Strategy in the 21st Century

[Bill Moore]

An interim report that came out in FEB 2016, titled,
"Thinking the Unthinkable: A New Imperative for Leadership in the Digital Age"

http://www.thinkunthinkable.org/

“The rate of change we are going through at the moment is comparable to what happens in wartime …yet we think we are at peace. The global pace of change is overcoming the capacity of national and international institutions”
Chris Donnelly,
Director, Institute for Statecraft

This report is directed at the top levels of executive management, whether in government or business. I think they overstated some arguments, but they're still very much relevant. The authors assert that the rate of change is faster than most are prepared to concede, or respond to. They argue it is imperative we overcome our bias towards conformity if we hope to adapt to the new world that is rapidly emerging. The authors are British, so that should help explain this statement:

We heard similar concerns from someone currently at the heart of policy making: “On major foreign policy issues such as Russia and Islamic State, we are working with a set of leaders in Whitehall, in the European Union, who have no adult experience of harm affecting the homeland”. The official added: “Our leadership is strategically fatigued. I’m talking about
politicians and most of the Whitehall village. And also much of British society. The Twitterati for sure. But the world is changing. The world may bring harm to you in ways you cannot imagine and ways you cannot manage. There is a resilience deficit, a lack of understanding of the scale of emerging threat”. This makes identifying ‘unthinkables’, then taking action to prevent or pre-empt them ever more problematic and unlikely.

This seems to be a prevalent line of thinking throughout Western Europe (much less so in Eastern Europe). Wish problems away until it is no longer possible to do so. This goes back at least as far Chamberlain's refusal to see the obvious and instead of countering seek to appease Hitler. The alternative was unthinkable, or as the authors argue, even when it wasn't unthinkable it was undesirable; therefore, people tend to ignore it and hope it goes away.

When leaders are blindsided, it is often due to their biased information sources, as explained here (think about Trump defeating the Republican establish and Brexit passing, both a surprise to the so-called experts).

“[In a] world where more and more people are connecting … [where there is] greater fragmentation, but you’re also seeing greater connectivity … leaders are not very good at actually interpreting the messages that are out there from people who are not connecting through formal institutional mechanisms”, one former senior international official admitted. But this is the new reality. “Technology and the new politics are changing the relationship between leaders and those they lead”, said Sir John Sawers, former head of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, in his first speech since leaving
Vauxhall Cross.

How this disrupts legacy forms of governance:

Governments will have to address super-complex issues such as mass
migration, climate change, population increase, rising urbanisation, ageing and the attendant huge resource questions. This is at a time when its legitimacy is being publically challenged.

Later in the report the authors state the ministers in Whitehall have relied on, and gotten away with, the tactics of delay and prevarication because they have worked. Of course those ministers have good company in the U.S. Congress and other countries.

Part 2 follows: