With this process in place we might never have seen the Edsel, New Coke, the Iraq War, Apple Watch, Brexit, and any of thousands of misadventures.
A recent front page article in the New York Times headlined the news that 51 senior State Department officials signed a memo of dissent complaining that current policies to contain the Syrian civil war were not working. Most readers of the piece came away with the impression of a State Department in disarray: an agency riddled with complaints that had spilled into the open. But that was not quite the story. From at least one perspective, the Times buried the real lede.
It turns out that memos of dissent are encouraged by the State Department. A “Dissent Channel” is a long-established tradition of allowing members of the agency to voice concerns about American policy, which can be expressed without career recriminations. The idea started by Secretary of State William Rogers in the Vietnam era was to feed the policy review process with more input from staff out in the field.
Interestingly, though the memo was leaked, the Obama administration didn’t publicly react as if anything dysfunctional had happened. The concerns were noted, but the signers were not condemned or disciplined. There would be no Nixonian threats of tax audits or shortened careers.
We’ve since learned that other agencies, including the CIA, have something similar: teams whose jobs it is to present counter-arguments to planned courses of action.
Of course the press loves to report on bureaucracies at war with themselves. But an alternative narrative is equally plausible and definitively preferable. As former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said in a famous decent on a First Amendment case: “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” A marketplace of competing ideas is a noble thing, and can be adapted to almost any organization. Well articulated dissents should have the effect of saving a nation or an organization from an action that will fail.
Done in the right spirit, a formal channel for registering another view on a momentous course of action can be a good thing.
Decision-makers in both public and private organizations ought to welcome substantive challenges to planned policies. Done in the right spirit, a formal channel for registering another view on a momentous course of action can be a good thing. Decision-makers can quickly learn just how good or how vulnerable a planned course of action really is. Think of this as the old question box converted into a more formal mechanism for review of a pending policy.
Of course all sides have to be intellectually secure in their reasons. It has to be understood that the subject under discussion is not a person, but an idea. This can be a major hurdle if individuals or units have redefined approval of a proposed action as a test of their power or legitimacy.
If this problem of personalization can be avoided a lot of can be gained. With this dissent mechanism in place we might have never seen the Edsel, “New” Coke, the Iraq War, the Apple Watch, Brexit, and any of thousands of similar misadventures.
When did burning down the house become the preferred solution for sorting out its various problems?
In the best of times persuading someone to do or believe something is difficult. And these are definitely not the best of times. One could be forgiven for assuming that self-destruction is not in our nature: that it doesn’t need to be proved or argued. But watch enough Youtube videos of people engaging in behaviors that can only end badly, or Britons willingly separating their nation from its European neighbors, or voters who seem comfortable channeling their free-floating anger into a political movement, and you begin to wonder. When did burning down the house become the preferred solution for sorting out its various problems?
A common theme on this site is that we are distracted and over-committed. It’s harder to be thoughtful when time and fatigue overtake solid values like risk avoidance and forbearance. The exasperation we all feel at times when incrementalism and caution seem too tepid sets us up to accept non-incremental change, even if adopting it means trashing rational impulses like fact-finding and circumspection. Both are tools for informed change that can seem too slow to deal with the wounds of class, ethnic resentments, or the sloppy machinery of self-government. They are easily vanquished by the incendiary language of a demagogue.
If we are lucky, this phase of seeking big change with little understanding is only one moment in a political cycle that will change. That’s the conventional wisdom. But a better case can be made that we are steadily moving toward a new kind of American politics where many in Congress and those seeking the presidency are motivated more by expressive opportunities than the actual work of governance. In the parlance of older members of the Senate, these folks are “show horses” rather than “work horses.” Even shutting down the government–a draconian step taken by Ted Cruz in 2013 to deny a vote for the Affordable Care Act–was done with more defiance than shame. Governing through compromise and cooperation seems to not be in their nature, leading to outcomes where the spotlight on the successful conciliators would have to be shared. By contrast, demagogues inclined to use bumper-sticker solutions that resonate with an angry electorate may know that their methods are at odds with the deliberative nature of their work, but they also know that throwing rhetorical grenades will mean that they can have the spotlight to themselves.
This is a pattern that great writers on American democracy like Walter Lippmann worried about. The public, he noted, can be dangerously out of step with national needs, converting trumped up fantasies into the urge to push for too much too soon, or too little too late. Such it was with the Communist witch-hunts of the 30s and 40s, or the current fashion for deprecating diplomacy in favor of the raw application of military power.
The questions that are white-hot right now are part of the same maelstrom: Should we block entry to the U.S. based on a visitor’s religious beliefs? Will it help us in the long-run to strong-arm China, which owns so much of American debt? Should we deport the mostly hard-working undocumented families woven into the American fabric? These are blunt proposals, better written into the third acts of revenge films than ginned up to be the policy positions of a great nation.
There’s a Tom Cheney cartoon in the New Yorker of a frustrated office worker standing over his computer with his desk chair in his raised arms. He’s ready to bring it crashing down on the non-functioning device, with its innocent screen command to “Strike any key to continue.” We know the feeling, and there are times when we would give anything for the shortcut a grand unilateral gesture. But the current preference for trashing caution will fill us with regrets later.
