Bad Management Theory Leads to Bad National Security Outcomes

Earlier today, at the third Legal Roundtable on National Security Reform, I made the following comments:

Bad Management Theory leads to Bad Management Outcomes, and the fundamental problem with the U.S. national security is its immunity from modern management theories. Three management theories that would inform discussions of intelligence reform are (1) Loosely Coupled Systems, (2) Organizational Sensemaking Processes, and (3) High Reliability Organizations.

Loosely Coupled Systems. Several people today have pointed out that it is unhealthy to construct a bigger and bigger -- more and more tightly coupled -- national security system Charles Perrow learned from his service on the Three Mile Island Commission that highly complex technologies and tightly coupled organizations can create high catastrophic potential. Washington DC is a town, though, that thrives on an outdated Napoleonic view of "great man" leadership, which creates a constant ideological push for increased centralization or what we might call supertight coupling. Gene Healy's book, The Cult of the Presidency, is a pretty strong indicator of this problem, and the iconic Sunday afternoon photo op of the nation's National Security Council proving to historians that they must have been in charge is the most recent evidence of this problem. Staw, Sandelands, and Dutton referred to this problem in 1981 as part of the threat-rigidity cycle: threat increases centralization and decreases lateral information sharing, which increases rigidity, which increases the threat. Intelligence reform must fight Washington's knee-jerk tendency toward centralization if it is going to avoid disasters such as 9/11, Iraq WMD, Katrina, Fort Hood, and Wikileaks.

Organizational Sensemaking Processes. Several people today have also called for a fundamental rethinking of what exactly it is that we are trying to accomplish with a -- let's say -- $100 billion per year intelligence budget. At an international conference in Stockholm in May 2009 on the future of the craft of intelligence, Greg Treverton and I were on the same page -- the era of secrets, data, and intelligence (in which the role of the intelligence community is to feed raw pieces of information into the White House so that the "policy-makers" can make brilliant decisions) is over. Instead, the crying need is for localized processing of complex information into high situational awareness. The "customer" is not the president anymore, but the ground-level team leader the military is starting to call the Strategic Corporal.

High Reliability Organizations. The first conference on High Reliability Organizations was held in 1987, and the fifth was held two weeks ago, here in Washington for the first time. Admiral Blair probably knows Admiral Tom Mercer, who championed the first HRO study by a group of Berkeley faculty members around the topic of aircraft carriers, air traffic control, and electrical grids. Since 1987, the research has spread to ten different HRO contexts: military, naval, aviation, petrochemical, nuclear, safety/security, space exploration, firefighting/emergency, medical, and interagency national security teams.

Jim Locher has heard me say this for four years, so I hope he'll excuse me for saying it again -- Washington needs a new Smithsonian museum to display all of the outdated management theories that live on here long after they've been replaced outside of Washington by more precise, evidence-based, and valuable newer theories. Some people in Washington might be reading What Would Google Do?, but I cannot imagine that anybody in Silicon Valley is reading a book titled What Would Washington Do?

An intelligence reform that is built on Napoleonic command-and-control bureaucratic management theory is going to lead to a replication of the current system. Unfortunately, though, the attorneys who will write intelligence reform are decoupled from the management theorists who understand new concepts. There is no congressional funding to get Capitol Hill up to speed on even the most basic management theory concepts.

The end result of all of this, then, is likely to be a new chapter in Jared Diamond's book Collapse -- in which Diamond tells the story of five great societies which failed because they were unable to change their basic assumptions about how the world worked. Our irrational allegiance to outdated management theories is going to lead us to an increasingly ineffective, inefficient, and unreliable national security system -- unless we fight to make sure that intelligence reform includes new management theories such as loosely coupled systems, organizational sensemaking processes, and high reliability organizations.