A Roadmap to Modernize Foreign Policy
Special thanks to Thomas Scherer for helping craft some of this language.
The goal of this newsletter is to help build an intellectual foundation for a more effective culture of foreign policy decision-making — a culture of expertise. No single intervention is sufficient to change the culture of policymaking. A holistic approach is necessary to think about experience and evidence at every stage of the policymaking process.
To facilitate and organize this work, I developed a five-stage model of the policy process. This simplified model is useful because it helps me think of the different kinds of opportunities and challenges at each stage of the process:
1. Information Collection
Information is nearly inseparable from the idea of expertise in foreign policy. It is the foundation upon which expertise is built.
Policymakers are bombarded with vast amounts of information every day — intelligence reports, cables from the field, policy memos, emails, news reports, books, think tank reports, congressional hearings, academic research, social media updates, and much, much more.
Today’s approach in foreign policy is to let each individual decide for themselves what to read, which information is valuable, and what to ignore. Individuals and institutions make choices every day about how to drink from this firehose. If a policymaker does not read something the day it is produced, there’s almost no chance that knowledge will be dug out of an archive (if an archive exists at all).
Too much of the most useful knowledge fails to reach officials in a timely manner. Key insights may be buried in the avalanche of irrelevant knowledge, forgotten as officials rotate positions, or rendered inaccessible due to stove piping. Knowledge is rarely organized systematically or curated for future use.
Research suggests that this status quo approach in foreign policy is flawed. The human brain is an extraordinary organ, but ad hoc approaches to information intake introduce deep biases into our worldviews. We tend to ignore new information that fails to conform to our existing views. And the more experience we gain, the stronger this bias becomes. This is a recipe for trouble.
Evidence from industry demonstrates the wide-ranging benefits of improved knowledge management practices. Research indicates that a robust KM system can reduce information search time by as much as 35 percent and raise organization-wide productivity by 20 to 25 percent. High-quality, carefully organized data is the fuel for today’s analytical tools, including artificial intelligence.
Getting information collection and knowledge management right is the vital first step upon which the rest of foreign policy expertise will be built.
2. Analysis
Next, officials analyze the information from the first stage. Analysis can comprise factual descriptions of what’s happening in the world, explanations of why past events occurred, or predictions of how one expects the world to change.
Analysis is a specialty of the intelligence community, but scholars explain that “intelligence has a limited influence on American foreign policy” because policymakers prefer to rely on their own analyses. This is problematic.
In contrast to the US intelligence community’s rigorous training and standards for good analysis (e.g., IC Directive 203), there is no analytical training or standards at the State Department, and no procedures for distinguishing good analysis from bad. The methods that policymakers use today to conduct and consume analysis are often ad hoc and subjective.
Without a process that promotes and rewards analysis with the strongest evidentiary basis, arriving at good analysis depends on the idiosyncrasies of those involved. This creates fertile ground for bias, misconceptions, and even deliberately manipulated worldviews.
A related issue is the deep disconnect between the practice of international relations and academic research. I cannot think of another field of public policy that features a weaker relationship between its policymakers and scholars. Could you imagine an official at the Federal Reserve suggesting economics was useless for their work? Or a public health official shunning epidemiology?
But many policymakers in foreign policy flat-out reject the value of science for their work (both its findings and its methods). I find that to be a startling perspective, likely born from unfamiliarity.
3. Decision-Making
In this third stage, decision-makers design policies and strategies to shape the international environment according to their interests. Ideally, these policies are founded on the best available analysis from the second stage.
The success of our decision-making processes should be measured as our ability to achieve our goals. Remember that I define expertise as “consistently superior performance.”
The hard work lies is designing policy interventions that will be most likely to achieve our stated objectives. Decision-making processes and cultures need to be intentionally built to contend with resource constraints, competing interests, and difficult tradeoffs.
When I’m feeling cynical, I sometimes quip that today’s foreign policy is “the art of setting ambiguous goals and always claiming success.” This approach is incompatible with the development of true expertise. Policymaking must be more than simply an expression of our values and desires (e.g. Putin must go! End the war!). Policies are little more than wishes without realistic plans for achieving results.
Whereas the military invests deeply in operations and strategic planning, and international relations grad programs teach policy analysis, I have rarely seen any of these tools used at the State Department. They are simply not part of the decision-making culture at the State Department.
Good decision-making cultures rise above the pernicious influences of bureaucratic politics. There are strong incentives in any culture to relentlessly defend your own turf, make your boss look good, and pursue new bullet points for your next promotion evaluation. Simply relying on the instincts and judgments of the most powerful actors in the system will introduce many perverse effects.
My work explores how to integrate the best available analysis into the policy process and institutionalize processes for longer-term foreign policy planning.
4. Learning & Accountability
The decision-making process doesn’t end when a policy is chosen; officials should continue to study the policy throughout implementation. Foreign policy is a process of continual adjustment and response; feedback is vital.
Clear feedback is an essential ingredient for the development of expertise. Strong organizations continually learn from successes and failures.
There are well-developed tools to build a culture of learning. In the foreign assistance world, monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems generate evidence that allows policymakers to understand the effectiveness of a policy or program from start to finish, while the business world likes to refer to key performance indicators (KPIs). The military leans heavily on after-action reports, hot-washes, and lessons-learned procedures.
This commitment to evaluation and learning has unfortunately not filtered into other realms of foreign policymaking. Many important policies fail to even outline clear standards of success, and are thus never evaluated.
Let’s be clear: Policymaking is difficult. Uncertainty is unavoidable, and one can never be sure exactly how a policy will affect events on the ground. Failure is common.
But failure is healthy if the organization is able to learn from it. On the other hand, failure is repugnant when the bureaucracy allows bureaucratic inertia to sustain a misguided approach for too long. In the absence of learning and evaluation processes, this is all too common.
Evaluation systems are also important for introducing a healthy sense of accountability into the bureaucracy. Institutional ties between the White House, Department of State, Congress, and others have grown weak and are often characterized by distrust. These divides need repair. Transparency about success and failure helps ensure that each organization is working to advance the priorities of our political leadership. Such feedback can also improve communication of the administration’s policies the American people.
5. Workforce & Organizational Change
In the final stage, learning is fed back into the workforce. New knowledge is disseminated via training, effective employees are promoted, and operating procedures are upgraded to comply with lessons of what worked.
The more closely stages four and five are connected, the more effective the organization will be. Alternatively, when workforce decisions are detached from learning and evaluation processes, the organization risks hiring or promoting officials for reasons that have nothing to do with their merit. (This is one way, for instance, an organization can end up with a severely homogenous workforce)
The foreign policy process begins and ends with our most valuable resource: the officials who power the organization every day. But the skills commonly associated with foreign policy effectiveness are highly subjective. For example, the Foreign Service promotes its officers based on a set of “promotion precepts” that include categories such as substantive knowledge and intellectual ability. These qualities are rhetorically admirable, but little attempt is made to evaluate these skills objectively.
Further, little training or feedback is offered to improve one’s substantive knowledge or intellectual abilities, which sends the message that great diplomats are naturally gifted. The resulting evaluations are largely subjective, and there is little ability to compare between officers.
Recruitment, training, promotion and organizational design practices for U.S. foreign policy is central to achieving a more effective policy. Merit-based practices which encourage and enable diverse teams can enable more effective workforces to meet today’s foreign policy challenges.
Conclusion
As you can see, each stage feeds into one another. And a weak link at any stage in the policy process can undermine the quality of every other stage.
In the coming weeks and months, my plan is to zoom in on individual components of this model policy process. In the meantime, I would love to hear from you whether you think this model is useful, or what it misses.