2
The Strategic vacuum

We are losing the skills of cooperation needed to make a complex society work.

— Richard Sennett, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation

Social labs as a new approach to solving complex social challenges compete with existing business-as-usual (BAU) approaches. The relative efficiency of one strategy over another can be evaluated only by considering the nature and cost of BAU approaches as a response to our challenges.

BUSINESS AS USUAL

Randy Shilts, a journalist who documented the spread of AIDS in the United States provides a sobering example of business as usual.¹ During the early years of the AIDS epidemic, the blood bank industry in the United States found doctors who questioned the evidence that AIDS resulted from a virus that could be transmitted through blood. These doctors argued in public that screening was not needed. Screening blood would mean the introduction of expensive processes and a crisis of confidence in the entire system of blood banks, which would in turn mean that the blood banks would lose a lot of money.

The decision not to screen blood resulted in many unnecessary deaths through contaminated blood. The lack of scientific consensus on the nature of AIDS allowed the blood banks to operate in BAU modes, even as the gay community and activists generated political pressure by pointing out that dying people required a response.

Shilts writes

Years later, when it was clear that hundreds were dying because the blood industry and federal regulators at the FDA heeded the calls from people like Joseph Bove, the doctor would pull a copy of his speech from his shelf at Yale to show that his 1983 presentation at NYU was, technically, accurate. “I wrote ‘evidence is minimal,’” said Bove. “I was extremely cautious about my choice of words. I didn’t want to go on the record either way. I was smart enough not to say it wasn’t there. Technically, I was not inaccurate.”²

BAU is what we do normally. It’s what we’re most used to doing and consists of those activities that we’re most comfortable doing. When a new challenge arises, BAU means taking an approach in which we’re operating from deep within our comfort zone. It means not having to experience the discomfort of something that’s new, with all the vulnerabilities that brings. It means not taking risks with our professional reputations. And in the words of one lab team member, “If you always do what you’ve always done, then you’ll get what you always got.”³

Business as usual is the dominant response in the face of complex challenges. Four spheres—the developmental, humanitarian, security, and battle—define BAU today.

The Developmental Sphere

Developmental responses attempt to cover basic needs for people, to ensure that they have an adequate supply of food and water, that they have shelter, and that they have a degree of safety in responding to injury and illness (such as in the Shilts example above). Education is usually seen as a high-leverage way of addressing these issues.

The developmental sphere is difficult to clearly define because the activities that shape it come from a combination of government, business, and civil society entities. The primary actor in this sphere, however, is government.

In domestic contexts, developmental responses are covered by social services and associated ministries, such as the US Department of Health and Human Services or the National Health Service in the UK. In so-called developing-world contexts, where government is seen as unable to meet basic needs, international aid seeks to plug the gaps, either by supporting governments or through provision of direct services.

In the developmental sphere businesses actively provide food, and in some cases shelter and health care, but are typically not seen as decision makers because this sphere is considered, in theory (but not in practice), to be independent of market forces. People are not provided for by their governments and cannot afford services at market rates and therefore rely on the developmental sphere.

The organization of the developmental space as the primary domain of governments is profoundly neo-Soviet in structure, practices, and culture. With the fiscal crisis, this neo-Soviet character has been strengthened through what is being called the results-based agenda.⁴ The idea is to pay for results.

Unfortunately one consequence of this seemingly simple idea is increased gaming of the system, where actors are forced to compromise (e.g., by fabricating data) because in practice what is being asked of them might not be possible. Studies have shown that while such results-based approaches can deliver progress in the short term, in the long term they risk collapse. Two academics from Oxford studying the National Health Service in the UK recently remarked:

In the 2000s, governments in the UK, particularly in England, developed a system of governance of public services that combined targets with an element of terror. This has obvious parallels with the Soviet regime, which was initially successful but then collapsed. Assumptions underlying governance by targets are synecdoche (taking a part to stand for a whole) and that problems of measurement and gaming do not matter.⁵

This neo-Soviet character is doubly reinforced when it comes to development aid, where a donor government provides financial aid either bilaterally (to another government) or to multilateral agencies. Typically decisions are made centrally and then programs are delivered on the ground via five-year plans.

The Humanitarian Sphere

In situations of humanitarian disaster, developmental responses are so disrupted by unexpected events (such as natural disasters), that people are suddenly vulnerable to hunger, water shortages, or other emergency challenges. A humanitarian approach then consists of a short-term, rapid response aimed at meeting the immediate needs of shelter, safety, or supply.⁶

Developmental responses, by their close association with governments, are relatively politicized, slow-moving instruments of both domestic and foreign policy. The humanitarian sphere, however, is characterized by underlying principles distinguishing it from other forms of response. In many ways, normal rules are suspended during humanitarian disasters. Foremost are values of neutrality and impartiality. At least in theory, by not taking sides, humanitarian agencies ensure access to war zones and other crisis situations.

Since the 1980s humanitarianism has undergone huge shifts in terms of culture, increasingly being driven by celebrities and global campaigns. In recent years the humanitarian sphere has also come under severe criticism.⁷ Formerly apolitical, humanitarian agencies are changing now and “venturing into the formerly taboo area of politics.”⁸ A challenge comes from the relationship of humanitarian aid and conflict, with accusations being made that in many cases, aid money goes toward supporting conflict.⁹ The vast amounts of money at stake in this sphere coupled with its media-saturated culture mean that some critics have christened it “humanitarian business,” the harsh point being that this sphere is far from neutral and is actually self-serving.¹⁰

The Security Sphere

When developmental and humanitarian responses fail, people tend to become desperate, and so a securitized response is called for to contain them. Assuming that developmental and humanitarian responses have failed and that the people suffering act rationally, what will they do in such situations? Faced with imminent risk to their survival, people will respond in one of three ways: (1) fight, (2) leave if possible, or if things get really bad, (3) suffer and potentially lose their lives. This is when securitized responses enter.

In recent years a number of events have changed the nature of security responses: 9-11, the rise of international suicide-martyrdom operations, asymmetrical warfare, and an increase in international protest movements, such as Occupy Wall Street, 15M in Spain, and the Arab Spring. Finally, we are witnessing an exponential rise in international cyber-attacks, which may take the form of criminal activity or even state-versus-state conflict.¹¹

When we see riot police or tanks on the streets of a city, we are witnessing a securitized response. According to some scholars, since 9/11 we have seen the rise of “strategic incapacitation” as a security response, focused on the prevention of “crime” through the control of space.¹²

Security is typically containment of grievances. The Troubles in Northern Ireland, the situation of the Palestinians, or the UN presence on the Green Line dividing South and North Cyprus are all examples of long-term securitized responses, where a situation is held in a weird form of attritional stasis for as long as possible. Where this stasis fails, we see battle-space responses, with extreme variability in how successful this strategy is at restoring the peace.

The Battle Sphere

When a security response is deemed insufficient, we are in a situation of war. The last two decades have seen profound changes to the notion of warfare. The so-called Global War on Terror has broken down clear distinctions of who the enemy is, what it means to win a war, and the actual location of the battlefield. Military theorist Emile Simpson comments, “The fact that the military now tends to speak about ‘battlespaces’ rather than ‘battlefields’ acknowledges the expansion of the traditional, apolitical, military domain beyond the physical clash of armed forces to include its political, social and economic context even at the local level.”¹³

The problems with security and war-as-policy responses are obviously profound. Both are tremendously expensive from every angle. A recent study on the financial legacy of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars show them to be the most expensive wars in US history. Costing between $4 trillion to $6 trillion, “the legacy of decisions taken during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will dominate future federal budgets for decades to come.”¹⁴

As situations, battle spaces are not amenable to control even as this is the avowed point. They also do little or nothing to address the underlying problems—regime change still leaves a new government with the same challenges on the ground—with the potentially added problem of massive infrastructure loss, internally displaced populations, and the loss of life.

Even as these four spheres retain distinct characteristics, they are blurring. We now see military forces engaged in the humanitarian spheres. We see the distinction between security and battle spaces blurring. In situations such as Afghanistan and Yemen, we see traditional notions of battle making little sense, as there are no set-piece battles.

In some ways, of all four spheres—developmental, humanitarian, security, and battle—it’s the battle sphere that is going through the deepest changes. The wars of Iraq and Afghanistan have prompted deep soul-searching in Western militaries. The very notion of strategy in the military sphere is being rethought from the ground up. This is unfortunately not true of other spheres. The historic links of strategy and planning, which are deep, may mean that this re-think has impacts way beyond the military sphere. One of the risks is an increased militarization of other spheres.¹⁵

THE EXPERT-PLANNING PARADIGM

I was in a nice warm bed. Suddenly I’m part of a plan.

— Woody Allen

BAU responses to complex social challenges start with the formulation of a strategic plan in response to a problem. Different spheres deal with different problems. So, for example, while poverty may play a role in the decision of a young Yemeni picking up a gun, once he does so, he becomes a problem that belongs either to the security or battle sphere. The way the problem’s defined or constructed is usually unexamined. It may be inherited from other spheres (e.g., politics or academia) or may simply be a commonly acdepted story.

At the heart of all BAU responses sit experts. They are the muscle behind BAU responses. And what experts do in response to complex social challenges is formulate plans. The formulation of a plan, be it by a development agency or a military commander, leads us to the challenges of implementing the plan. Once a problem domain has clearly been identified (in itself not always obvious) the dominant response is technocratic, a combination of planning and technical problem solving. This is the expert-planning paradigm that drives BAU. It’s, unfortunately, profoundly unstrategic in nature and leads to the creation of strategic vacuums coupled with expensive activity around complex social challenges. Vietnam War is a textblook case of this.

According to Henry Mintzberg, a professor who has studied strategic planning extensively, “The act of planning assumes predetermination in the prediction of the environment; the unfolding of the strategy formation process on schedule; and the ability to impose the resulting strategies on an accepting environment.” He concludes, “The possibility that formal systems of planning create dynamics which reduce the possibility of truly being strategic or the possibility that planning processes have never really been formal (other than to follow a checklist).”¹⁶

Mintzberg argues that an expert is “defined as someone who knows enough about a subject to avoid all the many pitfalls on his or her way to the grand fallacy.” The grand fallacy is that “no amount of elaboration will ever enable formal procedures to forecast discontinuities, to inform managers who are detached from their operations, to create novel strategies. Ultimately, the term ‘strategic planning’ has proved to be an oxymoron.”¹⁷ In Mintzberg’s grand fallacy, the failures of planning are not coincidental but integral to the very nature of planning.

In all of this, we have to remember that experts are not politicians; rather they are experts in their particular specialties. This means they make largely rational recommendations, the best of which are characterized by professional integrity.

The trouble is that decisions made by political decision makers are rarely, if ever, made purely on the basis of rationality or common-sense. Rather, they are made on the basis of political expediency, self-interest, and other trade-offs. While rationality is considered in politically loaded decisions, it is not the deciding factor.¹⁸ In other words, if we expect politicians to take the rational recommendations made by well-meaning experts and implement them, then we are living a fantasy.

FLYING AUTOPILOT IN THE PERFECT STORM

One should never bring a knife to a gun fight, nor a cookie cutter to a complex adaptive system.

— Harold Jarche

What I saw at Chatham House was that everyone in the room, every single so-called expert (including me) was playing by the rules and saw little reason to risk breaking them. We were all polite, and few people took a tone that could be called strident or emotional, even though the situation was deeply upsetting.

Part of the reason was, of course, that we believed that no one would listen anyway. And besides, it was unprofessional. At the last meeting I went to, an older Yemeni man, who was in exile, took a somewhat forceful tone arguing passionately against international support for the current regime. While there were murmurs of assent from various people in the room, we swiftly moved on. The Yemeni man settled back into his chair, defeated by a cold politeness. I somehow felt we had all been defeated.

This banishment of messy and potentially embarrassing emotions is one hallmark of the expert-planning paradigm. Mintzberg has summarized these problems as the fallacies of detachment, predetermination, and formalism.¹⁹ Detachment means experts are detached from the situation on the ground and critically have no skin in the game.²⁰ Predetermination means that activities are plotted out in advance, and in the most pernicious instances they do not change, come hell or high water. Finally formalism means that if it cannot be measured or somehow expressed on paper, it cannot be taken into consideration.

This results in the creation of vast bureaucratic flatlands—a world of abstract data and reports.²¹ Vast representations of reality that are disembodied and exist purely on screens become the place where our decision makers, planners, and donors engage with the reality of their decisions, designs, political power, and resource deployment. These representations costs billions to maintain and constitute a shadow reality that is psychologically, intellectually, technically, and physically much easier to deal with than reality itself. The disembodiment of reality is buried within cold, emotionless, antiseptic language, and technical processes, in “mathematical condensations of wounded images of a life worth living.” Consider the saying often attributed to Stalin that one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is statistics.²²

Ultimately, taking a planning-based approach in situations of complexity is akin to flying a plane on autopilot in a raging storm. Autopilot is an elegant technology that allows for long-distance flight. Flying on autopilot means that the plane keeps flying as long as the hardware and software of the autopilot are functioning within the limits for which they were designed. In other words, autopilots are not designed to fly in all weather conditions. When a storm surrounds a plane or when some other unforeseen event arises, human beings have to step in to make decisions, or inevitably the plane crashes.

A LACK OF GENUINE STRATEGIC INTENT

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.

— Shunryu Suzuki

What is it that causes us to approach challenges on autopilot? The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu offers us an explanation through his idea of habitus.²³ This idea provides us with an understanding of BAU and why we “keep doing what we’ve always done.” For Bourdieu, habitus is much more than habit; it is “longlasting dispositions of the mind and body,” that he sees as “a product of history.” It’s the way we think, talk, dress, work, and live our everyday lives in repeating patterns.

Habitus is like muscle memory. If we perform the same task over and over again, like riding a bicycle, then our muscles remember the actions without our conscious mind being a part of the act. In military training, repetition is used to train soldiers in tasks such as disassembling a weapon, so that when they are under pressure, their muscles can automatically perform the task without the mind having to think about it. Habitus is used to overcome the natural fight-or-flight response that arises in moments of extreme crisis. The systems built around training soldiers, in particular, illustrate habitus.

In other words, there are whole systems designed to reinforce particular behaviors through rewarding repetition. Such systems over time would produce habitus and would not require coercion, rules, or laws; it would just be that way. This ensures the “active presence of past experiences,” which “tend to guarantee the ‘correctness’ of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms.”²⁴

BAU strategies are unsuited to complex social challenges because they are not the product of what Bourdieu calls “genuine strategic intention,” oriented toward current realities and the emerging future. Rather, BAU stems from habitus that is “the source of these strings of ‘moves,’ which are objectively organized as strategies without being the product of genuine strategic intention—which would presuppose at least that they be apprehended as one among other possible strategies.”

A particular strategy originating from habitus can give the impression of being strategic, that is, formulated in response to a challenge. Instead, what we have are strategies that are created in advance of the objective conditions they purport to be responding to. In other words, they are pseudo-strategies.

I recall an example of this at one meeting where I was introduced to an expert with the comment that he might have useful ideas for our work in Yemen. I explained what we were doing and looked at him expectantly. He told me, “You need to think about these things …” and proceeded to explain various commodity supply chains to me. When he finished, I asked him, “So, can I see the data that your analysis is based on?” He looked at me, surprised, and said, “Oh no, this is just standard political economy stuff.” The actual situation in Yemen and its trajectory didn’t factor into his advice.

At worst, an expert-planning response involves a menu of preconfigured answers, as opposed to a completely new strategy that a completely new situation might demand. At best, an expert is a good guide to a narrow domain of historical practice. This service is valuable—experts have been thinking longer and harder than other people about their domains. However, the expert strategic response based on habitus is based on the past of what was acceptable practice.

Our reliance on the expert-planning paradigm is an example of Bourdieu’s observation, “Practice has a logic which is not that of the logician.”²⁵ This means that when faced with a real need to adapt our behaviors to a new reality, we as a society are unable to do so. Decision-making power and the control of resources rests with a narrow class of technocrats occupying BAU spaces, characterized by habitus. In the face of increasingly complex social challenges, this results in a troubling strategic vacuum masked by frantic technocratic activity.