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Work-Life Balance

Balancing work and the rest of your life is never easy. An NPR story on results-only work environments reminded of that.  I once ran a unit with around forty-five professionals, most of whom telecommuted a couple days a week and since my current staff and I enjoy flexible work arrangements, I think I can add something to the debate.  

Telecommuting and flexible hours can work well and increase productivity and morale at the same time, always a plus, but whether or not you can have flexible hours or work at home first of all depends on what you do.  Of course, if you work in a factory or a construction site, if you are a farmer or a fireman, you have to go to a specific work site.  We are mainly talking about jobs connected using Internet. 

One of my challenges in managing ROWE (I will call it by NPR’s term, which is better and more inclusive) was perceived fairness.  Jobs where people can work by themselves or collaborate online are easy candidates for ROWE.  But some jobs require actual physical presence.  In most offices, those jobs tend to fall near the top and the bottom of the organizational chart.  Let’s start near the top.

A big part of management and leadership is just being there and being seen.  Another is making personal connections, sometimes through the simple serendipity of being there. The now classic business book, “In Search of Excellence,” talked about management by walking around.   All great leaders know this intuitively and most good managers want to do it. Leaders also know that if they are not seen, they may not be heard from again. But sometimes when you promote an excellent worker to a management position he/she thinks it is unfair to ask him/her give up the ROWE.  Actually, leaders are always living in a ROWE and their results generally are produced in person. On the other end, you have people who must do actually physical work.  Most obvious are people who clean things or set things up.  In my case, I had people who had to physically assemble outreach packets etc.  They complained that they could not telecommute, mentioning the injustice of it all.  You can see the problem from their point of view.  They are often paid less than average and have difficult time juggling work and family responsibilities. But there is nothing you can do for them except encourage them to try to get one of the jobs that has ROWE.   I found, however, that some don’t want those jobs either, because of the added responsibility, which leads me to the next aspect – responsibly.

ROWE requires greater self discipline on the part of the worker.  There are some people who just cannot handle it and I had to suspend some privileges.  But perhaps the trickier problem comes from those who work TOO hard.  They never really clock off.  For a while, I used to check my blackberry before bed and send off a few messages.  I was often surprised to get immediate responses from people still working.  Maybe they were just doing what I was doing, but I suspect not, since my inquiries were unusually one line reminders, while the responses I got for them took real work.  I used to have to tell them to stop working to avoid burn out.  AND I had to stop sending messages after 7pm or before 7am and tell others to do the same.  If people think the boss is working, some of them will work too, no matter what you tell them. 

The irony is that you have to lead by lazy example.  I “work” around ten hours a day, but in the middle of that day, I usually find time to run or take a walk. I find that it actually increases my effectiveness and not only because it makes me feel better. So much of our work is now online collaboration. It makes sense to send something out and then get lost so that others can do their parts in peace.  You often don’t add value by hanging around and can actually subtract some. ROWE has some interesting social and organizational implications. I am not sure if it strengthens or weakens the power of the employee or the power of the organization. A bad boss can become a tyrant by demanding 24/7 responses. On the other hand, employees can more easily ignore him. I suppose a lot depends on the relative power of each going in. 

It will save companies some money. I thought of using “hotelling” where ROWE employees share office space on the assumption that everybody won’t be there at any one time. I didn’t get very far with this and had to back off.  But it will come. It doesn’t make sense to have a whole suite of empty offices. Future office buildings will feature more open and common space to handle the surges, but less daily personal space. I believe in ROWE for myself and others.   

But not all mangers like ROWE.  Some personality types just like to have people around to boss. I have to admit that I sometimes feel a little lonely when I walk past empty offices, but it is the way more and more firms will be organized in future.

People will do things in a decentralized way.  In fact, we have already outsourced many of our routine tasks, such as most copying and compiling.  FedEx, UPS or the Post Office can now do most of your logistics. Cloud computing will take care of your data processing and there are firms that will handle all your HR functions.  Maybe we will all become firms of one or two people, teaming up with others on an ad-hoc basis and cooperating and connecting via communications technologies.

I remember more than twenty-five years ago I heard a motivational speaker say that everybody was in business for himself.   He explained that nobody takes care of you as well as you take care of yourself.  You had the responsibility to keep yourself current and trained by seeking education.  You had to make sure your skills were up to date and that you have access to everything you need.  You couldn’t count on your employer to do that, he said.  We were effectively our own company that sold our serviced to our employer(s).  I thought he meant it metaphorically, but he was right in very concrete ways.  We should all think of ourselves as a company that we own and manage and ask whether we would buy stock in ourselves and whether our work-life balance makes it the kind of place we want to live and work. 

If not, maybe a little R&D is in order.

BTW – the picture on top shows the first magnolias blooming near the Red Cross. 

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We Stand on the Shoulders of Giants

We cannot patent ideas. Patents can protect only the physical manifestations of ideas, not the ideas themselves. This makes sense from a practical legal point of view. But we think of technology too narrowly when we concentrate on equipment and machines that make our world so different from that of our parents. A technology also refers to the human skills, habits and even cultures that help us solve problems and achieve our goals. These broader aspects of technology often explain why physical technologies sometimes fail to transfer or fail to flower outside their places of origin.  When we sell somebody a computer, we just are not transferring the whole technology, even if we have included the latest software. 

Misunderstanding of the breadth of technologies is an important reason why we fail to understand other contemporary cultures or people of other ages.  We tend to think that they are just like us only wearing funny clothes or that they are so different as to be almost a different type of human. Both these formulations are wrong.  Human nature remains similar, but it is amplified, altered or attenuated by technologies available and used. 

Physical technologies are easy to see.  An ordinary person in a culture that has developed automobiles can move many times faster than the fastest runner of one that has not. Intellectual technologies are harder to see, but can convey similar advantages. For example, the greatest mathematician of 1000 years ago could not pass a high school math course. Many of the quantitative techniques we use were just not invented. There was no calculus back then.  Statistics were in the alchemy stage. Even those calculation tables were not around.  Would it be possible to think as clearly about physics or engineering if you just didn’t have those mathematical and calculation tools? 

If I can indulge a little with my own experience (since this is my blog post), I can explain a growth of technologies and how it affects skills. I graduated with my MBA in 1984.  I am certain that I could not have gotten an MBA at all in 1974 and I believe that by 1994 (or today) I would have an easier time in school.  The reason is the presence and removal of limiting factors.  I cannot do arithmetic.  Arithmetic is not the same as math, but until calculators became common nobody could handle higher math unless he was also passably good at the simple skill of “ciphering.”  In 1974 sophisticated calculators were not available or affordable. Ten years later they were. Calculators are good; computers are better. By 1994, computer programs were commonly available that easily could do regression comparisons and multivariate analysis.   

These improvements in technology removed the tedium and routine repetitive work and allowed us to use our brains in more innovative ways. We used to think of intelligence in terms of ability to remember a lot of facts and do quick calculations. (I call it the Spock trap.)  These are things that machines now do for us most of the time.  In humans we now treasure the kind of intelligence that can make intuitive and creative leaps. Technology removes a limiting factor and makes the next step possible.

There are less obvious advances. One of the most important is in the realm of organization.  The Framers of our constitution studied political systems ancient and (to them) modern, but they found no example of a successful large republic or one with consistently peaceful transitions of executive power over long periods. That is because there weren’t any. Humans had not yet created that experience.  Our Constitution is based on Greek and Roman models leavened by the practical experience of British practices supplemented by examples from elsewhere.  (A big failing of the Romans is that they never solved the chief executive succession problem. We were forewarned and did a good job with that.)

James Madison’s or Alexander Hamilton’s reading list was impressive, but all the experience of the 19th and 20th Centuries, when many new forms of governance were tested in real world situations was unavailable to them since it still was in the future. (A good book about the thinking that went into the U.S. Constitution is Novus Ordo Seclorum by Forest MacDonald) Imagine trying to explain political theory w/o being able to reference anything that happened after 1787 and you will begin to understand their handicap.

How about economics?  The guys who wrote the Constitution could have read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, but all the economic theory and experience with markets on which we now depend were still in the future.  It is amazing how well Hamilton did w/o those things or examples. In my own lifetime, we have seen a revolution in our understanding of economics, with various intellectual technologies, such as behavior economics and new means of measurement.  It is now much easier to understand what and why people are acting in the economic realm.  

We all stand on the shoulders of giants of the past and it is no disrespect to them or foolish pride on our parts to acknowledge that our position gives us greater vision than they enjoyed.  I am always struck by the incongruous combination of sophistication and short-sightedness among the masters of the past.  Plato and Aristotle struggled with concepts that we can easily address because they and others have shown us the way.  It is churlish of us to look down on their mistakes but silly to ignore them.  No intelligent modern man could base his philosophy on Plato any more than a modern doctor could stop his study with Hippocrates or a physicist could understand the universe by studying Thales. But we owe much of our modern understanding to the starts they gave us.

So,  we can talk about physical, intellectual, scientific, cultural and organizational technologies. But I think there have also been improvements in moral technology. I know this is controversial and I am not saying that most people have become morality better; I am saying that ordinary people have access to a better “moral technology,” which give even ordinary people access to moral power that only the most fortunate had in the past.  That is not to say they use the power wisely any more than a driver of a fast car necessarily puts all the horsepower to good use. 

As somebody who loves the classics, I treasure the ancient texts. I know that people will remind me that Aristotle addressed ethics, almost 2400 years ago and we have had access to the Bible for nearly 2000 years.  What has improved?   Most important, IMO, is that more people can think about these issues.  We have greater literacy and much greater access to the great books. We have also expanded our experience to include the wisdom of a greater variety of cultures. We also have the benefit of thousands of years of experience. We could claim that the clash of cultures in the Roman world was every bit as real as we face today, but never before has the contact been so rapid or intimate. In times before significantly before our own, news and people moved only as fast as a horse could walk or at best a ship could sail with a good wind. Most people lived their entire lives within a few miles of the places they were born. People simply did not have the diversity of experiences we do today.  

It is a lot easier to believe a set of morals is THE only truth if you never meet any good or intelligent person with a conflicting or contrary opinion. Moral or ethical awareness improves and develops when challenged to address new experiences, different ideas and diverse people. 

There is also the accumulated effect of experience. The knowledge of the Holocaust and a visit to Auschwitz will certainly affect a moral calculation. Some of the ends justifying the political means or “collective” will so completely overriding the priorities of individuals makes much less moral sense if you know about the Gulags.  

So we have to be realistic. We don’t expect that a man with a hammer and chisel can beat a steam drill (remember the John Henry story). Technology multiplies the power of human muscle. It also can multiply the power of human intelligence and improve human thinking and judgment. This is hard to believe. We like to think that the great thinkers of the past, or of other cultures w/o some of our technologies of thought, would be able to fit right into our intellectual context, but it is unlikely. Besides to obvious historical excitement, I think it an able modern scholar would be disappointed with a technical discussion with Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Pythagoras or Leonardo da Vinci. We have “conversed” with them already through their writings and have developed further their best ideas in light of knowledge and experience they could not have.

I have had this disappointing experience on a smaller and modern scale on several occasions when I have met authors whose work I admire.  Many times, their knowledge of their topic peaked on the day they finished the book I read and loved. It makes sense. They poured themselves into what they wrote and after that forgot some of the details, maybe they moved on to something else.  Of course, it is often very interesting to learn about their subsequent ideas, but that is another story.

Think of it this way. Most of us try to improve ourselves and learn new things. If you take a rigorous course of study, are you better before or after … or are you just the same? If you don’t feel you can improve, you would be foolish to spent the effort. And if you believe you are better after the learning (internalizing the new intellectual technology) you must also understand that someone w/o access to what you learned would be in the same situation you were before you became more enlightened.

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America at the Museum

Espen’s professor told him that he could get a few extra credit points if he visited an exhibit on the history of computers at the Museum of American History, so we went down. It turns out the exhibit was no longer there. They took it away more than two years ago when they did renovations.  

We took a picture of Espen at the museum to prove that he went. I find interesting that the exhibit has been gone for two years. Obviously the professor hasn’t visited recently; I wonder how many of his students claimed to have gone in the meantime.

It reminds me of the sleazy journalist’s trick of writing about an event using only the press release.  I have seen stories reporting the comments of guests who never showed up or giving details of events that were canceled and never happened at all. Sometimes nobody really seems to care. The irony is that a bogus story is usually more interesting than the real thing.

I enjoyed the museum. I haven’t really been through it since the renovation. They restored the original “Star Spangled Banner” and put it in a nice exhibit hall and there were lots of nice examples of the machines and technologies that built our country. They had a big a special set of exhibits about electrical generation and a little hagiography for Thomas Edison, who deserves it.  Of course, it didn’t hurt that General Electric was a major sponsor.

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Where No Man Has Gone Before

There are 120+ little boys for every 100 little girls in China & Northern India. This is because baby girl fetuses are aborted and newborn baby girls are killed in the quest for sons. When the boys get old enough to care, they will find a female shortage. The world has never experienced anything like this before. What will be the social ramifications? Imbalances in the other direction are common. Men have been killed disproportionately in hazardous occupations and in wars. After a big conflict or in some particularly warlike societies, there might be two or three times as many women as men. This was one of the justifications for polygamy and that adaption meant that within very broad boundaries the smaller number of males made no difference in the reproductive success of the population. In these situations, one man is able and usually willing to do the work or three or five. It doesn’t work like that for women. Young men are responsible for most of the violence in any given society and they don’t settle down until they have established themselves in relationships with females. Evolutionary theory explains this very well. They are wild and crazy because they are competing for reproductive success, even if our modern societies sublimate and mask what is going on. Even if we forget about the Darwinian aspects of this situation, the social ramifications are significant.

In 2020, there will be 30-40 million more Chinese men than women in the age groups when they care about those things. For comparison, there are only 23 million boys below the age of twenty in Germany, France and UK combined. That means that essentially China will have more than the whole young male population of these countries w/o girlfriends. Worldwide the estimate is that there will be something like 90 million more men at the key reproductive ages by 2020.

What happens when there are lots of men and not many women? In Roman history, we have the rape of the Sabine women, where young men of Rome just went out and kidnapped women from neighboring tribes. This, in fact, is the way the problem has been handled until modern times. But in these cases they were talking about local shortages.

There is some hope that this will be a passing trend and in the long run relative scarcity will improve the status of women. Already in India dowry prices are falling. Women may be able to get a better deal if there are many more men available.

In the classic movie, “Casablanca”, the French Captain Louis Renault chides Rick Blaine (the Humphrey Bogart character) for not paying proper attention to a female admirer. “How extravagant you are throwing away women like that. Someday they may be scarce,” Louis says. Maybe he was right, just a little ahead of the time.

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Iraq in the Fullness of Time

Memory is never finally fixed. We are constantly editing our memories in the light of subsequent events. Sometimes meaningless event are explained in the fullness of time. Sometimes those events really were meaningless and they take on meaning only because we have jammed them into our narrative of memory.

That is why oral histories are unreliable and even things that are written down are subject to continual revision.Telling any story is always an act of choosing and even if we are being fair and thoughtful, our choices will always be subject to revision. We probably cannot arrive at THE truth, but we usually can come up with something useful or at least something that makes sense to us.

I have been thinking about these things as I prepare to address a class in public diplomacy at USC. They want to know about strategic communications at a PRT in Iraq. Lucky for me my blog provides a lot of contemporary impressions and pictures. I can see the evolution of my own thinking and my blog entries remind me of lots of things I would have forgotten. It seems like I am reading the experiences of someone else, but I know it was me because I can see the pictures.

My time in Iraq was the most meaningful work I have ever done. I am not saying that it was the most enjoyable or even that it was the best work I have ever done, but my job made a difference and my actions made a difference in a way they had not before. I am convinced that my activity saved lives. My PRT contributed to our success in Iraq and that is a world changing accomplishment. America and the coalition beat back terror and chaos, when many in the world and even in our own country had written us off. The alternative would have been horrible.

I don’t think we have told the story very well. Most people I talk to and read about in the papers have it wrong. They think that our success was based on good luck or that it would have happened anyway. This is very ironic, given the fact that back in 2007 most of these same people were convinced that we were so far down that road to perdition that we could never recover.

There is definitely a political dimension to this. Some people are knee jerk anti-war. They don’t want to believe that anything good can come from something is bad as the Iraq conflict. They dislike words like victory or even success. I don’t think anything can be done to change their minds, short of them experiencing what I did. Forget about them. But the broad American public should understand because there are lessons to be learned. We learned how to counter an insurgency. We beat an Islamist terror group right in the heart of their own region, on a battlefield of their choosing. Their growing power is not inevitable. History is not on their side. The future belongs to us, not them.

Iraq is a success story. I read an interesting headline in the paper the other day. It said that the Iraqi election was too close to call right away. When you have an election like that, it means there are actual alternatives. Saddam always got nearly 100% of the vote.

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Energy: Cheaper in the Long Run

Technology is amazing. In the last few years, new technologies have vastly increased American reserves of natural gas and are making North Dakota a leading oil producer, so much for peak oil. The term “game changers” is thrown around in both these cases. I might paraphrase the Godfather about fossil fuel, “Just when we think we’re out, technology pulls us back in.”

Environmentalists have been predicting the end of the age of hydrocarbons ever since I was a kid. Their predictions have a kind of plaintive, even pathetic tone, sometimes a hopeful one. Actually, the resource depletion prediction is a lot like the old Malthusian predictions and wrong for the same reasons. They have consistently made their predictions by simply projecting past trends forward and assuming limited technological progress. In other words, they underestimated the power of human intelligence, innovation and imagination. As Yogi Berra used to say, “Predicting is hard, especially about the future.” It is just impossible to predict discontinuous changes but we are usually aware of things that could go wrong with what we already have.

Back in the 1970s experts predicted that by now, or more commonly by around 1980 or 1990. Yet we persist. Usually such successes would be all to the good. We really don’t have to worry about running out of energy and we can probably expect real energy prices to drop in the next decade. What is not to like? Nothing, except the potential problems of global warming. The problem with switching to alternative energy is price. It has always been price and will always be price. Until people talk about price, it’s only some people talking. As long as fossil fuels are cheaper, they will be preferred. Why would a rational person choose to pay more to get less convenience? Petroleum based fuels such as diesel and gasoline, for example, are nearly perfect fuels for a car. They are very dense (i.e. a lot of energy per gallon. Hydrogen has more energy per pound, but it has such low density that takes up more than three times the space; ethanol is much denser than hydrogen, but not as dense as gasoline and less efficient). Natural gas is great for stationary energy production. It is very clean burning, easily distributed via underground pipes & remarkably efficient.

So let’s be clear. The reason we rely so much on fossil fuels is that they are generally cheaper than the alternatives, convenient to use, easily produced and readily available. When you pit low price, convenience and availability against something that cost more & is harder to use, which do you think wins most of the time? This is the place for some government intervention in the form of a carbon tax . Prices of carbon based fuels will naturally DECLINE as technology increases exploitable reserves. As the prices of carbon based fuels declines in real dollar terms relative to other products, we should tax them back up. The ratchet is a relatively painless way to phase the tax in.

Lest this become merely another source of tax and government waste, we should make this a revenue neutral venture. A good idea here is tax plus dividend. Whereby ALL of the new taxes collected on carbon would be paid out the individual Americans as dividends. To make it simple, every American man, woman or child alive on Dec 31 would get a check for whatever the tax revenue divided by the population. I would make this clean and honest. Everybody gets an equal piece of the action.  I  don’t think politicians will go for it, since it cuts out their opportunities to turn the money to their own purposes, but it is a good idea and if we are serious about addressing climate change, raising the price is one of the only things that really work.

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Death Panels

The medical profession has failed miserably. Almost 2500 years after Hippocrates invented the profession, the human death rate is still 100%. Our ancestors lived more intimately with death than we do. They often did it at home. We make it a clinical process. They understood that death was inevitable and capricious. We are not too sure. We postpone death with our science and pour money into “saving” lives.

Read both the links. The second link in poignant. The first one is in jest, but both speak to both universal truths and our own attitudes that are out of sync with them.

In his Apology, Socrates talked about facing death. When confronted with the option of compromising and “saving” his life, Socrates pointed out that saving his life on this one occasion would not mean that he would live forever. He was already old and he preferred to die with the values by which he had lived. His decision was both practical and principled. End of life decisions have not really changed that much.

We have significant problems understanding health care because we do not want to face the truth of our own decline and mortality. No amount of money can buy back your youth when you’re old and nothing will keep you alive forever. The interesting thing about our extensions of life EXPECTANCY is that LIFE SPAN has not increased in the last 6000 years.

The Pharaoh Pepi II Neferkare reportedly ruled for ninety-four years. We assume he was young when he took the job, but you still have to figure that the man lived around 100 years. While there is reason to question the exactness of the records, SOME people clearly lived to very old ages w/o the benefits of modern medicine and we don’t live significantly longer. The difference is that back then MOST people didn’t live past their childhood. They pulled down the statistics.

Of course, there is also the question of whether or not you want to live to be 100. I see these guys celebrated on TV and it seems like an exclusive club of which I prefer not to become a member.

Pepi lived for a long time because he was lucky enough to avoid things that might have killed him sooner. There was nothing in ancient Egyptian medicine or pharmacology that could have extended his life. Today we can, so we have to start thinking about what we really want. We now have hard choices that generations past didn’t face. 

My second link tells the sad story of a woman trying to save her husband’s life. Modern medicine managed to extend his life – extend his misery – by a few years at the cost of $618,000. My father went out right. He got a medical exam in 1945, when he was discharged from the Army Air Corps and never went to the doctor again except once to remove a sore on his stomach.  At the age of seventy-six, he fell to the floor and couldn’t get up. When asked how he was doing, he said, “I can’t complain” and promptly died. No doubt good medical care could have extended his life, but would that have been a good idea?

No matter what, the decision you make will be wrong in some way.

There has been a lot of loose talk about death panels and medical rationing. Nobody likes the idea, but we – as a society – will indeed need to develop some ethics about end of life issues. Until recently we didn’t have to worry about it but if we apply our medical technology and our big bucks we will have to decide when it is enough. We shouldn’t make it political. It is a matter of ethics.

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Free at Last

Pardon the hyperbole, but the unusually hard (for Virginia) winter has kept me off the running trails and I have been feeling unconnected. This weekend the snow melted off. So I got out yesterday and today running, walking and stopping long enough to take some pictures at what I believe is the end of winter. It is hard to believe there is still this much snow on March 7.

Above is the W&OD full of runners and bikers on this nice spring day. Below are jet streams. I take a break at Navy Federal S&L park grounds. You can just lay on the bench and look at the sky.

The white pine below is a nightmare for foresters, but very interesting to have in your front yard.

Below is a building across from the Metro. 

Below is the bike trail along Gallows Road. Still not really in good form. All that sand and crud will make for an unpleasant ride. But a good rain or a sweeper will take care of it.

Below is one last look at my bike/running trail with snow, not always so crowded. I figure it will all melt off by tomorrow or the next day. The sun is high and the weather is warm. 

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Changes in Attitudes; Changes in Behaviors

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 yesterday. 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 understanding 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.

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Volunteers, Philanthropy & Cultural Policies

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.

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.