Tag: public affairs

Posted on

Wasted (on) Youth

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 WWI 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 on

Public Diplomacy Not Broken … So Can’t be Fixed

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.   I don’t think we can succeed in fixing the problem because it is not a problem that can be solved.  It is an ongoing situation that will never end until we are gone, all gone – in that eternal sense. That which cannot be changed must be welcomed.

Maybe we cannot fix public diplomacy any more than we can fix the need to eat.  It is just an endless need.  If we eat a big meal today, being hungry again tomorrow does not indicate a failure or eating or the need to reform our consumption methods.  

We often assume if we just explained better or understood our fellow man better, things would be okay.  Experience does not bear this out.  In most of history’s truly monumental conflicts, the warring sides understood each other only too well.  It was not a failure to communicate that got Xerxes in trouble with the Spartans at Thermopylae.  Ghengis Khan was fairly clear about what he wanted but it was not easy to find a mutually agreeable compromise with him.You can have some real conflicts of interests and real differences that do not represent a failure to communicate.   IMO, very often the more you talk about differences, the sharper they become.    Maybe simply ignoring them or kicking the can down the road is the solution, more on that below.  But let’s think about agreement first.

Agreeing about Most Things is Easy

First the good news.  The world is not a zero sum game.   We can get a lot when we work together and cooperate.  We agree MOST of the time and when we agree there are no controversies and not much scope for politics, persuasion or public diplomacy.    We have all kinds of non-controversial agreements.   On the local level, most of us agree to stop at red lights.  Although we have to persuade the occasional miscreant that the law applies to him too, there is no real controversy.   We have long standing agreements about very important things like telecommunications, navigation, air traffic control and postal services.   I can send a letter anyplace in the world because all of us agree that is a good thing.   

These agreements require constant maintenance, but it is more or less like painting your house or keeping your car tuned up – very little drama.  They work in the background, very much like whatever software is running your computer as you read this, and we rarely think about them.

Politics, diplomacy and violence are reserved for the places where we don’t easily agree.  It should come as no surprise that this relatively small subset of our activities gets most of our attention nor should we be too distressed that we constantly face new problems of this sort.   On those occasions when we succeed in solving one of these problems, it moves into the category in the earlier paragraph and we no longer pay any attention.  It is sort of like when you always find your keys in the last place you look and then you stop looking.  Human nature being what it is, after a problem is solved most people come to think that it was never really much of a problem in the first place and that it would have taken care of itself anyway.  Even really massive changes, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, start to look inevitable and easy as events recede into history.


Not Everybody is Nice

We are left with new problems and since yesterday’s solution is often today’s problem, we are also left with the impression that we are not making any progress.   In fact, we are NOT making progress because there is not end-state toward which we can progress.  I am not big on sports analogies, but one leaps to mind.   The Red Sox can never win an ultimate victory over the Yankees.    The Packers will never finally dispatch the Vikings.   A new season follows and the cycle never ends. Even if the players change, the general geography remains and familiar patterns persist.  All this doesn’t mean you can do nothing or you should be complacent unless – to stretch my sports analogy – you want to become the Chicago Cubs of world politics.   In fact, eternal vigilance is indeed the price of liberty.   And it is possible to have victories and good seasons.   We are not the victims of fate or mere random chance.  There just is no way out of the game until you are physically removed … and then it continues w/o you. 

To sum up, most of us CAN agree with others on MOST things. Those things you cannot agree about become the property of persuasion, politics, coercion and violence. They are problems by definition. It is best to keep as much as possible away from the politics, coercion and violence, but it is not always possible.  Of course peaceful, respectful persuasion is the best, if you can get it, but you can usually get it only in situations that are not the most severe and the others are always lurking in the background.   Just because you reject violence doesn’t mean it has been removed from the equation. Unfortunately, politics can be easier than working to create a solution, coercion is a very potent persuader and violence a very compelling public affairs message.

Sometimes it goes away if you ignore it

I once foiled a robbery attempt in the bookstore where I worked in Madison by not getting it.   A couple guys came in and hung around near the cash register.  When I asked them what they wanted, they said they wanted all the money in the register.  They didn’t brandish any weapons and they didn’t seem especially tough, so I just laughed at them and told them to beat it.   They went away.  I thought it was a joke until I saw on the news that police were seeking a couple of young men who had robbed a store down the street.  

I would like to put in a plug for avoidance & denial, when possible.  Don’t go looking for trouble.  Call it pluralism if you like.   I simply mean that we don’t have to agree on everything and there can be a wide sphere where people can do different, ostensibly contradictory things.  We should constantly seek to expand the areas where we can say, “I don’t like what you are doing, but I just don’t care enough to do anything about it” or better yet, “It is just none of my business.”  This can flow from, “I don’t know very much about what you are doing, but it doesn’t seem to be a problem for me” or “I don’t care what you do, as long as you stay over there.”   We don’t have to resolve all our differences if we can create environments where most differences don’t matter.    I understand that the attitude I describe will probably not make you famous and will make some people think you just are not paying attention but it makes most people happier and often works better than the more active and aggressive alternatives.   I am not advocating that we actually BE ignorant, as I was in my robbery example above.  I do advocate that we have enough self-awareness and humility to know that we cannot understand everything and may well be wrong in our judgments.  We don’t have to drill down and solve every problem.  I really don’t think the trouble is that the world hears too LITTLE from and about the U.S. 

Engaging is Easy

The latest buzzword for public diplomacy is engagement.   I like engagement.  It can be fun and you can learn a lot.   But it is not a panacea and it can be overdone if you start invading the pluralism “don’t know; don’t care” turf mentioned above.   Remember what Aristotle said about anger?   It applies to engagement too, so let me paraphrase.   Anybody can be engaged – that is easy, but to be engaged with the right people and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.

Posted on

New Media’s Reach Exceeds Its Grasp

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 on

Anti-Isms & Bogus Assumptions

We fret a lot about anti-Americanism in my business.  And we watch every up and down blip in America’s image abroad.   But I have suffered a crisis of faith.  I no longer have faith that the GENERAL attitude U.S.  really matters very much and my years of weighing every permutation were as useful as charting waves on the surface of a lake.  I don’t believe the measures of the attitudes measure real attitudes, since they bounce around so widely and I don’t see that it translates much into any actual specific behaviors apart from gnashing of teeth and shouting.  According to recent surveys, our national image was edging up before last year, but now it has surged, but it doesn’t seem to have changed what is happening in a practical sense. No surprise. Most people just do not act out of general beliefs, even if they really know what those beliefs are, itself a questionable assumption.  You also have to understand that people think about us a lot less than we think they do. Let me give you an example about others, which will take away some of the bias we might have from looking at ourselves.  

Let’s put the shoes on the other feet.   Take a look at question # 20 and see what Americans think of various foreign countries.   Only 4% view China very favorably, but this is twice as much as the 2% who favor the Russians.   We like the Brits, but even they get only 41% very favorable, although if you add somewhat favorable you top 77% and only 4% are very unfavorable.    A majority of us even like the French (54% very or somewhat favorable).  So what does that mean to these countries?  Would you pay more for a computer made in France or UK (presuming you could find one) than you would for the Chinese-made model?   Would you favor a British over a Chinese job applicant for that reason alone?  I don’t think so.

You would base your judgment NOT on the GENERAL reputation, but rather on the SPECIFIC one you were considering.  Anything else would be … stupid and bigoted.  Why should we assume that others would be that way toward us that we would find so odious in ourselves?  They say that all politics is local and so it is at least most public affairs.   Of course we know our reputation varies in the countries of the world, but also is variable in within every place, situation and individual based on specific circumstances.  I remember seeing this paradoxical mix of emotions and reason in Iraq. The people said they wanted the U.S. to leave Iraq right away, but they wanted the Marines specifically guarding their homes to stay essentially forever. I think the wisdom on this is “Be careful what you wish for because you may get it.” That is why general sentiment often does not translate to concrete results.  People sometimes don’t say what they believe and/or they question with their intellect what they know in their hearts. And sometimes they really just haven’t thought it through.

I thought about all these things when I was reading this article.   We hear that the Chinese are moving money  all over the world and buying love in the developing world with their investments in infrastructure  and public works.   These investments often come with fewer strings attached (i.e. fewer demands for economic or human rights improvements) than similar investments from the U.S. or the EU. This makes the Chinese ostensibly more attractive partners to some sorts of governments and leaders who view democracy and humans rights with less enthusiasm.  We are exhorted to do something about this, although rarely specified is how, what or why.

But how’s it working for them, image wise? And what are the practical ramifications?  That’s hard to say about the image, but what you can do is count is the rising numbers of Chinese being attacked, targeted and even killed in places as disparate as Algeria and Zambia.  Ten years ago in Indonesia as many as 1500 Chinese were killed in race riots.   This stuff happens.  We just don’t read about it very much.   Both the Chinese investors and local authorities have some interests in not making a big deal about it.  Imagine if 1500 Americans were killed in anti-American riots.  It would be a big deal.   I bet we would pay attention and beat ourselves up with questions about “why do they hate us?”  In places like Indonesia or Malaysia they have a long history of these sorts of ethnic tensions and periodic pogroms, but when you are talking about Algeria or Zambia you wouldn’t guess there were even enough Chinese around to provoke attacks.  Certainly they have not been around long enough to permit the development of deep-seated ethnic or national animosity. 

The evidence is that these troubles resulted from specific, local situations and events that got out of hand, not a general Chinese image problem that stretches from Algeria, through Zambia and Indonesia to Papua New Guinea and beyond. Properly addressing them would mean lots of local responses, none of them exactly the same. Causality regarding a practical overall image would probably run in the direction from the local to the general, not the other way around.   I think the wisdom on this is “watch you pennies and your dollars will look after themselves.”

So my faith in my profession is not gone, but I am zooming down more to ground level, maybe down to the dirt level.  Gone are the beliefs in sweeping transformations.    Sweeping rapid changes are ephemeral and episodic attention is probably pernicious.   What Aristotle said about anger (Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody’s power, that is not easy.) also applies to public affairs.   You have to identify the specific issue and audience at the specific time and in a specific place. 

Posted on

Practical + Theoretical = Useful New Stuff?

I would like to bring together people for a conference including those who “do” public diplomacy using the new techniques and technologies such as augmented reality, social networking, text mining & mobile together along with those who develop and study those things in order to discuss practical applications.  

We need to discuss which technologies can be best used to deliver public diplomacy messages and that we and the larger public affairs community can use.  Integral to addressing these issues are our organizational and mission imperatives, which directly affect the extent of use and acceptance of new methods.  Not every new technology is useful for our work and not every useful technology can be used by us.

Subject clusters, along with notional times

8:30 – 9:00

Registration & seating

9 – 9:30

Introduction – new technologies and the new public diplomacy.    A discussion of what has worked so far and what is in the works for the next six months and beyond.

9:30-11:45 (with 15 minute break in middle)

The next big ideas – I envision a panel with an expert on each of these things giving a 15 minute explanation.  Following is a discussion among the panelists with questions from the floor.   We would ask what are the next big ideas and whether or not they are useful in public diplomacy. 

·         Augmented realty – what is it?  What does it do?  How might augmented reality augment public diplomacy?

·         Gaming platforms/virtual realities – what are they?  What is our public diplomacy experience in their use so far?   What are some future applications?  Will “holideck” functions come to dominate online collaboration?

·         Social networking systems – what are they?  What is our public diplomacy experience in their use so far?   What are some future applications?

·         “Old” new techniques (blogging, webpages, outreach) — what are they?  What is our public diplomacy experience in their use so far?   What are some future applications?

11:45-12:45

Content – how much do messages matter?  Can a content neutral or content free social network long endure?   Is such a network worth cultivating?   How can it be used to further public diplomacy goals?  Where will content come from in a post-MSM world (this one is for the journalist and journalism professors)?  Can user-generated content replace professionally crafted material? 

12:45- 1:30

Lunch

1:30-3:30

Putting it together – Panel session format as above

·         Integration/technological models – can one model encompass all/most forms of new technologies?   Can we understand the new technologies w/o an overall model or framework?  How can we determine the appropriate mix to use in various situations?

·         Integration/anthropological models – how do new techniques fit into and alter existing human networks & relationships, both inside and outside organizations?  

·         Integration/information management – can wikis function as information conduits and knowledge generators?  How will dispersed decision making change power structures and priority setting?   Can a series of tactical decisions become strategy?

3:30-5:00

Where do we go from here?  What is the future of public diplomacy?  Does public diplomacy need to be run by, or mostly run by, governments?  Can public diplomacy function successfully as only one voice among many?

Posted on

The Four Ps of Marketing (and Public Diplomacy)

I was talking to some marketing guys the other day who told me that we should market America like a brand.  We should listen to our customers and make sure we create products the market wants.   I understand this, but there are a few problems with this formulation, not least of which is that America is greater than any brand.  We are something special and we should not prim and trim ourselves to win ephemeral popularity. But that aside, government, especially the U.S. government has fewer “marketing” options.    

Marketers used to talk about the Four Ps: product, price, promotion and place.  Executives supposedly control those four things and can deploy them and rearrange them to maximize the attractiveness and sales of their products.    As a government “executive” I control none of those things. 

Our “product” the U.S. and its policies, is determined by forces way beyond our small ability to add or detract.  I don’t have the ability to alter it to suit changing or local conditions and probably would not want to.   Our product will not always be popular and sometimes very unpopular.  People engaged in actual armed conflict against us or our interests are probably signaling that they are not happy with the “product” on offer, which illustrates the other important difference in the product category.  A marketer never has to appeal to everybody while government is stuck with everybody in the marketing universe.  The private sector supports many options and people can choose.  If you don’t like Coke Zero, don’t drink it. Opting out of government is not so easy.

How about price?  We don’t have one.  We usually think of price as something that limits or stimulates demand, but its most important function is the information it conveys about relative scarcity and attractiveness of the product and its components.  People can easily lie to pollster and often deceive themselves, but when they have to put down the cash, they tend to reveal their true preferences.  Price is a better indicator than polling but we just don’t have that information and have to look to proxies and polls, which are always imperfect and usually behind the curve.

Place is determined by policies (above) and geography.  Conditions and adversaries often determine where we have to engage.  But we do have some flexibility in location.   We can choose to emphasize particular things in particular places.  Of course, we suffer significant leakage.    Information markets are not separate and we rarely have the luxury of being ignored by those not in the target audience.    We also have the problem of having actual enemies who refuse to stay in the places we would prefer of them.    In fact, a significant amount of overall governmental energy involves fixing some of these guys in place (often followed by neutralizing them, but that is not my department).

Promotion is what is left most for us and that is closest to what we do.  Of course, we are not unconstrained even here, but this is the area of greatest freedom of action. Public diplomacy could be included as a subset of national promotion.   

So we are essentially left with two of the four Ps (place & promotion) and not even in firm control of either of them.  Next time you hear somebody talk about the the American image as something that can be branded or marketed as a product, remind them of how real marketing works and the real marketing constraints.   Despite it all,  we still manage to produce some successes. It reminds me of the Samuel Johnson saying about a dog walking on two legs.  “It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

Posted on

ONE Common Man v THE Common Man

The interactive or social media is the future of public diplomacy, but it has the capacity to lead us down lots of blind alleys.  Much of this aimless wandering can be avoided if we just don’t make the error of mistaking ONE common person for THE common person.  Let me explain.

We group things and people in order to simplify and understand our world and we use shorthand phrases, such as the people of country X to describe very large groups that may have little in common with each other.    Marketers, politicians and public diplomacy professional want to reach THE people. The trouble is there is no such thing.  No matter the rhetoric, smart marketers, politician & PD practitioners know this.  That is why we study polling and demographic data.  We try to segment the audience in terms that make sense for our persuasion job. 

We know that in any given population, only a small percentage of the people really care about any particular issue enough to get the facts or develop opinions about it and an even smaller number will leverage the opinions of the larger population.  These influential people are NOT a random sample of the population.  They are people with specific interests, communications skills and access to persuasion methods.  The problem is finding them, especially because you have to find different ones for different occasions.    

The advent of interactive social media does not solve this problem.  Although it empowers us to move much faster, sometimes we might just be moving faster down the path to nowhere and the fastest way to go nowhere in PD is to wrongly identify a representative audience as an influential audience.   A representative sample of 1000 people might be sufficient to accurately measure the attitudes of a millions, but it won’t suffice to influence a change in those attitudes.   On the other hand, 1000 influentials could indeed affect the course of the nation. 

Social media at once reveal and obscure this reality.    We can graphically watch the spread of information on platforms such as Facebook or Twitter and see the power of opinion leaders.  We knew they were out there but to a long time public diplomacy guy, actually seeing them is as amazing as really seeing gravity or magnetic waves would be for a physicist.  But it is more complicated.   Physical forces don’t exercise options or free will; people do.  Physical particles always react the same way; people don’t.   A physical object cannot just lose interest in gravity and stop exerting influence.   People … you get the picture. 

I have noticed a hazardous trend in public diplomacy.   We have started to become much more interested in numbers counted than in influence achieved.   Maybe that is because we can so easily generate numbers with our new technologies, while influence is nearly impossible to quantify.   Numbers can talk, but they don’t always tell the truth and they never tell the truth unless surrounded by an explanatory context.   For example, is it better to reach 1000 people or 100,000 people?  You really cannot answer that question until you know the context. 

Let me illustrate with my own number fallacy.   I fell into it when I started to use Facebook.  It is an embarrassingly simple error, but I have since seen it widely.   Social media is about friends.    The average Facebook user may have 500 friends.  So if my Facebook message reaches 500 people, can’t I just multiply by 500 and claim that my audience was 250,000?   And by that logic, I would only need 2000 people to reach a million.  My job just got a lot easier.  Of course, friends’ networks overlap.   In some communities, the overlap might be 90%+. 

In other words, by reaching one or two, you have already bumped up against boundary of your influence.   Adding hundreds or thousands more from the same group may not add any value at all.  The total number is meaningless. It is like saying that you want infinity and being disappointed that you had to settle for half of it.

BTW – Business Week has a very good article about what an online friend is worth. 

We used to call them boutique programs.  They are the kinds of things you set up for an ambassador or a VIP to give him/her the flavor of an issue or area.    For example, the VIP talks to a youth audience and leaves with the impression that he/she has met THE youth.  He/she has, in fact, spoken maybe sixty people, most of whom know each other (i.e. their communities overlap).  It is a very useful exercise, as long as you know what you are getting into and when you leave the boutique you go to talk to opinion leaders and people who can make connections.  Then maybe look carefully at some polling data.   

You should stay out of the boutique if you think you are getting anything more scientific than a personal impression.  Boutique programs are easier to do online and easier to fall into than they are in non-virtual life.  So remember whether online or in person, meeting ONE common person, or even fifty or a hundred of them, is not the same as meeting THE common person.

Posted on

Truth & Contexts

Public affairs professionals rightly advise people in crisis to be open, honest and transparent.   While honesty is the best policy most of the time, it seems that the dishonesty and dissembling works too. 

I read a couple of articles recently that made me think about that.   The first one was about a German police officer who shot a student protestor in the 1960s.   The protestor was called the left wing’s first martyr and the story and famous photo that went with it was one of the sparks that set off the massive student protests and  the terror movement that swept Europe during the late 1960s and 1970s.   It turns out the cop was working for the East German communists.   His action may have been provocation.  Okay, it comes out, but it doesn’t change forty years of history.  The bad guys got what they wanted.  Another article talked about the Russians sanitizing the communist era.  It may become a crime to equate Stalin with Hitler.   I wrote my own article about Katyn a couple days ago.  What is truth?We like to think the truth comes out, but sometimes it doesn’t or when it does it has lost its context or just doesn’t matter anymore.   Once a story line is set, subsequent revelations might have little effect.  The world has always been full of all sorts of horrible regimes and people.   Many have diligently stonewalled on the historic record or manipulated it.   Think of that horrible murder Che Guevara.   People still wear his image on T-shirts.  Historians know about his sadistic ways, but his image was protected long enough that now the general public no longer cares.   The Soviet and the Chinese communists killed tens of millions of their own citizens.   They denied it and made investigations difficult.   Much of the detail is lost forever.  Once again, historians know about mass terrors, but it often ignored in the general consciousness.    

We in the West take the opposite tact.   We sometimes seem to reveal in the revelation of our faults.  Sure, we should hold ourselves to the very highest standard and you cannot learn from mistakes if you don’t identify them, but doing this w/o context can lead to the wrong conclusions and let some real bad guys off the hook.   In geometry it takes two points to define a line.  You need context.   

Most of life’s achievements are graded on the curve because nothing can be properly defined except in relation to other things.   We do not serve the cause of truth when we loudly confess and even exaggerate our own mistakes, while implicitly or sometimes explicitly allowing others to downplay or obscure theirs. Turn that around and consider what it would be like if we only bragged about our own achievements while denying the opportunity to others.  We suffer from a massive availability bias, in that we overemphasize information that is nearby or easily obtained and overlook that which is hard to find or actively hidden.   The commitment to truth requires that we seek it in ourselves and also demand truth from others.  We should always ask the “compared to what?” question.    In our personal life it is bad manners to put others on the spot or catch them in a lie, but in the public sphere the pursuit of truth requires occasional truculence.

Posted on

How Strategic Communication Helped the Surge Succeed in Iraq

Colonel Patrick Malay, my friend and colleague from Iraq, is coming to Washington and together we will make a presentation at the Strategic Communication Network (formerly known as Fusion Team) on May 29 about the importance of strategic communication in Iraq and how the Marines and the ePRT worked with the people and leaders of Anbar to help create stability and relative prosperity.  Below is more or less what I plan to say.

Every move you make conveys a message and actions often speak louder than words.   This is especially important in a disrupted and dangerous place like Anbar province was in 2007-8.   But the words and how you express them are also important.   You need a combination of talking and doing and that is what we were lucky enough to have in Western Anbar when the Marines, the State Department and other parts of the USG worked productively with the Iraqis to make the place safer and more prosperous.

I thought and wrote a lot about it at the time and I recommend you look at my webpage from the time.   The passage of time has strengthened my conviction that we achieved something special.   But I don’t think it was something unique and I do believe that the lessons of Western Anbar have meaning in other places and times. 

All Necessary; None by itself Sufficient

As with many successes and most failures, it seems easier to see the causes when you look back than it was at the time of the events.   We had a fortunate combination of factors.  None of them alone would have been sufficient to achieve success, but each of them was necessary.  

The most obvious is that the people turned against the insurgents and the Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). The insurgents and AQl, it turned out, really were bad.  When their promises were replaced by the reality of murder, mutilation, rape & destruction, the people of Anbar realized that letting them get established had been a mistake.  Unfortunately, standing up to the terrorists was dangerous and often fatal, not only for the brave individuals involved, but also for their family and friends. Early opposition ended up headless in roadside ditches.  AQI would often even go after anybody who tried to remove the bodies. This was an example of AQI’s strategic communication. A headless body makes one hell of an impression, especially if you think you might be next. 

Terrorism indeed created terror that paralyzed opposition.  So the second part of the puzzle was needed – the surge.

The surge was more than just an increase in coalition troop numbers.   It also coincided with a change in strategy.   In Anbar, it meant that Marines protected the people locally and went to live in Iraqi communities among the people they were supposed to protect.  They trained police & security forces and held the ground, but their most important strategic communication message was just being there.    For civilian populations in war zones, the perception of safety is crucial.  The perception of safety creates real safety as more people go onto the streets, interact with each other and begin to get the confidence to stand up to the bad guys or at least help others do so.

The supporting strategic communication message the Marines sent was consistency.    The people needed to know that the Marines would be there for a long time. If the population suspects that coalition forces will leave and the bad guys will be able to return to chopping heads, nobody will cooperate.  The only way you can create the perception that you are there for a long time is to be there for a long time and have the reputation for keeping your word.  Marines stayed and established a reputation for honesty and persistence.  

So we have two necessary parts of the puzzle.   The people have turned against AQI and the greater numbers of coalition forces are making it to be both openly against the terrorists and alive at the same time.  Both these things are necessary and probably in that order. But we still need something more.  

Although basic stability always precedes prosperity, stability cannot be long maintained if the people are miserable and have no meaningful economic activity. Stability and prosperity are symbiotic and mutually reinforcing.  This is where our ePRT came in.  A PRT certainly cannot create prosperity, but we could help create conditions where the Iraqis could build, or rebuild, their own prosperous community.   

We did this by emphasizing the structure of a civil society. These are the things that are so ubiquitous in our own society that we rarely even notice them anymore, things like a functioning court system, protections for private property, transportation, clean water, distribution of goods and a reasonable functioning financial system.

Let me say again that we did not, we could not, create this kind of thing.   We could, however, help the Iraqis do it for themselves.   We could and did make grants of money.  We sponsored training.   We (and even more the military) physically built things like schools, roads and bridges, but I content that the thing that made all these activities into a successful whole was strategic communications.   There is really not much we did for the Iraqis that they could not have done for themselves.  But the fact that we were out there encouraged them and paved the way for progress.

It is Better to Light a Single Candle than to Curse the Darkness

Let me give one example.  It is not the most important example, but it is the one I like the best.   I called it the “String or Emeralds”.  You can see more about it at the String of Emeralds Link.

Iraq is an arid country, plagued by dust storms and drought. But the dust storms and drought are not completely natural.   Some is caused by humans and livestock destroying the natural vegetation cover by bad farming methods and overgrazing.   This has been a problem for 4000 years and our PRT could not solve it.    But after 4000 years, we have learned something about soils.   Our PRT’s agricultural attaché was an expert on rehabilitating irrigated dry soils damaged by salinization (salts deposit is a big problem in dry Iraq). We also took the lessons from our own dust bowl of the 1930s.  Planting trees serves to slow the wind and catch some of the blowing dirt.   I looked for opportunities to help and I found some.  The Iraqis understood the need for this too, but the effort had been neglected under Saddam Hussein and collapsed utterly during the war. 

We went to some of the oases and raised the profile and that encouraged the Iraqis to think more about it too.    The strategic communications lesson is that when someone in authority just shows interest, things can happen. There is no real magic to it. It just takes effort. The trees will grow and the future will be better than the past.

This is my Western Anbar progress report from about the time I left. You can get a better idea if you look at the sections.

When does strategic communication work?  The short answer is when it is embedded in other things that are working. All the talking in the world could not have made Western Anbar safe if not for the Marines & our brave Iraqi friends.   But communications enhanced and spread the good news.  And by spreading it and making it believable the perception of security started to become more real.   Telling the right stories creates a reinforcing loop, a virtuous circle or just plain success.

Posted on

Let the Games Begin

Continuing my thoughts on games in public affairs, interactive games will soon become the leading method of persuasion and a key advertising medium.   I know that is a sweeping statement.   Those familiar only with the “Space Invaders” game generation will think I am nuts.  The “Myst” people will see the merit in the statement, and those playing World of Warcraft would heartily endorse it, if they could divert their attention long enough from their games.   Games are already a primary way that young people interact with data, each-other and the world in general.   Even the EU now thinks that gaming might be good for young minds, so we better get used to the idea that games.  For a funnier approach, take a look at this video.

Games’ pervasive persuasive ability is part of a continuum of imagined worlds so let’s digress a little to the more familiar previous persuasion champion – the play (or in the modern versions the movie or TV show).  Sophocles and Shakespeare, Ibsen, Shaw, O’Neil and George Lucas & Steven Spielberg were/are masters of persuasion and they all knew what they were doing.   Think of a play as a very long commercial message that you volunteer to watch.  And remember that if a thirty-second commercial can sell you a product, don’t you think an hour and thirty minute play or a thirty minute TV show can sell you an idea or a lifestyle.

The writers, producers, directors and actors work together to sell you an idea.  Sometimes it is  innocuous; sometimes not.  Shakespeare sold us all the Tudor version of English history and we bought that Richard III was nothing but a sneaky rat and Henry V was a great and brave hero.  There is some truth to some of these characterizations, but they are fictional caricatures, not history.  It was a conscious effort at propaganda, but it was so skillfully done that it is still part of the fabric of our society four centuries later.   A skillful current propagandist is Oliver Stone.   Many people draw their knowledge of JFK or Nixon from his movies and the images are strong.  Even when you know the real history of the events, it is hard to get the image out of your mind.   The living, moving image often trumps the truth of history.   That is the power of the play/movie/TV Show.    

The writers/producers/directors control ALL the characters.   They can make the ones they don’t like unlikable or stupid.  It is all a set up.  They can structure events so that faults are revealed AND they can give characters the faults to be revealed.    It is analogous to your own dream, where all the characters are you but they seem to be others and that is how you react.   In every play, for persuasion purposes, the bad guys and the good guys are on the same side.  They are all working for the guy who wrote the play.  But the illusion remains.    Directors sometimes disingenuously talk about characters as independent or they ridicule critics by pointing out that it is only fiction.   Think of how you view familiar historical people or events.  Now consider whether your image came from reading actual history or just watching it on TV.   

BTW – the power of the producer has increased in Orwellian fashion.  Now many directors go back to their movies and change them to fit the current situation and sensibilities.   The “Star Wars” you saw in 1979 is not the same one you will see today.  “He who controls the past controls the future and he who controls the present controls the past,” is the philosophy of Ingsoc and Big Brother in George Orwell’s “1984.”

But the power of the play/movie/TV show pales in comparison to a modern game.  Viewer might get involved in a drama, but not matter how involved the couch potato gets, he is still a passive participant.   None of his intelligence or perception will change the course of the investigation on “Law & Order”  and none of his passionate tears will prevent one death on “House” or “ER” and the rerun will unfold exactly as it did the first time.

Not so in a game.   The game provides some choices and the illusion of free will.   What you do makes a difference to the outcome.   That is why games are so addictive.   You get to be a player in all the senses of that word.    The irony is that BECAUSE you are making choices and seeming to go your own way, the power of persuasion is multiplied.  

The game maker sets all the parameters.   He can suspend the universal laws of physics.  He can dictate the nature of human interactions.   He can dictate the nature of human nature itself.  Animals can become wise; inanimate object can be animated.   The game maker can determine heroes and villains, but now they are also YOUR friends and enemies.    Humans have a wonderful capacity to personify animals and objects.   It is much easier when these things have elements of a real personality.    Games create that.

I don’t think most game makers have an explicit social or political agenda, but they do have perceptions and prejudices that color their view of reality and so come to color the reality of many others. 

I no longer play many video games and I date myself when I say that used to play Sid Meyer’s Civilization, a game from the 1990s.   It is the only game that I really know well and it is familiar enough to many people, so let me use one example from that game.  You can find examples from other games at this link.

Civilization requires you to develop from a society of Stone Age wanders into a future with space travel.  As you develop various technologies, you get more options, both in civil and military matters.   The game makers have determined the relative merits of particular advances and you get them as givens. You compete with other civilizations and you have to spend a lot of time defending yourself and there was some criticism that the game was too warlike, but so was human history.

The first rendition of the game the other civilizations had characteristics broadly correlated to their historical activities.    For example, Hammurabi and the Babylonians were builders who spent relatively more time developing irrigation and road.  Lincoln and the Americans were technologically savvy and likely to develop democracy.   Shaka and the Zulus were less interested in technology and were more aggressive in attacking others.   The most aggressive and dangerous people on the board were Genghis Khan and the Mongols.   This was very un-pc and it disappeared from subsequent versions of the game.   

So the message of the later versions was that the unpopular idea of national character or any sort of cultural determinism was completely useless.   This is a very important point, BTW.   IF applied to the real world, it would mean that over time you would expect the Swiss and the North Koreans to behave in the same ways and that their national character would have no predictive value.   This, BTW, is the message of cultural relativism that you get in many universities.    If you get it directly, you can counter with the Swiss-North Korean argument.   If you imbibe it unconsciously as a teenager, it just becomes part of your world view.

But there is even a deeper message implicit in the game.  You, as the leader of your civilization, have nearly complete knowledge.  You make choices based on calculation or preference, but you can be logical.   Real world leaders never have this option.   There is always fog and uncertainty.   So if players take a lesson from the game, they have way too much confidence in the ability of leaders to run the economy or engage in foreign policy.   Conversely, if the leader does not deliver as promised, they are less likely to understand the constraints, unavoidable ignorance or mitigating circumstances.

Anyway, more and more we will use games to persuade and train.   Games are artificial models, created by humans, bundled with their unconscious preconceptions and prejudices and often peppered with deliberate manipulation.  As with any model, they represent one reality.  They are not THE reality.  But they sure seem like it to the players and I wonder what sorts of mind-sets the games are creating.   Games can create an entirely artificial world, whose characteristics players may carry over to the real world they (sometimes) live in.