Apparently I wasn’t the only one thinking about the diplomatic potential of Muslim hip-hop when I posted a blog about it for COMOPS Journal back in September of 2009. Recently we heard from Tyson Amir, one of the Muslim artists that I featured in the blog, and he had some interesting news to report. Amir is from San Jose, California, and currently performs with the Remarkable Current Musician Collective, founded by Anas Canon in 2001. As described on the group’s website, Remarkable Current is “an American artist collective consisting of musicians, writers, and producers who are bonded not only by their love for music and art, but also by their shared Islamic-American tradition.”

“Some of the artists that I work with,” wrote Amir, “have actually submitted a proposal very similar to what Jeffry Halverson articulated in [his] article to the US government.” Unfortunately, the government has thus far been unresponsive to the group’s overtures. Amir further added that: “We hoped the US government would be open to allowing us to utilize our art to try to bring about some type of change in the world.”

Tyson Amir in Morocco

In the meantime, Tyson Amir and his colleagues have been going forward without government support. They were on tour in Turkey in 2009, where they recorded a music video for a song entitled “Granada Rap,” a reference to the Andalusian city where Muslims, Christians, and Jews coexisted together in southern Spain before its downfall in 1492. And if you’d like to see the way American hip-hop can appeal to Muslim youths, just take a look at the Turkish kids in Amir’s video: LINK.

“The entire proposal,” Amir further explained, “was based on the State Department’s usage of Jazz musicians in the late 1950s for the purpose of diplomacy; the first artist they sent was Dizzy Gillespie.”

In 1956, the State Department under the Eisenhower administration sent Gillespie to bring the uniquely American art form of jazz to the Middle East, Southern Europe, and South Asia during the height of the Cold War. Other Jazz ambassadors soon followed, including Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis. As Dr. Curtis Sandberg of the Meridian International Center has noted: “In this battle for the ‘hearts and minds’ of the world’s peoples, the United States developed an unlikely but remarkably effective response to Soviet initiatives: building international friendships through jazz.”

As Tyson Amir sees it: “In the 1950s we used Jazz ambassadors, today we need hip-hop ambassadors.”

I couldn’t agree more.

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A new “strategic framework” for U.S. Public Diplomacy has at long last been released. Oddly, it is a slide show rather than a paper, but perhaps that’s because it is to be the basis for a briefing today. My colleague Phil Seib has already expressed disappointment in the new proposal:

It is so lacking in imagination, so narrow in its scope, and so insufficient in its appraisal of the tasks facing U.S. public diplomats that it is impossible to understand why its preparation took so many months.

One particular way in which this is true is the plan’s conception of narrative.

The number one objective in the strategy is to “shape the narrative.” Its authors reckon that we are not dealing effectively with new media, that inaccurate information shapes our story before we have a chance to do the shaping ourselves, and that too little information is available to audiences around the world. Accordingly it specifies the following tactics (paraphrasing):

• Rapidly respond to inaccurate information and shape stories through engagement with international media
• Expand platforms for shaping dialogue, communicating our perspectives and countering misinformation
• Use new modes of communication

The slides say these goals are the first phase of developing a more detailed plan, which will be taken up by working groups. Fair enough.  But the framework will guide the way the working groups think about the problem, and the guidance seems to be based in an outdated message influence model of strategic communication that fails to take account of the rugged landscape on which U.S. public diplomacy operates.

First, the framework clearly conceives the narrative problem as one of inaccurate information. But this misses the point; narratives are not about facts, they are about how facts are framed and interpreted. Extremists work tirelessly to tie U.S. actions in the Middle East to a master narrative of the crusades. The facts of the crusades are not really in dispute. Western/Christian powers aimed to seize lands from the Arab/Muslim people–especially Jerusalem–and in doing so served their economic and political interests.

Many facts of present day U.S. actions in the Middle East resonate with this account. We provide military and economic support to Israel, which is determined to keep Jerusalem out of the hands of the Arabs. We have recently invaded an Arab country and maintain a large number of troops in the region for the purposes of protecting our interests. Our leader said in 2001 that we were on a crusade. Our soldiers have bible references inscribed on their weapons. I have first-hand reports that active duty military personnel are wearing this patch on their uniforms in Iraq, and maybe Afghanistan too. None of these facts are inaccurate.

The U.S. offers a couple of counter-narratives against the crusader portrayal. One is that we are involved in a fight between Good (represented by us) and Evil (represented by violent extremists). But one can imagine crusaders saying something similar, and the extremists simply argue that these roles are reversed.

We also say we are trying to bring democracy and freedom to the lands where we are fighting (something reiterated in the new framework). But extremist ideologues like Abu Yahiya al-Libi, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, and Abu Bakr Basyir argue forcefully that democracy is a form of polytheism that is part of the crusader plot to weaken the foundations of Islam.  Thus they turn our “gift of democracy” narrative against us.

Second, “shaping the narrative” is the wrong concept to use in the new strategic framework. It imagines that we can take an existing narrative and gradually use messages to alter its form. But in the case of the crusader narrative this is more akin to shaping a balloon. We press in one place and the balloon expands in another place to compensate. When we let go of the spot where pressure is being applied the balloon snaps back to its original shape. This happens because, as we have argued, the communication system has taken on a great deal of inertia such that new messages are readily assimilated to the existing structure.

A better goal would be to try to disrupt the existing narrative system–to pop the balloon–so a new narrative could be formed where our messages could get some purchase. With respect to the crusader narrative, a significant disruption would be some kind of breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would demonstrate that we are no longer complicit in the long-term project of the crusades. Needless to say, that is a tough nut to crack. But such is the nature of the challenge, and this or something like it is the only realistic way of changing the narrative.

Finally, the strategic framework seems to rely heavily on the idea of mastering the means of transmitting messages. It calls for better application of the tools of marketing, better utilization of new media platforms and social networking technologies, and better coordinated communication efforts. None of these are bad ideas in themselves. But they imply that the main problem is that we are not good enough at sending messages through newly available channels. If we could only do this better we would be more successful at shaping narratives. Yet in the absence of a more fundamental change in our communication strategy it is unlikely to do much good. Indeed it could make things worse if we more efficiently deliver messages that can be assimilated to the crusader narrative.

The narrative gap in the new stragegic framework lies in its assumptions that the problems are inaccurate information, lack of  shaping efforts, and inadequate use of media channels. In reailty the problems are that existing facts resonate better in the target audience with a crusader narrative than the alternatives we are offering, that the communication system is locked in a pattern of iterpretation that favors the extremists, and that just doing a better job of sending messages will do nothing to change things.

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In the war of ideas for the “hearts and minds” of the Muslim world, cultural diplomacy can go a long way. The US government may not be very popular abroad, but our cultural products certainly are. Many Muslims hate our policies, but they still love our movies, listen to our pop music, and cheer for our athletes. Extremists, on the other hand, actively try to disseminate monolithic images of “the other” to their audiences. Al-Qaeda loves to reduce Americans to the archetypal “Crusader” with a singular malevolent purpose. Our films, music, arts, and athletes, can profoundly disrupt and subvert such efforts.

In the age of twenty-four hour news networks, websites, blogs and YouTube, there is no shortage of information out there for inquiring minds to consume. To command a sizable audience amidst such a saturated media landscape (mediascape), many outlets have resorted to promoting outrageous opinions and personalities to garner public attention (i.e. ratings and readers). Thus, the outrageous polarized voices of inflammatory right-wing pundits and snarky left-wing cynics have become a daily fixture of our mediascape and the “old school” journalism of Walter Cronkite has been relegated to the News Hour on PBS.

Even a casual glance through the headlines of the major news sites and magazine stands reveals a disturbing preoccupation with stories about people with names like “Snookie” or “J-Lo.”  Judging by these sorts of headlines, one might not think there’s much going on in the world. But according to UNICEF, some 16,000 children die every day from hunger-related causes (1 every 6 seconds). The world spends well over $1 trillion dollars each year on military expenditures.  Every twenty minutes another species goes extinct. And despite the recent attention, people were suffering and struggling in Haiti long before the devastating earthquake on January 12, 2010. So why is the vapid cast of “Jersey Shore” still getting front page attention when the world has no shortage of urgent and horrific matters to report?

People love (even worship) celebrities.

This is nothing new, of course. Some celebrities have even used their cultural deification for good in the world and lent their names and images to important causes. Some of them might adopt causes for publicity or to fix a sullied public image (e.g. Paris Hilton), but I like to believe that most do it out of real compassion for their fellow human beings and the environment they live in. I guess I have “faith” in a few of these “gods.”

Last month, I was part of a planning committee for a grant proposal that would create a major conference on our campus featuring keynote speakers from academia, government, journalism, and the wild world of celebrity-activism. The core idea behind the conference was making specialized academic expertise about Islam accessible to public policymakers and the public-at-large. The inclusion of a celebrity-activist in our proposal was a response to the public’s preoccupation with celebrity-culture and how “ivory tower” intellectuals struggle to get their ideas and perspectives out into the crowded mediascape. After all, how many Americans would even know where Darfur is located if George Clooney hadn’t traveled to see Sudanese refugees with a film crew following him? The “bread and circuses” of the first world are too distracting for most people.

Communicating to a large public audience seems to require the aid of a celebrity spokesperson, ideally one with some credentials and intellectual clout who cannot simply be dismissed for adopting a “pet project.” A lot of NGOs and charities understand this concept. So why doesn’t our government?

No matter how hard they try to be “stars,” congressmen, senators, governors, and other politicians, are not “real” celebrities – although some admittedly exist in both worlds (e.g. Schwarzenegger, Franken, Reagan). President Obama certainly has celebrity status. But if the United States is truly interested in reaching out to the everyday people of the Muslim world and subverting the “clash of civilizations” rhetoric of Bin Laden, Zawahiri, and Awlaki, we need to bring out the big guns of celebrity firepower through cultural diplomacy.

Even people who hate the U.S. government and its policies love American cultural products, including our movies, music, and athletes. It’s easy for Bin Laden to talk about waging holy war on the land of the “Crusaders” George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, but it’s another thing to convince a kid in Cairo or Riyadh to wage jihad on Leonardo Dicaprio, LeBron James, Will Smith, and Johnny Depp. People in the Muslim world, many of which remain under authoritarian regimes, are understandably distrustful of governments and politicians. It’s easy for the Arab and Muslim street to dismiss the promises and claims of a Secretary of State or U.S. Ambassador reading a speech off of a teleprompter beside representatives of an unelected regime. An American movie star visiting a Muslim city with a charming smile and polite handshake would probably do a better job at disrupting the “Crusader” image constructed by al-Qaeda and its affiliates than a thousand government speeches and photo-ops. In 1971, we used table tennis or “ping-pong diplomacy” to improve U.S.-Chinese relations; what are we doing in the Muslim world today?

I propose a large-scale U.S. cultural ambassador program to university campuses and cities throughout the Muslim world. In 2007, the State Department conducted a program in China that featured Cal Ripken Jr. and organized youth baseball clinics in four cities. This was too brief to be truly effective. And as much as I love baseball, it is not a popular U.S. export to the Muslim world. So an extension of this program to a country like Syria or Jordan would likely be ill-advised. In terms of athletes, we’d be better off sending stars from the NBA – maybe the kids in Amman would enjoy seeing a dunk contest. Basketball is much easier to set-up and play than baseball – especially in crowded, impoverished and arid cities. Movie stars also need to be enlisted. American movies are everywhere. When I lived in Cairo, there were American movies on broadcast television a couple of times a week. The biggest obstacle might be convincing American movie stars to participate between awards ceremonies.

It is equally important to point out that this sort of cultural diplomacy needs to go both ways. There are a lot of people in the United States who – out of fear, ignorance, or anger – carry disturbing attitudes about Muslims that influence our public discourse and the conduct of our elected government (for the worse). These folks likely won’t listen to an informed professor down at the local university or pick up a copy of his or her over-priced academic hardcover at the bookstore, but they might show up to hear Natalie Portman talk about these issues and share her personal insights as someone who has worked and lived in the Middle East (Portman is Co-Chair of a village banking program with Queen Rania of Jordan). People might also sit down in a theater together to watch a play performed by American and Muslim actors, like the brilliant Ghassan Massoud of Syria. American audiences would undoubtedly find it hard to see the zealous jihadi of their fears in an actor creating a work of art on stage beside their fellow countrymen.

In all, the last thing America needs to do is allow U.S.-Muslim relations to be dictated by or restricted to the events on the battlefield when we are all a part of so much more than the characters imagined by both sides of the “War on Terror.”

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Yesterday, the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Judith McHale gave her first major speech outlining priorities in her new job.  My reaction to her remarks is mixed.  On the one hand there were some confusing definitions a key missing element.  On the other hand it contained some very promising themes, which on balance leave me optimistic about her tenure.

One thing that really puzzled me was a definitional exercise near the beginning of the address.  McHale said public diplomacy operates on two levels:

First, communication.  This is the air game, the radio and TV broadcasts, the websites and media outreach that seek to explain and provide context for U.S. policies and actions; and

Second, engagement, the ground game of direct people-to-people exchanges, speakers, and embassy-sponsored culture events that build personal relationships. (emphasis original)

This is an odd distinction for two reasons.  First, person-to-person engagement is just as much communication as is the “air game.”  In fact it is even more so, if we adopt a modern view that communication is not just the transmission of messages but a process of dialogue.

Second, it implies that person-to-person relationships cannot be developed through electronic media.  That may be true for mass media like radio and television, though what is said through those channels does impact the ability to establish personal relationships.  But it is surely not true for web-based interactive media like mobile messaging, web-based fora, and mobile messaging.  These can be used for engagement too, as examples later in the speech show.

I would not make so much of this were it not for the fact that it was emphasized so much in the speech.  It was flagged as a main organizing principle, with the two elements set off in boldface in the transcript (the only things that got such treatment).  This signals that it is a major conceptual distinction in the speech, that McHale sees these two aspects of public diplomacy as having different functions and calling for different strategies. On the contrary New Media are breaking down these kinds of distinctions.  And indeed in the remainder of the speech McHale seems to abandon the distinction, using communication and engagement interchangeably.

Another conceptual head-scratcher was McHale’s statement that

The national security implications of engagement have not been lost on our colleagues at the Department of Defense, which has become heavily involved in what we call public diplomacy and they call strategic communications. (emphasis mine)

That’s not exactly right.  What the DoD calls strategic communication is not just public diplomacy.  It also includes public affairs and (most importantly) information operations.  It is important to recognize this because information operations can involve deception operations–so called black propaganda.  If discovered these operations can have negative impacts on person-to-person relationship building, as can normal overt actions of military operations.  They can also cause domestic public affairs problems, as they did in the Lincoln Group scandal of  a few years back.  Speaking of public affairs, McHale did not take this opportunity to unpack apparent recent changes in that function at State.

The missing element in the speech was the emphasis that McHale’s predecessor Jim Glassman placed on communicating about the Bad Guys.  Glassman declared that–in contrast to previous Under Secretaries–he was going to make public diplomacy less about selling brand America and more about de-branding our extremist opponents.  If anything McHale’s speech moves back in the other direction, placing emphasis on winning friends and influencing people.  This is undoubtedly important, but so is capitalizing on the growing ill sentiment toward extremists in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan.  It would have been nice to have this affirmed.

All that said, there were a lot of things to like in McHale’s speech, and for me they outweigh the shortcomings just discussed.  She echoed a large number of themes we here at CSC have been advocating in recent years.  Among them:

• “We need to listen more and lecture less.  We have to learn how people listen to us, how are words and deeds are actually heard and seen.”  Hooray!  Our Under Secretary thinks of communication as dialogue, not transmission.
• “We need to explain our position and policies upfront and not after the fact when opinions have already been formed.”  This is further evidence of a move away from spin-meistering and toward dialogue.
• Throughout the speech McHale emphasized the importance of communicating in the languages of our PD audiences.  As anyone who has traveled abroad knows, speaking someone else’s language can open doors,  even it’s just a few words pronounced improperly.  Moving to fluent foreign language engagement in PD will have important benefits.
• She repeatedly emphasized the importance of New Media in public diplomacy efforts.  Though just using different channels will not change things, using them properly and in combination with the dialogic approach McHale is advocating is critical.
• She also discussed the importance of creating a culture of risk-taking and innovation.  This is of the utmost importance because public diplomacy operates on a rugged landscape.

Finally, for my money the most important thing McHale said in her speech is this:

At the top of my list is integrating public diplomacy into the policy process at every level, from formulation and implementation.  Our policy decisions must be informed upfront by sound research and perspectives on possible impacts.

Amen!  What a great thing to have on the top of the list.  If McHale can really accomplish this goal, it alone will be enough to secure her legacy (in my humble opinion).  She will have solved the number one problem of U.S. public diplomacy in this decade, that it has been treated as an after-the-fact effort to put lipstick on pigs.  Given institutional inertia that will work against this change, she has her work cut out for her.

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Last week, while I was recovering from a long stretch of foreign travel, GAO released its latest report on public diplomacy.  Matt thinks it is “interesting and worth reading,”  while Kim says not so much. My own view is that the report is interesting (in a disturbing way) because it clings to a failed model of strategic communication effectiveness.  Like past GAO reports, it insists that if we only apply that model more diligently, then everything will be alright.

The main conclusion of the report is that the State Department has not been paying enough attention to earlier GAO reports and that it has failed to clearly enough define its purposes/goals, assess and manage risks, measure outcomes, and coordinate activities.

GAO Campaign Style Approach

In particular it faults State for lacking country-level plans that implement best practices from the “campaign-style approach” to strategic communication.  The ideal process as diagrammed in their report is shown in the figure at right.  Among the  assumptions underlying the diagram are:

• It presumes you can define your core messages independent of the people you will be communicating with, then launch the messages at them, like so many artillery shells.
• It assumes you can target particular audiences and deliver messages narrowly to them, without those messages leaking to other audiences.
• It assumes you can pre-plan your communication efforts and that if you do a good job things will probably go more or less according to plan.
• It assumes you can unambiguously assess the results of communication efforts in a short time frame and use this information to make minor adjustments that “fine tune” your communication efforts.

However, as we have argued, repeatedly, the diagram and its assumptions are derived from an outdated model of communication, and following it better will only make matters worse.  Communication is not a process of transmission of messages but of dialogue with an audience.  Modern media systems make exclusively targeting narrow audiences difficult or impossible.  Communication systems are so complex that planning is of limited use.  You can’t straightforwardly assess results and tweak your tactics, as if you were a strategic communication version of a forward artillery spotter.

The fourth section of the report says our problem is that U.S. strategic communication efforts are not coordinated enough.  This is a theme that has been repeated ad nauseum in reports over the last eight or nine years, and was the subject of multiple abortive attempts by the Bush administration to create coordinating offices at the executive level.

There is little doubt that presenting incoherent and contradictory messages is a bad idea. But on the other hand having everyone hammering on a few talking points in a “campaign style” effort is a bad idea too, and this is what I think the GAO has in mind.  The problem with that approach is that it presumes you already have the right messages and you can predict how your audience is going to react.  In other words, it presumes a simple strategic communication landscape.

In reality, the United States operates on a rugged landscape where things extremely complex and unpredictable.  In that situation we a more evolutionary approach, based on variation, selection, and retention.  Trying too hard to coordinate things only works against that goal by inhibiting variation.

The GAO also faults the State Department for not engaging the private sector more effectively.  This is another recurring theme in their reports (as they themselves note).  The presumption is that we have the best marketing and advertising minds in the world, and if we can only get them involved in public diplomacy things will improve.

But there is reason to question whether the knowledge of our admittedly first-rate marketing and advertising minds maps straightforwardly to public diplomacy.  Charlotte Beers was regarded as one of the brightest stars in the advertising business, but failed in applying her ideas to public diplomacy.  Karen Hughes made use of Disney’s production savvy in developing a video to be shown in embassies, customs control points, etc., but it’s not clear this had any impact on views of the U.S.  While the private sector has ideas to contribute, it is possible to take the analogy between business and public diplomacy too far.

There are some things to agree with in the report:  State is underfunded and understaffed with respect to its responsibilities, security concerns at its outposts has limited engagement with foreign publics, and efforts have begun to engage new media.  But on the whole, if you took the dates and references to the Obama admininstration out of this report, it would be pretty hard to distinguish from those from 2003 and 2005.

This leads me to suggest that maybe the GAO should reconsider its own communication strategy in preparing these reports.  The recommendations they are making are not sticking; they document this themselves.  Maybe this is because they are not really offering anything fresh or compelling in terms of perspective and recommendations.

The GAO would have more interesting things to say if they abandoned the old “command and control” framework for criticism that they have been applying all these years, and made recommendations that are better suited to the complex systems in which public diplomacy actually operates.

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Judith McHale was sworn-in yesterday as Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs.  Accordingly the Countup Clock that has graced these pages for the last several weeks has been retired.

The final reading was 129 days between President Obama’s inauguration and swearing in the new PD Chief.  As others have noted as well, that’s not much haste relative to the importance of the job, and it does not bode well for the priority that the Obama administration plans to give public diplomacy…at least via State.  As Alvin Snyder points out,  there may be a move afoot to duplicate DoS PD functions in the White House staff.  That would be a bad idea as it would create more complex interdependencies between those responsible for PD, making the strategic communication landscape even more rugged.

Matt says we now need a clock for “when the deeply problematic bureaucratic and functional division between public affairs and public diplomacy within the Under Secretary’s office will be eliminated.”  I would be happy to adapt the old one for that purpose, but I’m not completely sure when we would set the start date, nor what the exit condition would be.  So I think I’ll let Matt handle that one.

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I just ran across this “Washington whisper” item in USNWR:

President Obama has nominated longtime national security expert Philip J. “P. J.” Crowley as assistant secretary of state for public affairs, a move that suggests that the department’s public diplomacy with foreign nations will be stepped up. Crowley, currently a senior fellow and director of homeland security at the Center for American Progress, is expected to play more of a background role, explaining U.S. diplomatic moves to the foreign media and nations rather than handling the daily briefings. He is widely respected in the press and among military and diplomatic officials for his past government service and his steady advocacy while at the progressive think tank. During the Clinton administration, he was the spokesman for the National Security Council and a Defense Department communicator. He is a retired Air Force colonel who has also worked with NATO. If he is confirmed, as expected, it will help Secretary Hillary Clinton build on her public diplomacy program, say State Department officials. As one source put it, the goal is to “narrow the perception gap between what we say and what we do.

This is confusing.  I know definitions in this domain are kind of fuzzy, but I always thought public affairs was targeted primarily at domestic audiences.

To wit, publicdiplomacy.org says that public diplomacy

seeks to promote the national interest of the United States through understanding, informing and influencing foreign audiences.

Public affairs, on the other hand:

seeks to foster understanding of these goals through dialogue with individual citizens and other groups and institutions, and domestic and international media. However, the thrust of public affairs is to inform the domestic audience.

(my emphasis in both quotes).

Yet the announcement above says Crowley will be “explaining U.S. diplomatic moves to the foreign media and nations” and that he is going to “help Secretary Hillary Clinton build on her public diplomacy program.”

So is this a PA post or a PD post?  If Crowley will be doing PD, what will McHale be doing?  And who will be doing PA?

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Today the White House announced its intent to nominate Judith McHale as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs (h/t Matt).

Obviously the Obama administration couldn’t withstand the unrelenting pressure of the Count-Up Clock.  I can only imagine the meetings that must have taken place over the weekend.  Had I known it would be so effective, I would have put it up months ago.

Yet we’re not quite ready to take it down.  There is still a confirmation process to follow, so The Clock will come down once that process is complete.

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Matt’s latest post reminded me that we are still awaiting the appointment of a new Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Perhaps the problem is that the task of filling the PD post has simply fallen off the radar screen.  I mean, we all know how things can slip between the cracks when busy people get busy, right?

As our own modest effort to help keep the process moving, we here at COMOPS Journal have established he Official Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy Count-up Clock.  It appears on the left sidebar for your viewing enjoyment.

Using the very latest in Internet-based digital computer technology, the clock automatically displays the number of days since Obama’s inauguration that the PD post has gone unfilled.  Now nobody will be able to say they lost track of how long it’s been.

Each passing day will increment the count, like a burgeoning Badge of Shame. We figure that at some point the pressure created by the Clock will become unbearable and the people in Washington will have no alternative but to act.  We don’t enjoy having to inflict punishment like this, so we hope we can take down the clock very soon.

As Matt pointed out, President Obama and Secretary Clinton have been doing a fine job themselves on the public diplomacy front so far.  The worry is that while they are doing the big things, the little things are going undone.

Since the Obama administration isn’t listening to me or Matt or any number of other bloggers who want to see this position filled,  maybe they will listen to management and leadership guru Warren Bennis. In an interview with the Harvard Management Update entitled “Leaders: Don’t Go It Alone,” he talked about the pitfalls of a failure by CEOs to delegate.

One problem is that if you’re not delegating, your’re not exploiting important synergies in your organization.  Says Bennis:

[I]f you’re not delegating, you’re not doing your job. …  By definition, an organization is a system of collaboration and interdependence. The work of leading an organization is to fit together the organization’s independent pieces so they create the most value—it’s to increase the sum of the parts.

And the other problem, and one emphasized by Matt, is that failure to delegate has a negative impact of the morale of lower level employees:

[A] failure to delegate appropriately drives down motivation and morale. Competent, creative, hardworking people want their talents and effort recognized. I was reminded of this rather poignantly in a recent conversation with a friend of mine. She is an extraordinarily gifted person who chose to take early retirement from an organization where she’d worked 30 years because she said she never felt that her full talents were utilized.

Washington, you have been served.  It’s time to delegate and fill the position of  PD Chief.  Don’t make us escalate by creating a nag-bot to send you daily e-mail reminders.

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Earlier this week John Brown posted a blog questioning those of us who have expressed concern about slow movement on filling the position of Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Department. Maybe this go-slow approach is not such a bad thing, he says.

I have great respect for John and his opinions, but in this case I find his position wanting.  If I understand it correctly, his position in a nutshell is this: Bush era PD was so misguided and so ruined our international reputation that it would be unwise to quickly press forward with some kind of big new initiative at this time.  Thus, getting a new Under Secretary in place may not be such an urgent matter.

John is right that we should be careful about aligning messaging efforts with our power to influence.  Credibility is key factor in ability to persuade, and the Pew surveys show our credibility at a low ebb as of the end of 2008.  This is one reason I found a lot to like (more than John found, I surmise) in Jim Glassman’s approach of de-emphasizing the marketing/branding/PR efforts of his predecessors and emphasizing support to other, more credible, non-USG messengers.

But that general agreement aside, there are three reasons I disagree with John’s position.  First of all: That was then, this is now.  As we argued in a widely-read white paper, part of the problem in the recent past was that the strategic communication system (the one encompassing the USG and its foreign audiences) became locked in a pattern where virtually anything we said was interpreted negatively.  What we needed in that situation was a game-changer to shock the system out of its inertia.

I believe the election of President Obama was that game-changer, and based on John’s post I assume he agrees.  The question is whether the disruption will last long enough that we can afford the go-slow approach to new PD initiatives he advocates.  One of the chief features of complex systems is their unpredictability.  The stimulus package wrangling has shown us how rapidly windows of opportunity can begin to close.  So my bias is to strike while we think the iron is hot, or at least to not deliberately sit around allowing it to cool.

Second, there are reasons other than rushing into new message campaigns to have an Under Secretary in place.  For years critics (including those on the Defense Sciences Board) have bemoaned the uncertain division of labor and lack of coordination between State and Defense on strategic communication (including public diplomacy).  Now we have a sympathetic Secretary of Defense, who has given his employees plugs and sent them in search of sockets at State.  Yet there are none to be found because three weeks into the Obama administration there is still no electrician to install them.  Matt Armstrong worries (rightly, in my view) that unless this happens soon the socket-seekers will go home and the Pentagon will become the defacto coordinating entity for U.S. global engagement.

A final shortcoming of John’s position is that it assumes that the only important audiences are the external ones. But there are a lot of people–observers named in John’s post and people like them, career employees at State, interested parties in the private sector, and so on–who agree that PD is critical and think is has been poorly executed in the past.  We are all looking for signs that things are going to change and that PD is going to get the priority it deserves.  Unfortunately, all the signs are pointing in the opposite direction.  So even putting the programmatic and organizational matters aside, there is an important issue of symbolic leadership here.

To sum up, John is right to be cautious about hastily deploying new messaging campaigns.  But I would balance that caution against opportunity costs.  There is risk in taking too casual a pace and allowing the disruption caused by the election of Obama to fade.  There is a lot of urgent managerial-organizational work to be done, regardless of campaigns that might or might not be launched.   And there are also important internal audiences that have been expecting change.  Not only are they not seeing change, they’re not seeing anything.

These are the reasons I believe we can’t afford to go slow in getting a good Under Secretary in place.  On the contrary, it should be a high priority at this time.

Update February 13 9:30 MST

Here is a response from John Brown (who had trouble posting it as a comment):

Steve, Thank you for your thoughtful piece. All your points are well taken — but I find that more “new PD initiatives” are not necessarily the answer to dealing with our urgent overseas problems. Nor do we need an Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs who will “hype” our PD programs a la Karen Hughes or James Glassman in order to demonstrate to the White House or domestic audiences that “we’re doing something about those that hate us.” Rather, as I try to suggest in my piece, what is most important is for the new administration to have a public diplomacy perspective when framing policy. In other words, it should take  foreign public opinion seriously – which the previous administration essentially failed to do, despite its “new PD initiatives.”

PS – If there is one term I hope the new team in Washington will abandon (together with the “war on terror,” “the war of ideas” and “homeland”) is “new initiative.” Ever heard of an “old initiative”?

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