe it when it comes to that. Decisions are ONLY needed in areas of disagreement or uncertainty.

Science informs; it doesn’t decide

Most “scientists” understand this limitation. Those scientists who want to be political might not get it. They want to use science as a trump card, but it doesn’t work. Decisions are made based on values. Science is value neutral. Therefore science cannot decide.

20th Century tyranny was "science-based"

When science becomes political, it stops being science and starts to become tyranny. In fact, science works a lot like religion when mixed with politics. It invests too much "certainty" into a human political process. It might start off “good” but politics corrupts it, because politics is not science, but politicians - especially bad ones - like to use science, as they once used religion - as a weapon to pummel their opponents into silence.

Stalin and Hitler had scientists working for them. Marxist and Nazi systems were “science-based” in the minds of their creators. Nazi science was chillingly precise. There was "scientific racism" and the eugenics movement was firmly rooting in the science of the time. We now tend to call them “pseudo- scientists” but they were trained and passed scientific muster at the universities of their times. They were pseudo BECAUSE they were political, not because they were not trained as scientists.

I would also point to the case of Nobel Prize winning chemist Fritz Haber. W/o his work literally half the world population would probably go hungry. Some of his other inventions were less felicitous. He had the most impeccable scientific credentials, but his political judgment was perhaps not so good.

Leave the lying to the politicians

This broad political road that leads to perdition is posted and brightly blazed all the way. Scientist should stay on the steep and narrow trail to truth. Leave the lying to the politicians. That is what they are good at.

Posted by Broadnax at 05:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I think it is more important to stand with your proven friend than try to curry favor with adversaries who have shown little inclination to cooperate in the past.  America has few friends as steadfast as Poland.   Polish support for our country goes back before the revolution, when Kosciuszko and Pulaski came to fight along with George Washington just because they loved liberty.  

Yet Poland was devoured by its neighbors, Austria, Prussia and Russia, and it remained an imprisoned nation for 123 years.  Rebirth came in 1918, at the end of World War I, but it was not an easy time.  About two decades later, Nazi armies invaded Poland from the west and the Soviets stabbed them in the back from the east. This happened on September 17, 1939. Remember that date. 

Although Poland was conquered again devoured, partitioned by the two extremes of revolutionary socialism, Poles fought back.   The Nazis lost more troops invading Poland than they did conquering France in the next year and the Poles never gave up. Great heroes like Jan Karski and Jan Nowak-Jeziorański (I had the privilege of meeting both these heroes) warned Franklin Roosevelt about the holocaust and what the Nazis were doing in their conquered territories.  Although Poland was under the Nazi jackboot, Polish soldiers fought in all the allied armies.  Polish pilots were crucial during the Battle of Britain.  Poles served with Americans at Monte Casino and Arnhem.  They always took heavy casualties, fighting bravely and – frankly – being used more freely as cannon fodder. Had Polish soldiers been counted, they would have made up the fourth largest army in the Allied camp.

In September 1944, the Polish home army rose against the Nazi occupiers. Stalin halted his advance, hoping to allow the Nazis to kill off Polish patriots.  He thought it would slow him down for a couple of days.   The Poles held out for months. The Nazis completely destroyed Warsaw and murdered hundreds of thousands.  But the Red Army was halted on the Vistula long enough to lose the campaigning season. This had the unexpected effect of holding Stalin back, allowing American and British troops to advance to the Elbe. Had Stalin not slowed, he may have reached the Rhine, making the post war Soviet tyranny much more powerful and dangerous.

After World War II, Poland fell into the Soviet sphere and they suffered in that communist purgatory until 1989.   The iron curtain cracked in Poland. Solidarity pushed the communist to the wall and then the Poles elected a non-communist government. But they still didn’t feel secure in their new freedom. They wanted to have friends and allies. They became NATO allies in 1999 and proved their worth. Polish troops served in the Balkans and they fought and died along side us in Iraq.  They also agreed to support us with missile defense on their land. I suppose not everyone is as grateful to them as I am. Maybe some actually hold it against them.    It is a fault in our system that we sometimes identify America’s friends as connected with particular American leaders or their policies.

Remember that September 17, 1939 date? On September 17, 2009 we decided to pull out of an agreement to deploy missile defense in Poland.  

We made a big effort to help secure Central Europe. It was a success of both the Clinton and Bush administrations. Security is as often about perceptions as it is about capabilities. If an adversary believes the cost of aggression will be great and he refrains from aggression you win w/o spending the blood and treasure needed to fight the real war. 

We sometimes think the age of aggression is over. The Poles have a more tragic history than we do and they are not as certain as some of us might be. 

As I wrote at the beginning, it is better to stand with proven friends. You cannot make friend with everybody.  Some people and some regimes are just playing a zero sum game with us. If we give; they take and ask for more.  They are “satisfied” only when they reach the limits of what they can grab. If you give you can be asked to give again. It is not impossible to reach agreements or to live together in peace and mutual respect. But that respect must be mutual. One-way respect is just for chumps.

I recommend a good article by Ron Asmus, one of President Clinton's smartest advisers in the Washington Post. 

Posted by Broadnax at 09:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It is hard to overestimate the value of precise, current information and the understanding of local conditions when talking about almost anything, but especially concerned with persuasion and public affairs. Remember that when hearing from experts who purport to know a lot about really big and widely dispersed cultures or countries.  Even Coca-Cola tastes different in different places. There is no such thing as a global brand.

I was reminded of that during an unpleasant conversation I had with a woman who implied that she spoke for or at least understood Muslims.  She didn’t really specify, but she left the strong impression that she was talking about ALL the Muslims. Last I heard, there were about a billion and a third of them. I don’t doubt that she had important insights, but it is clearly not possible for anybody to be an expert on that many people, living as they do in such diverse circumstances.   Nor is it possible to craft any message or campaign that will appeal to all of them. It is just stupid to lump a billion people together. Yet stupid is rampant. 

I goggled that transparently stupid phrase, “what do a billion Muslims really think” and to my chagrin found lots of people who claimed they could tell me the answer.  There is a whole book with that in the title, hundreds of articles, scores of opinion polls and lots of activity by think tanks. I guess I should not have been surprised.  It has long been a profitable racket for experts to set themselves up as spokespeople for large unknowable masses. I have met those who “speak for” the workers, the business owners, the blacks, the whites, the poor, the rich, the famous, the unknown ... I even met people who claim to speak for the animals, trees, rocks and for the earth itself.   I have even met people I did not know who claimed to speak for people like me. You just have to call them on this. 

One of the most important roles for a non-expert who is assigned to do something with experts is to keep them in their places.  This is hard, since they do indeed know more than you do in their area of expertise.  They can make you look silly for questioning them and most experts think their own field of endeavors is the most important or at least the indispensible link in the chain of effectiveness.   

But they do not know everything.  Developing real expertise is necessarily a narrowing process.   It is attractive to be THE expert and that means digging deep into something nobody knows, or maybe nobody cares, much about.  These kinds of experts may not have much grasp of the bigger picture, re how their part fits into the bigger whole.  They are so accustomed to intensifying the parts of their expertise that they forget to ask what their expertise is part of. The tricky tasks of the expert master is  to develop enough specific knowledge to ask the right questions,  enough humility to let the experts operate autonomously when appropriate and enough confidence and courage to stand up to them when necessary. Actually, a true subject matter expert rarely is a big problem for an experienced leader. They are like craftsmen, who do their job according to specifications. If you keep in mind that to a man with a hammer, every job looks like a nail, and you are sure that hammering is what you need, the main challenge is choosing the right people for the job in the first place.    

The problem people are the uber-experts, who extrapolate from what they legitimately know to claim all sorts of Gnostic knowledge that they claim to know but cannot explain to you because you can just never know it.  They tend to slither into places they don’t belong and develop a type of exclusive pseudo-expertise power that cows the timid, impresses the credulous and generally creates a pain in the rear for everybody else.  Anybody who claims to be an expert on Muslims w/o narrowing the category to something more specific is such an expert.   This goes for anybody who claims to represent any large group or have mastered any broad and complicated subject.  Little good can come from associating with them, apart from some passing entertainment value.  But the costs can be high in lost opportunities and misallocated resources.

Socrates warned us about people like that almost 2500 years ago. It is not a new predicament and it will not go away because it is too profitable for those doing it.  They struggle hard to protect their phony-baloney jobs and they are usually smart enough to put up a good fight.  The key to nullifying their power  is just to identify it for what it is and expose it to the light. Of course, that is easier said than done and sometimes even harder to explain to others.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Meaning often lost is translation but you can sometimes find even greater significance in different interpretations if you look hard enough. I have long been interested in Taoism (the philosophy not the religion) and have been fascinated by the great variety of translations of the words of Lao Tzu.  Some of them directly contradict the others, so I have given up on the “true meaning” and rather go with the meaning useful for me. In other words, I take inspiration rather than direction.

I was talking to a Chinese translator who told me that Lao Tzu was not nearly so mystical in Chinese.  The translations had enhanced the mystic feel and may have created some where none was implied.  Lao Tzu, he said, was actually a lot like “Poor Richard’s Almanack.”  Consider the old saying, “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” Here is my reformulation, “He who is present at the dawn will come to know the robustness of fortune on the path of ancient wisdom.” 

I still go with the ancient wisdom, but I understand that a lot might be what the translator put there and what I am reading into it. This is really a good thing.  We improve it and make it more applicable to our circumstances. That is why it is impossible for something written just a few years ago to be a “classic”.  

To be a classic, a work has to have been interpreted and reinterpreted by at least a couple of generations, each accreting its own perspective and wisdom.   In other words, the wisdom of Socrates or Lao Tzu wasn’t as potent when it was first bottled as it became after being properly aged and filtered by subsequent generations.

Philosophy & literature, like fine wine, good cheese or even decent beer, require time to ripen.

Writing good literature in translation takes a good writer in the target language, since it is much more than just substituting words. Nobel-Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney’s translation of “Beowulf” is probably better than the original in many ways and we cannot say how much of its beauty is from the original and how much from the poet’s skill.   We have our pick of translations of the Iliad, the Odyssey and the great philosophers of the world.

I don’t remember much of the classical Greek I once knew, but I do recall the many possible interpretations of even simple texts and that some things couldn’t be rendered elegantly into English.  The most common challenge was a kind of framing (µεν …. δε), which we translated as “on the one hand … on the other hand” but it didn’t really mean that in most cases.  It was just a kind of notice that a comparison was on the way.  Sometimes it was used ironically, i.e. in the sense of saying no comparison was possible.   If you translated it faithfully, you might create the false impression that a comparison was made when none was implied.   If you were merely inspired by the meaning, i.e. did not try to be too literal, you could be accused of putting too much of your own personality into the translation.   If you read Plato or Aristotle, the translations are full of decisions and compromises made by translators, so never tether yourself too closely to any particular turn of phrase. 

My job has often involved foreign languages, supervising translators and/or using translations.   I am not sure that most people are aware of the types of considerations I mention above.    More and more I am going with the inspirational rather than the literal idea.  I know the pitfalls.  Whenever you lard anything with your own judgment, you change it.  But every choice is a judgment.  Should we leave a literal translation that we think be interpreted incorrectly by the listeners or do we go with something that might change the meaning? 

I recall hearing about a Russian who complained that the translator got it wrong.   He asked the rhetorical question, “Can a hunchback change his hump?” which was translated as, “Can a leopard change his spots?” There is clearly a difference.   A hunchback, in spite of the nobility of the hunchback of Notre Dame and the lovable subsequent Disney character, is vaguely creepy and menacing and the condition is usually the result of an accident.   A leopard is sleek and wild and his spots are a natural condition.  We don’t have that hunchback metaphor is English but the translator should have stuck with the clumsier literal translation.

The best translated speech I ever heard was when President Clinton announced support for Polish NATO membership in Warsaw in 1997.   But Clinton’s speech was not really very good.  The Polish translation was much better and delivered better (with sequential translation) by Victor Lipinski, who had a knack for the dramatic perfectly tuned to Polish sentiments, which Clinton lacked as an outsider.   Even though English is my language and I understood all the words (something I cannot always do in Polish) I could appreciate that the Polish was better.  But then it had the advantage of being enhanced by the emotion and the symbolic lifting of generations of oppression by Czars, Nazis and Communists.  That meaning was FOUND in translation floating on the aspirations of millions of people.

BTW - If I may digress on a spectacular memory involving a beautiful translation, I still remember that day in Warsaw in July 1997.  It had been rainy and overcast with black clouds all day.  The sun came out as if on schedule when Presidents Clinton and Kwasniewski came out in front of the Royal Palace to make speeches.  As President Clinton (and Victor) reached the crescendo, promising that Poland would never again be conquered, they released thousands of red and white (Polish national flag colors) into the sky.  They rose into sunlight and danced against the ominous dark clouds now receding into eastern sky.  No special effects artist could have planned it better.

BTW 2 - The pictures above are St. Peter and St. Paul from the Church at Chora in Istanbul.  They actually require significant translation & explanation.  Although I am not expert enough to give the whole story, let me do the basics of what I remember the guide telling us.   The images of these two saints were more or less set in the first centuries AD and these two representations are typical.  Paul is balding and intellectual; Peter a big burly guy.  Since there are no contemporary pictures of the two men, the representations developed and scholars study how they changed over time as artists learned from each other.  They also draw on older, even pre-Christian models and the depictions are also dependent on the technology, i.e. mosaic used to create them. 

Notice the symbolism.  Peter is holding the keys to the kingdom of heaven.  The Popes in Rome made a big deal about being the successors of Peter and so the holders of the keys.  The Greek Church was less interested in that particular, but kept the same symbolism. From these mosaics and others around town, you can also see how the ethnic mix changed.  Presumably, the artist made portrayed people as he knew them around him. All of what is now Turkey was part of Greco-Roman-Christian world ethnically, linguistically and culturally.  To the extent that the native people living in Istanbul (then Constantinople) looked like Peter as depicted before the Turkish conquest, they were significantly different from the people living there today.  A guy looking like Peter might be mistaken for a German tourist in today's Istanbul, although Paul could probably pass unnoticed on the streets.  So in these mosaics, we see tracks of the changing religion, culure, ethnicity and interpretations of history.  There is a lot of meaning beyond the pretty pictures.

Anyway, these mosaics are true classics, since they incorporate ideas and personality of generations long past.  They need explanation.  We may never get the meaning "right" but we can find the meaning nevertheless.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Measuring success in public affairs is hard because we don't control all, or even most of the key factors. Beyond that, we are essentially trying to measure a cascading set of conditional probabilities, each more fuzzy than the one before.  First we are trying to measure attitudes that nobody really understands.   Then we are asking where those attitudes come from.  After that we want to know the strength of the conviction and how attitude make practical differences.   Do they change behaviors or outcomes?    Complicating analysis is that effects may be significantly separated from the causes in both time and space and you have to account for the effects of temporary circumstances and random chance. 

You begin to see the problem?  All we really need to care about is what people do, but to explain that adequately, we have to consider all the things mentioned above.    

Does the Rooster Make the Sun Rise?

It only gets worse. Public affairs can be a little like peeing in the Pacific Ocean saying it caused the rising tide and practitioners, me included, can sometimes strut like roosters taking credit for the sunrise.  In other words, we are not sure how the attitudes affected behavior, nor are we sure where those attitudes came from or the strength of conviction.  On top of that we are trying to figure out how our small input created a big output.  

Not that we are always merely mendacious when taking credit, BTW.  Public affairs is indeed all about leverage.   Very small input can often create monumental outputs using leverage of the public affairs environment as it pulls in outside resources.   Even this good thing, however, is just another problem for measurement.  The equation would look like this. 

Our input + lots of other resources we don't control + luck + time = output, which MAY grow into a useful outgrowth.   We cannot control most of the factors in this equation and often cannot even know what they are, so instead we measure the reach (not the effectiveness) of OUR own inputs. Let me illustrate with one of my usual examples, not surprisingly an oak tree 

Mighty Oaks From Tiny Acorns Grow - But a Bushel of Acorns is Not an Oak Forest

If I plant an acorn, it may grow into a mighty oak.  How much credit do I deserve?  Maybe a squirrel would have planted an acorn if I didn’t.  Maybe one would just grow by itself.  Besides that,  I didn’t make the acorn.  I didn’t create the soil.   I cannot control the rain nor can I anticipate every destructive storm nor control all the bugs.  The oak tree will grow according to its form and DNA.   I cannot demand that it become a pine tree. In fact there is little I can do expect remove obstacles to it becoming the best it can be.   But if you come back 100 years later, maybe some kid will say, “My grandfather planted that tree.” 

In public affairs we are not dealing with acorns.  Our analogous measure is reach.   We can get a reasonably good measure of the number of people who COULD have received our message.   It doesn’t mean they DID receive our message or that they paid any attention.   So reach is a problematic measure. 

Don't Count the Same Guys too Many Times

A look at Facebook shows examples of opportunity, challenge & problems associated with this kind of measurement. You might have a thousand friends or a big rock star might have a million fans.  But how much are they getting the messages?  We also habitually overestimate the connections.  If you have 100 Facebook friends and each of them has 100 friends, you do not have 100 x 100 or 10,000 friends because the sets overlap.  If your friends are also each other's friends you may have only 100 in total. Overlap is usually not 100% and the real number is probably more than just 100, but it is far less than 10,000.   

Reach is not a very useful measure, but we like it because it is a relatively easy number to find or estimate AND it tends to be the largest number we are can get, especially if we engage in some willful ignorance about human attention spans and math 101 concepts of overlapping sets, as above.    

Reach Exceeds Grasp

And reach is relatively easy to astro-turf, especially in the new media.  There is an interesting article talking about how you can BUY Facebook friends and fans for as little as $.076 and $.085 respectively.  What reach!  If you have big bucks you can reach the all the world in theory.  Who can you blame if your reach exceeds your grasp, if you have a million fans who cannot remember your name or hear your message? 

Hey, the numbers are good, even if they probably overlap and may represent meaningless relationships.  We might become a little suspicious if our extrapolated fan bases (i.e. our estimate of our own fans to the exponent of their fans & friends) exceeded the total population of the earth, but achieving that might take a couple of months anyway.   

I am not saying we should not rejoice at successful numbers, but let's not try to fool others and let's not fool ourselves.  Reach provides ONLY the opportunity to engage and engagement provides only the opportunity to communicate and communication provides only to opportunity to make a difference.  You need to start with the acorns, but that doesn't mean you automatically have a grove of big oak trees.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here we are again in the spasms of self-flagellation about how we treat (or mistreat) people who have planned and sometimes carried out the murder of many of our citizens. We worry that revelations about harsh tactics used to get information from some of them may have damaged our international reputation and there are calls for a full scale investigation to uncover and reveal additional details. As long as we do such things - the argument goes - we cannot hold the moral high ground nor expect cooperation from others.  The ends don't justify the means.  Actions speak louder than words. 

But actions must be framed and interpreted, and that requires words and analysis. Sometimes the reason something is done does make a difference and the some ends can justify some means. I believe we make a big error in framing our actions by demanding, and letting others demand, a measure of perfection not attainable among humans.   In those terrible times after 9/11, I think the U.S. showed amazing restraint, even after we captured soem of those who planned the attacks that killed thousands of Americans.  Under passionate circumstances, and even under normal ones, mistakes are made.   Humans overreact, over respond and overreach, and things done in the passion of one situation may seem stupid or even evil after those circumstances have passed. 

Posted by Broadnax at 08:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)