Conclusions: Adaptive Leadership and Power for Secure Cyberspace Operations

by Carl W. Hunt, Walter E. Natemeyer and Chuck E. Hunt

Throughout this series on Adaptive Leadership and Power for Secure Cyberspace Operations (ALP-SCO), we’ve stressed how hard leadership is. It’s time for us to admit that operating in cyberspace does nothing to make the fundamentals of leadership and management easier. In fact, successfully operating in cyberspace is one of the greatest challenges leaders (and followers) have ever faced in the history of organizations.

Leaders make the difference in any operating environment, however, and they will in cyberspace also. This concluding post on ALP-SCO both wraps up the series and offers some views on how leaders in all sectors might enhance their thinking about SCO. [1]

Last time, we began to contrast leadership in the “old days” of the information technology world with the need to accommodate system-wide complexity in approaches to leadership for today’s universe of cyberspace operations. Since we’ve emphasized the role of leadership in SCO throughout, it’s worth noting the prominence that cybersecurity author Marc Goodman places on the systemic nature of cyberspace:

In a world in which all of our critical systems and infrastructures are run by computers, it would be easy to dismiss our profound technological insecurity as just a computing problem. But we don’t just have an IT problem. Because technology is woven through the entire fabric of our modern lives, we also have a social problem, a personal problem, a financial problem, a health-care problem, a manufacturing problem, a public safety problem, a government problem, a governance problem, a transportation problem, an energy problem, a privacy problem, and a human rights problem…[2]

Technology and leadership, even though they may at times seem unrelated, must blend effectively in cyberspace to put our nation at the forefront of a future built on the dynamisms of what Kevin Kelly calls the currents and flows of innovation. [3] Here, we don’t mean technology leadership…we mean leadership in a highly technological environment that is increasingly difficult to visualize. Every item in Goodman’s list above has a common basic requirement to succeed and bring about some level of organizational visibility and transparency, however: adaptive leadership.

Getting back to Narrative 2 from last time, “SCO in Complex and Chaotic Environments,” let’s refocus on the elements of good leadership in the age of a complex environment like cyberspace. The two critical components we narrowed in on to succeed as adaptive leaders today are the ability to orient to the realities of the environment and match leadership and power styles to both the environment and to the readiness of the followers. It is the mismatch of leadership and power to the readiness levels of followers and to the environment that leaders must seek to avoid.

Since we’ve talked extensively about OODA and orientation to the operating domains and environment of cyberspace, we refer you to the detailed discussions (here and here). Also, the last post discussed the process of orienting to complex and chaotic environments, so we won’t repeat that in this post, either.

Instead, we’ll reemphasize the application of OODA and Orientation in order to avoid mismatch and operate more securely in cyberspace. And, since ALP can help even in the increasingly rare non-cyberspace environment, it’s like getting a twofer: adaptive leadership and power works in any management setting.

A significant element of adaptive leadership is anticipation of the future requirements and risks. We could easily argue that OODA was in fact designed to make anticipation in complex environments possible. [4] OODA, particularly Orientation, is indeed at the heart of ALP-SCO. Anticipation is equally at the heart of adaptive leadership, as described next.

Coauthor Carl Hunt offers an example of the effective operational level use of OODA and adaptation he experienced as a newly minted Information Technology officer in the Army during Desert Shield-Desert Storm in 1991. Many have likened the leadership challenges we face in conducting secure cyberspace operations to be like war, and we agree. From Carl:

“I had just been assigned to the US Army Intelligence Threat Analysis Center (ITAC) at the Washington Navy Yard, in DC as large numbers of US forces were being deployed to the Persian Gulf in early 1991. When I arrived, I found ITAC and our national intelligence agency partners at the forefront of applying early cyberspace technologies to warfighting challenges in an effort to make national-level intelligence products available to our forces deployed there, in what we hoped would eventually be real-time intelligence support.

“War has always presented a complex operating environment, and until this point, the delivery of these kinds of intelligence products were subject to the vagaries and untimely flows of war…intelligence support didn’t always arrive in a timely manner, or didn’t fulfill the field commander’s needs.

“The intelligence products provided from the national level normally had to be either delivered by courier or produced in-theater, typically using less than the state-of-the-art capabilities than existed in facilities in the United States or permanent regional centers. Such localized intelligence products reflected only small parts of the overall context or were of inferior resolution so that they were often ineffective at telling the story the warfighter needed in remote areas. Sometimes the products simply didn’t help commanders in a rapidly changing battlefield environment.

“National intelligence organizations of the early 90s were very keen on sharing relevant information with the warfighter in as timely a manner as possible. This was also the timeframe when we all realized the critical nature of collaboration and sharing information; we actually had the beginnings of an IT infrastructure that could make this sharing a reality, but we had to orient to the new environment; interestingly, there was a lot of talk about John Boyd and his OODA Loop in those days! Fortunately, we also had the roots of what I would call an adaptive and anticipatory leadership approach to serve remotely stationed US forces.

“Unfortunately, on the other hand, it was only the beginnings of the needed IT infrastructure, and it was hard to find “experts” who were familiar enough with the new world of “cyberspace” to adapt old processes and policies (or create new ones) in ways that would accommodate the demands for secure delivery of “real-time” intelligence. However, this was the American military, an organization that appreciated why and how to change to the demands of war, and we relatively quickly coevolved processes and technologies to adjust to these new demands. We helped warfighters win in the Gulf, with what became direct support from DC.

“Adaptive leadership demands that we find innovative ways to coevolve processes such as leadership styles, with technology in order to stay inside an adversary’s own OODA Loop. We began to provide intelligence products in real-time or even anticipated the needs of combat commanders and staged them so they could pull them as needed. In other words, anticipatory/adaptive leadership allowed the US to stay well within the adversary’s OODA Loop and decide and act during this first Gulf War far more quickly than they could before. This contributed significantly to a quick and decisive combat outcome, as well as a low-casualty conflict.”[5]

Such adaptive/anticipatory leadership approaches are precisely what we need to cope with the demands of the complex nature of operating securely in cyberspace today.

If there are any historical lessons that leaders can immediately follow to start implementing ALP-SCO today, they will likely be found in the successful prosecution of modern conflicts like Desert Storm and the follow-on military operations in the Gulf. The essential principles of ALP-SCO worked in the context of war because leaders understood the gravity of the situation and environment and realized the old ways of “attrition warfare” would result in many more casualties.

What Can You Do, Leader in Cyberspace?

Today, we are fighting the battle for cyberspace like attrition warfare, except our friendly forces of businesses, governments and academic institutions are the only ones really suffering attrition. Individual organizations cannot fight this battle alone, and we will all need to collaborate with each other and leverage the forces that governments at every level must refine and deploy in law enforcement and other forms of interagency and cross-organizational operations.

Leaders at all levels can transform the ways in which we interact with adversaries. Leaders can change the nature of the conflict through just a few basic principles derived from the topics we’ve presented in this series. It may not be all that easy to change, but nobody said leadership was easy!

For reference, here is an updated version of the initial model we showed in the first post in this series depicting the major working parts of ALP-SCO:

Here’s what we can all start doing now as leaders in the pursuit of secure cyberspace operations, using ALP-SCO as a model:

1. Understand and orient to the environment of cyberspace. OODA is all about orientation in the support of decision and action.
2. Apply the orientation and understanding of the environment through adaptive employment of leadership styles…avoid mismatching the leadership style to what followers’ readiness and the environment demand.
3. Back up the use of the right match of leadership style with the right power base that complements the follower’s needs and situation. Match style and power base to the environment.
4. Anticipate the adversary and align prepared responses based on good cyber intelligence. Collaborate and cooperate both within and across partner organizations. [6]
5. After a leader has succeeded in the first four principles, then look to technology as an augmentation and set of tools for enhancing secure operations. Leadership trumps technology, but in this day and age benefits greatly from effective implementations of technology.
6. Care about what you do as a leader, take care of your followers and organization, and help make cyberspace secure for all of us.

Yes, leadership is hard, particularly in cyberspace. But, this is the United States of America. We can “fight and win” as the military mantra goes. We can be good leaders and ultimately secure cyberspace for all operations, including commercial, academic and government. ALP-SCO can make that difference.

Be an adaptive leader, especially in cyberspace.

Originally posted on 9/26/2016.

[1] Readers may note that we have chosen not to label SCO as cybersecurity throughout this series. Cybersecurity has been associated with the IT gurus for too long and removed from the visibility of the CEO, COO and CFO and rest of the C-Suite team. The identification of cybersecurity as one function of SCO is more accurate and better weights the responsibilities that every leader in the organization has for protecting critical assets.

[2] Goodman, M., Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015. Kindle Edition, (Kindle Locations 8468-8473).

[3] Kelly, K. The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future (Kindle Edition). Penguin Publishing Group, 2016.

[4] This makes adaptation and anticipation key features of another property of effective leadership we’ve talked about throughout the series: risk management.

[5] While there are no details here about what we did specifically or how we accomplished it during this conflict, the experimental processes and leadership approaches we implemented paid off very well, and set the stage for how networked collaborative intelligence is done today. Much can be said about the remarkable contributions of those at the strategic, operational and tactical levels of intelligence and what they accomplished in the early 90s and since.

[6] See: How To Stay One Step Ahead Of Cybersecurity Threats, Sep 22, 2016, for a 7-point list of things to do to practice Anticipatory and Adaptive Leadership. The list is composed of items that are leader responsibilities such as follower and peer training, senior-level engagement, collaboration with other organizations and investments into AI and future holistic technologies that go beyond Defense alone.

Contrasting the “Before and After” of Leading in the Information Age

by Carl W. Hunt, Walter E. Natemeyer and Chuck E. Hunt

Leadership in cyberspace is hard work and leaders need every edge they can get to succeed in the Information Age. In the past five posts, we’ve presented the major components of a system for adaptive leadership and power that can synergize to produce a better likelihood of organizational success in cyberspace. Interacting and working together, these leadership components produce a greater effect for secure cyberspace operations (SCO) than any technology available to us today, as well as minimizing the threats that cyberspace offers.

Moreover, combined effectively with technology, adaptive leadership and power (ALP) offers organizations even better opportunities for success. ALP, application of good cyber intelligence and risk management, paired with increasingly good technology, will act in concert to make secure cyberspace operations feasible and profitable. [1]

As Raymond Kelley, New York City Police Department’s longest serving Commissioner recently pointed out “…cyber is interwoven into everything that we do, so if you’re hit by a terrorist attack or natural disaster, cyber is going to play a role in some way, shape or form…(and) if it doesn’t come from the top, chances are (cybersecurity is) not going to be adopted or certainly not going to be interwoven.” [2] Only leaders and adaptive leadership can make ALP-SCO happen as an integral part of secure organizational operations.

Before we wrap up this series on ALP-SCO with a review and conclusions, we want to offer a couple of contrasting example vignettes, or narratives to show the differences in operations before the pervasiveness of cyberspace and what we face as leaders in 2016 and beyond. Even today, too many leaders still apply (or misapply) industrial age leadership to information age challenges and opportunities.

Mismatch of style and process is an area of emphasis for ALP-SCO. We want to demonstrate how the major components of the ALP-SCO model converge to help avoid or at least mitigate mismatch. We want to narratively demonstrate what we hypothesize will be measurable improvements brought on by more effective and secure operations in cyberspace.

In the first narrative, we’ll describe “the good old days” of operating in the world before we started connecting everyone to each other and everything else that could be connected. This is the world of Simple and Complicated environments that we described previously, and to which earlier forms of leadership and management principles applied adequately.

The second narrative will be split across this post and the final, concluding post to cement what we mean by operating in Complex and Chaotic environments like those presented in today’s manifestations of cyberspace. We intend to show how leaders may still rely on good old fashioned leadership approaches to adjust to new challenges and situations that cyberspace introduces, but update their styles and processes through more adaptive forms of leadership and power. In other words, we want to help leaders avoid mismatching their leadership approaches to the challenges their followers and organizations face in cyberspace.

Narrative 1: SCO in Simple and Complicated Environments

Remember the days when “all employees really needed” was to make sure their firewall and antivirus software were up to date and they changed their passwords every few months or so (if indeed they used passwords)? That was a time of simple network environments. Cyberspace was a reality but few were aware of it as an operating environment.

The pioneering “IT staff” had the lion’s share of the responsibility for reliable and safe network access and they only reported to the C-Suite when they had a problem or were asked for budget input. [3] The operational bosses concentrated on the bottom line and taking care of customers (or the government and academic equivalents). There was nothing more important than staying competitive, establishing new markets and making more money.

Yes, those were the days, weren’t they? We upgraded our PCs and network components based on an IT budget and life cycle that was simply one, sometimes minor, line item in the organizational budget. Depending on the size of the organization’s network, it could also be a complicated environment because it was tougher on the IT department to make sure all those software updates and faster printers were implemented in a timely manner. Information flows were relatively transparent.

During those “halcyon days” of early intranetworks and simple office automation, leaders focused on the productivity gains that fax machines, teleconferences and face-to-face meetings offered; email was only a toy to share jokes around the office. Disruptions to business processes based on network outages were few or had minor effects, and the work-arounds were well tested because they were the standard prior to the rise of the early PCs and networks.

Leaders oriented to the early cyberspace environments in much the same way they did before IT became the common and pervasive operating environment of organizations. Connections were clear to see, typically manifested in org charts and telephone directories.

As we wrote in “A Walk-Through for Applying Leadership Orientation Domains,” effective leaders could visualize these connections using tools that were available to them for decades before. Causes and effects were fairly observable and the “remedies” for low follower readiness and motivation were tested by time. Risk Management techniques were similar to what they had been for many years, consisting of standardized training and operating procedures, rarely changing organizational missions, and laws and regulations that reflected still-current industrial age conditions.

Dare we say Risk Management was easy or at least straightforward before the rise of the Information Age and the massive connectivity of cyberspace?

In the early days of office automation and the beginnings of the Internet (the interconnecting roots of cyberspace), leaders were already beginning to question the wisdom of standardized industrial processes, however. Frederick Taylor (Scientific Management), Fritz Roethlisberger (Hawthorne Experiments) and the direct application of military leadership principles to civilian organizations probably sounded great when they were initially introduced to leaders and managers (perhaps based on Machiavelli or Clausewitz). [4]

But, as followers understood through a newly connective mass media what was happening outside their own organizations and behaved in a less “scientific” manner (e.g., predictable), things were changing. Leaders and managers also began to question the scalability of the original “scientific leadership” principles in an increasingly connected and complex world. Looking to the past for leadership inspiration wasn’t working as well as before the rise of cyberspace…a different world was descending upon all of us.

Leaders intuitively knew there were more and more mismatches of style and process. Enlightened leaders found they needed to reorient themselves to the realities of a changing, more connected operating environment.

Fortunately, this was about the time John Boyd introduced new thinking in his OODA Loop model, and leaders could begin to look at innovative ways to consider the rise of cyberspace as an organizational operating environment and orient to the challenges it presented. As we’ve seen, Boyd’s work was starting to influence leadership thinking in the connected age, but leaders needed still more. Hence, our introduction of Adaptive Leadership and Power for Secure Cyberspace Operations.

Figure 1 reviews the basic elements of Leadership Orientation Domains, Adaptive Leadership and Power characteristics and OODA from earlier discussions.

Figure 1: Basic Elements of ALP

 

Narrative 2: SCO in Complex and Chaotic Environments

Situational Leadership, using OODA to orient to operating domains and even understanding and leveraging power and influence in cyberspace are useful concepts to be sure. But if used independently of each other mismatches and reduced leadership effects are still a danger. Failure to allow these components to synergize ensures that leaders will find it harder to orient to the challenges of the very complex and even chaotic world cyberspace imposes on the organization that must work within it.

When it comes to leaders and followers orienting to cyberspace as the predominant operating environment for business, government and academia, it’s worth heeding the words of Kevin Kelly, subject of one of our blog posts last year: “No matter how long you have been using a tool, endless upgrades make you into a newbie—the new user often seen as clueless. In this era of ‘becoming,’ everyone becomes a newbie. Worse, we will be newbies forever. That should keep us humble.” [5]

We’ll not only be newbies, we’ll lead like newbies to followers that look to us for inspiration and motivation. That’s a failure of leadership! Leaders and managers operating in cyberspace have to do better than being overwhelmed like newbies.

Today, we are still advised to do Risk Management similar to the ways we did it before cyberspace. In reality though, only the risk management prescription terms have changed to reflect new technologies, not new approaches to leadership. [6] Risk management is a leadership responsibility and it has to be articulated in terms that reflect leadership and inspire effective followership. Poor Risk Management is a failure of leadership, also.

So, let’s apply a bit of Boyd’s OODA Loop integrating our self-understanding of heritage, culture, analysis and synthesis abilities, previous experiences and new information inputs, as Boyd wrote. Let’s say that this orientation indicates that we are operating in an environment in which cause and effect are obscured by the highly interconnected nature of cyberspace.

Let’s further say that nothing in the current risk management approach for our organization is effective in dealing with attacks on our networks, and we conclude that we are indeed operating in a complex environment. As leaders, we come to realize we are mismatching leadership style to follower readiness and the organizational environment.

Half of the battle is won as we reach these conclusions: we are at least oriented to the environment we face as leaders. We now understand that simple, rules-oriented and best-practice approaches operating in such a complex environment are no longer suitable. How do we proceed? How does ALP-SCO help us?

Well, not to spoil our conclusions as we wrap up this series, we’ll use this setup to defer to next time. The next and final post in this series will address how we synergize the components of ALP-SCO to understand where we are in cyberspace, how we better operate in a more secure fashion and how we avoid mismatches of leadership style to followership readiness and organizational environment conditions.

Until next time!

Originally posted on 9-13-2016.

[1] We haven’t written a lot about the importance of open-source cyber intelligence, available to all, is to ALP-SCO. It is an important ingredient of agility and adaptation for secure cyberspace operations. Many of the sources of cyber intelligence for this blog post series are taken from Threat Brief, a daily recap of cyberspace and terrorism threats.

[2] Warren, Z., “Cybersecurity ‘Has to be Everyone’s Problem’ Says Former NYPD Police Commissioner,” LegalTech News, 8-22-2016, accessed 8-30-2016.

[3] Remember these early “IT staffers” were likely to be the ones who were early adopters of technology at home; they were the ones who bought the Radio Shack TRS-80 or Commodore VIC-20 computers to fool around with. These folks at least had learned enough computer lingo to tell the difference between a RS-232 serial port and a DB-25 parallel port.

[4] For deeper insights on these early leadership and management concepts, see Natemeyer, W., and Hersey, P., Classics of Organizational Behavior, Waveland Press, IL, 2011.

[5] Kelly, K. The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future (Kindle). Penguin Publishing Group, 2016, Kindle Edition locations 178-180.

[6] Caspi, G., The H Factor – Why you should be building “human firewalls”. “Cybersecurity risk management procedures can include providing employees with a VPN to avoid the risk of them using public Wi-Fi when they work outside of the office; prohibiting the use of personal social media channels to communicate with colleagues or clients about work-related correspondence or information sharing; mandatory periodic password changes; tracking apps on devices to protect from loss or physical theft; a theft hotline procedure with remote-deletion tools in place, and more.”

Leadership Decisions and Actions for Secure Cyberspace Operations

by Walter E. Natemeyer, Carl W. Hunt and Chuck E. Hunt

“The cybersecurity business runs on fear, so it is appropriate that investors have learned to be afraid. While hacking seems like a long-term growth industry, security hasn’t turned out to be the surefire bet many thought it was.” [1]

This quote comes from a business article recently posted in the Wall Street Journal Online, discussing revenues for cybersecurity companies. More than a story about cybersecurity, it’s also a telling piece about leadership in the connected age of cyberspace. Whatever success we’ve had in developing secure cyberspace operations over the years has never been just about software and technology, but it’s always been about good leadership. It’s not just cyberspace “security” as the WSJ article points out. We also need leadership.

In recent posts, we’ve talked about the challenges leaders face about secure cyberspace operations (SCO) and the environments they face in orienting to those challenges. Last time, we discussed a valuable construct from John Boyd, called the OODA Loop, that leaders can leverage to orient to the environments of cyberspace and frame decisions and actions.

We’ve been laying the case that leadership in cyberspace, while sharing similar characteristics to leading in other operating environments, also presents novel challenges that did not exist before. Further, our increasing reliance on technology as a surrogate for leadership encourages us to minimize good leadership and management fundamentals and practices to the detriment of the organizations for which we are responsible.

In continuing our case for adaptive leadership and power for secure cyberspace operations (ALP-SCO), we now dig deeper into the kinds of leadership models that are well-suited for organizational success in the connected age.

There are two leadership models that can leverage the insights gained from applying LOD and OODA for ALP-SCO. [2] They are Situational Leadership (SL) [3] and Complex Adaptive Leadership (CAL), which is actually a variant of SL. [4] Situational Leadership was originally developed by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard at Ohio University in the late 1960’s.

Since we’ve focused on some of Nick Obolensky’s insights about CAL in previous posts, we’ll talk primarily about SL in this post. As Obolensky has shown in his book, Situational Leadership is a cornerstone of all adaptive leadership approaches.

More than 50 years of research has consistently shown that there are two critically important dimensions of leadership behavior: providing direction and providing support. A key element of leadership effectiveness is deciding the mix of the appropriate amount of direction and support to followers; the SL model helps leaders make that important decision.

SL embraces the belief there is no one best way to lead people. Rather leaders should vary their leadership style (i.e., direction and support) according to the unique demands of the situation and organizational environment. SL suggests that the most important situational factor is the follower’s performance readiness level with respect to what the leader wants the follower to do. [5]

There are four categories of performance readiness. The first level of readiness is called R1. At this level a follower is very unable to the job, very unwilling to do the job, or both. So, R1 is very unable and/or very unwilling.

R2 is a person who is somewhat unable but willing. This is a follower who is below average in ability but willing to do what the leader wants the follower to do.

R3 is a follower who has developed to a point that he/she is generally able, but not fully confident or perhaps not fully enthusiastic.

Finally, R4 is the highest level of readiness. This is a follower who has developed to the point where he/she is very able, very willing and very confident.

The key point of Situational Leadership is that it is the performance readiness level of the follower that determines the appropriate leadership style for the leader to employ. [6] Again, the SL Model is based on the two key dimensions of leadership behavior: direction and support. Let’s explore those two dimensions a bit more:

Directive leadership behavior is the degree to which the leader tells followers what to do, how to do it, when to do it, where to do it, who to do it with, when to have it finished, what standards to achieve and procedures to follow, etc.

Supportive leadership behavior consists of a variety of people-oriented behaviors, including the degree to which the leader takes time to engage in two-way communication and engage with what the followers have to say, how much encouragement the leader provides, how much feedback the leader gives, how much the leader praises the followers when they do a good job, how much friendly interaction the leader engages in with them, etc.

In the SL model shown below in Figure 1, Directive Behavior is represented along the horizontal axis, and Supportive Behavior is on the vertical dimension. The key point of SL is that the leader should vary his/her leadership style (i.e., amount of direction and support) according to the follower’s readiness level.

 

Figure 1 – A Model for Situational Leadership for Secure Cyberspace Operations

The SL model is broken into four sectors representing four distinct leadership styles. In the lower right sector (S1), the leader provides an above average amount of directive behavior combined with a below average amount of supportive behavior. In the upper right sector (S2), the leader provides above average direction and above average supportive behavior. The upper left sector (S3) shows a leader who provides below average direction with above average supportive behavior. And finally, in the lower left sector (S4), the leader provides below average amounts of both directive and supportive behavior. [7]

Second, there’s an additional dimension below the SL leadership style model that represents the readiness level of the follower. Notice that the readiness scale ranges from low readiness (R1) on the right to high readiness (R4) on the left, as we discussed above.

Notional steps for using Situational Leadership are as listed below:

1. Start by assessing the performance readiness level of your follower with respect to the particular task that you want that person to perform
2. Then virtually “plot” that assessment along the readiness scale shown at the bottom of Figure 1 (R1, R2, R3, R4)
3. “Draw” a line from the readiness assessment to the corresponding leadership style
4. The point of intersection indicates an approximation of the appropriate style to use with that person or group at that point in time, under the constraints of the cyberspace environment imposed

In future posts, we’ll describe in more detail how SL, CAL and OODA can work together so leaders can better appreciate follower readiness and the cyberspace environment they must integrate to make leadership style decisions. Below are some initial examples of integrating these concepts to support secure cyberspace operations.

Examples of Using Situational Leadership in the SCO Environment

R1 requires S1

If the followers are very unable and/or very unwilling to solve a SCO problem, a high level of direction from the leader is required. This category of SCO problem might include a blatant disregard for established password or login procedures, or repeated attempts to visit unauthorized websites. The leader needs to tell the follower(s) what to do, how to do it, etc., and at that point a low level of supportive behavior is required. This assumes that the leader is capable and experienced in relation to the problem and understands the rationale for the procedures that need to be reinforced. If the leader is not a capable R4, he/she needs to connect to an R4 expert to provide the needed direction and support to both the leader and the followers.

R2 requires S2

If the followers face a problem where they are somewhat unable but willing, the leader should provide a high level of direction and support. An example of this type of SCO problem might be seen where a follower repeatedly fails to delete or quarantine and report the receipt of phishing emails, given that such attacks are a favored intrusion vector for cyber criminals. The follower may be mature in other aspects of cybersecurity, but just has problems observing and orienting to the threats this attack vector imposes. The followers’ lack of ability requires high direction while their overall willingness should be reinforced with feedback, encouragement and praise.

R3 requires S3

If the followers are generally able with respect to their SCO challenge they face but they lack confidence or enthusiasm, the leader should provide a low level of direction combined with a high level of feedback, encouragement and praise. Here, the leader also reinforces good follower SCO behaviors, and even solicits techniques that may benefit the rest of the team or organization. S3 allows the followers to use what they know and provides the supportive behaviors required for the followers to increase their confidence and/or enthusiasm. R2 and R3 can sometimes overlap, so it’s important for the leader to exercise balance and discretion to help develop and encourage the follower.

R4 requires S4

If the followers are very able, willing and confident to deal with the SCO challenges they face, the leader should use S4 and delegate the responsibility to deal with the situation to the competent, committed and confident followers. In desired cases such as these, the leader is just as capable of learning about SCO from the follower as the follower is from the leader. Leaders in this case should also be looking for good cybersecurity techniques they are learning from their followers that might scale throughout the organization.

In SCO, it’s critical to note that any follower or leader can instantly become R1, regardless of his/her ability, willingness or confidence in other areas of the job. This is because new cyberspace threats arise frequently, often in what are known as “zero-day exploits,” which are attacks that arrive with no prior warning or intelligence indication. It’s important to understand that operations in cyberspace are still so new to many organizations that anyone can become an R1 at any time and thus need to constantly orient and adapt to the situation as both leaders and followers.

A key benefit of utilizing Situational Leadership is that it can significantly improve the performance of the follower. Therefore, leaders should develop the habit of continually assessing their followers’ readiness level – as well as their own – and take necessary steps to provide the appropriate leadership style (i.e. directive and supportive behavior). In cyberspace operations, nobody stays R4 very long.

In fact, in the dynamic environment of cyberspace, people’s readiness level is likely to be more volatile than ever. Therefore, to maximize success at building and maintaining SCO, leaders need to quickly adapt their style to the readiness level of the follower as well as the environmental characteristics that the massive interactions and connections that cyberspace presents. Also, leaders need to assess their own readiness level and seek direction and support from others who possess the appropriate experience, knowledge and skill with respect to the current situation.

Next time, we’ll talk about the interaction of leadership approaches and leadership power.

Originally posted 8-22-2016.

[1] Gallagher D., “Why Safety Is Hard to Find in Cybersecurity,” The Wall Street Journal, 8/16/2016, accessed 8/18/2016.

[2] This current series will not address in great detail the acquisition and use of power in cyberspace operations. Future additions will examine more deeply the role that power and influence have in the massively networked environment of cyberspace.

[3] For the latest textbook-based presentation on Situational Leadership, see Hersey, P., et. al., Management of Organizational Behavior, 10^th Edition, Pearson Education, Inc., Saddle River, NJ, 2013.

[4] Obolensky, N., Complex Adaptive Leadership: Embracing Paradox and Uncertainty, Ashgate Publishing Ltd., Kindle Edition, 2014, p. 55.

[5] ALP-SCO extends that thinking to take into equal consideration the impact of the environments of cyberspace.

[6] And, in the case of ALP-SCO, subject also to the demands of the environments of cyberspace, as noted above.

[7] The term “average” is a simplified adjective that serves as a placeholder for the “ground truth” of the follower’s and the environment’s actual requirements on a case-by-case basis.

A Walk-Through for Applying Leadership Orientation Domains

This post accompanies OODA and Leadership in Cyberspace, posted 8/15/2016

How could operationalizing Leadership Orientation Domains (LODs) to inform Adaptive Leadership for Secure Cyberspace Operations (ALP-SCO) with Boyd’s Orientation component work in practice? As we’ll see in the next couple of posts, leaders must understand and orient to the readiness level of their followers for given tasks as well as the environments in which they are functioning. They must also understand and orient to their state of teamwork and collaboration both inside and outside their organizations. We’ll talk about internal operations for simplicity sake in this initial example.

Let’s say a follower is quite experienced and has a high level of readiness (ability, motivation, confidence and willingness) to accomplish a task in a standard office environment. We realize that list represents a lot of variables and the term “standard office environment” is ambiguous. Just imagine this situation reflects what we might think of when we look back on the world before computers and networks. For the most part, this would be a Simple or perhaps even a Complicated environment, as defined in our second post in this series, Leadership Orientation in Cyberspace. We assume that in this case leaders can visualize causes and effects of behaviors and actions because they are oriented to their environment.

Now, jump ahead a bit in time and add in some office tools such as desktop computers or word processing equipment that at most connects only the internal office workers (e.g., before the ubiquity of the Internet we have today). Both the followers and the leaders are no longer in what was previously thought of as a “standard office environment.” They both have to adapt to new tools, both hardware and software, as well as new procedures. Neither leaders nor followers now possess the readiness level they had before: the environment has changed. It may not be Complex at this point because new forms of connectivity haven’t fully influenced operational procedures yet, but the way people labor and interact with their work has clearly become more complicated.

In this former time, rules still work and best practices can be discovered and implemented because the connectivity and interaction levels are low…the Complexity LOD hasn’t kicked in yet. Leaders can exercise “simple” cause-and-effect based leadership behaviors that only have to consider follower readiness; the environment is more predictable and can be more easily visualized. However, leaders will still have to adapt to this evolved definition of “standard office environment.”

In more modern times, the massive interconnectivity of cyberspace-based organizations changes the environment even further. Now leaders must not only consider the behaviors and readiness levels of their followers, they must also consider the “behaviors and readiness levels” of different elements in cyberspace operations such as new technology or rules, and equally important, network intruders.

In terms of intruders, leaders of individual organizations typically have little insight as to the ability, motivation, confidence and willingness of these adversaries and the LOD can quickly change to Complex or even Chaotic. Networked collaboration with other organizations becomes a requirement to fend off these threats…as Ramo and others before him point out, it takes a network to fight a network.[1]

The bottom line in this very simple example is that it’s up to the leaders to orient to new environments and to adapt and manage the evolution of the way they and followers interact. While similar orientations and adaptations certainly happened at the transition of the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age, very few things were as connected and open to attack as they are in cyberspace: the world was not complex in the way we define organizations today.

A very simplified depiction, Figure 1 demonstrates a basic way to visualize the relationship of complexity to adaptive leadership function.

Figure 1 – Complexity and Adaptive Leadership

 

Our world has changed and leaders must constantly adapt. They must form new internal and external collaborations to cope with LODs as they are recognized. That’s what leaders in any age must do. As we claimed in the first post, leadership is hard! Leadership self-understanding and orientation to the environment is equally hard. We’re really only just scratching the surface as leaders in cyberspace.

Originally posted on 8/15/2016.

[1] Ramo, J, The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks, Little, Brown and Company, NY, Kindle Edition, 2016. Interestingly, this decree has been a part of military counterterrorism network operations for many years.

Leadership Orientation in Cyberspace

by Carl W. Hunt, Walter E. Natemeyer and Chuck E. Hunt

Part II of The Future of Leadership in Cyberspace Series[1]

Dwight Eisenhower said “Now I think, speaking roughly, by leadership we mean the art of getting someone else to do something that you want done because he wants to do it, not because your position of power can compel him to do it, or your position of authority.”[2]

This definition of leadership, often quoted in books, papers and training classes, evokes the essence of the subject of leadership in any environment: inspiration, motivation, preparation, power and authority. It focuses on both leaders and followers, two of the three most critical elements of adaptive leadership and power for secure cyberspace operations (ALP-SCO) in the connected age.

As we presented in the first post in this series, the environment of cyberspace itself is the third element that drives the function and role of leadership today. When we start thinking about leadership in these three terms, it becomes ever clearer that the hierarchical models of leadership are shattered. If effective leadership wasn’t hard enough before cyberspace, the new environment of cyberspace should definitely get a leader’s attention.

Respected network enterprise services and equipment provider Cisco Systems, just released their “Midyear Cybersecurity Report.”  Their Executive Summary concludes: “Attackers currently enjoy unconstrained time to operate. Their campaigns, which often take advantage of known vulnerabilities that organizations and end users could have—and should have—known about and addressed, can remain active and undetected for days, months, or even longer.”

This could be construed as a virtual indictment of leaders in all types of modern organizations, whether commercial, government or academic. If it’s not leaders who allow attackers to dwell in organizational IT systems for “days, months, or even longer” who is it? That’s rhetorical, of course…it’s the leaders. But as we noted last time in Part I of this series, it’s a tremendous challenge for leaders and followers to understand and orient to what’s really happening in their little corner of cyberspace.

There is a broad spectrum of difficulty in orienting to challenges that leaders face within highly interconnected, cyberspace-based organizational settings. Nick Obolensky suggests that there are four basic operating environments or domains.[3] He bases his four-part framework on the work of David Snowden and Mary Boone in their Cynefin Model.[4] This model introduced the four domains in which leaders typically operate and make decisions, in any organizational setting.[5]

In graphical terms, we might visualize these operating domains as shown in Figure 1. These domains are not necessarily linearly connected, but rather interconnected with relationships and information passing between each, through channels that often emerge unpredictably, as Snowden and Boone wrote. Operating in cyberspace further obscures these flows.[6]

Figure 1: Leadership Orientation Domains (LODs)

Last time, we introduced these four environments for leadership in cyberspace as Leadership Orientation Domains (LOD). Simple environments are where “cause and effect are fully linked and known, and so predictability is high. If you do ‘This’ you get ‘That’. It is the area of process and best practice.”[7] This is the domain of “what you see is what you get,” so says the old saying. As the picture shows, it’s essentially a flat landscape that doesn’t hide or obscure information flows.

Next on the scale, or grid if you prefer, are Complicated environments, where “cause and effect are there, but the linkages are not so obvious and need analysis to sort it out. Predictability is less than ‘The Simple,’ but with careful analysis and consideration the choices one makes have a fair degree of predictable outcome.”[8] Figure 1 might indicate that this is a “hillier landscape” and thus not all the connections are necessarily easy to see from every point in the organization, but obscurity of connections is still low. It’s possible to still get an overall viewpoint of what’s going on, even if we have to look harder.

A Simple LOD empowers leaders to act with straightforward, cause-and-effect models and methods that are generally predictable and leverage experience and intuition nicely. A Complicated LOD requires a bit more analysis and occasional “outside-the-box” thinking. Both simple and complicated fall within the realm of “best practices” and familiar models and tools.

Experts thrive in these two environments and are often the key players in decision-making and risk management. Also, Simple and Complicated LODs have generally simple patterns that are ultimately straightforward to detect and where risk is apparent to the trained and observant leader, and quite often to experienced followers, as well. When management advises “you just need to follow the rules” or the standard operating procedures or “the book,” they are really referring to Simple and Complicated operating domains.

After simple and complicated, however, leaders must “jump” an intellectual chasm that leads to the “mysteries” of complexity and chaos in organizations. In the next two operating domains, leaders have to be willing to balance intuition and experience with imagination and discovery. If leaders are successful in thinking beyond the boundaries of cause and effect, they will be better prepared to see and interact with the new organizational world that has emerged with the advent of cyberspace.

The “rules” and the “book” may offer a basic foundation for thinking through the challenges of these environments, but it’s up to leaders to sense the conditions of the challenges and opportunities of cyberspace, orient to the leadership behaviors required and to adjust and adapt accordingly. As the bottom two areas in figure 1 suggest, there are interacting weaves that are very difficult to follow, but the patterns can be detected through a creative mind and appreciation for emergence.

The Complex environment is where “‘cause and effect’ are combined. The multiple ‘agents’ involved (for example, people, organizations, technological component parts of the system and so on) are interconnected with feedback loops that affect each other in a complex network that is hard to predict.”[9] In reality, the patterns are in fact present but require maximum creativity to orient to the patterns; this domain may even require advanced models and simulations to visualize and interact with existing and generated data to observe these patterns.[10]

Resolving complexity in an operational domain requires an understanding of emergence, a term on which we can expand a bit here. Being comfortable with the concept of emergence in an organization entails an appreciation that sometimes things happen or people behave in what appears to be totally unpredictable ways. This is sometimes referred to as an object being more than the sum of its parts, and where even a full comprehension of those component parts does not lead to an understanding of their interactions and ultimate behaviors. For example, individual follower behaviors in a group do not always apprise leaders as to what will happen when these interactions and resulting team behaviors occur. This keeps adaptive leadership interesting and absolutely necessary![11]

It’s even more difficult to visualize and orient leadership experiences in the Chaotic environment. This is “rare and is where there is no discernible cause and effect at all.” Obolensky, Snowden and Boone essentially say that there are “no manageable patterns – only turbulence.”[12] Here the leader’s main job is not to find patterns, but “stop the bleeding” and allow the team or organization to get back into the game as soon as possible and move towards a domain in which the organization can get things under some semblance of control. In scientific terms, chaos is a well-studied state and it is currently unclear that organizational operations in the chaotic environment are even possible for very long.

Organizations can thrive in simple and complicated environments and if they can master complex environments, they may even succeed beyond all expectations. Chaos, however, may not only be debilitating but destructive, and should be avoided or at least mitigated, if at all possible.[13]

So, a Complex LOD requires leaders to test the environment and think beyond intuition and experience; they must be prepared to adapt to a world that often surprises them, and while there are models and tools available, they require practice and objectivity to leverage them. If they were describing leadership in cyberspace in their original work, Snowden and Obolensky might say that a Chaotic LOD is in some sense the easiest of the four since there is no discernible pattern to guide decision-making and action; the leader just needs to do something to get the organization out of this domain as soon as possible. Quite often, one action is as good any other, but constant planning and training will help prepare for eventual action![14]

A key problem for leaders is how to learn which of the LODs they are facing (if they are fortunate to be facing only one at a time) and what they can do about it. Each of these four environments requires different orientations, behaviors and activities for leaders to be successful within their organizations and cope with demands each environment makes on an organization.

Mismatch of leadership decisions and actions to domain requirements can be as bad as mismatching leadership styles to follower readiness levels, as will we note in the near future. This is where the tried but true Observe-Orient-Decide-Act (OODA) model we introduced last time can help leaders operating in cyberspace achieve orientation for all leadership functions.

OODA for orientation to LODs to more effectively lead secure cyberspace operations is the subject of our post next time.

Originally posted: 8-9-2016.

Notes:

[1] This series is part of an ongoing effort to better understand the challenges of providing Adaptive Leadership for Secure Cyberspace Operations for the United States and our international partners.

[2] Dwight D. Eisenhower in his remarks at the Annual Conference of the Society for Personnel Administration, 5/12/54, from the archive recorded at the Presidential Library of the former president.

[3] Obolensky, N., Complex Adaptive Leadership: Embracing Paradox and Uncertainty, Ashgate Publishing Ltd., Kindle Edition, 2014, p. 55.

[4] Snowden, D. and Boone, M., “A leader’s framework for decision making” Harvard Business Review, November, 2007.

[5] The domains Snowden and Boone discuss are not original to them, but have been categories discussed for years as a part of the study of what is known as complexity science. See for example, Kauffman, S.A., The Origins of Order, Oxford Press, NY, 1993.

[6] For more detailed images of the four domains as presented by Snowden, see Snowden, D. and Boone, M., op. cit.

[7] Obolensky, op. cit. p. 55.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Agent-based models and simulations are examples of the advanced computational tools that may be required to visualize patterns in complex domains.

[11] Snowden and Boone’s paper recounts a NASA example: “There is a scene in the film Apollo 13 when the astronauts encounter a crisis (‘Houston, we have a problem’) that moves the situation into a complex domain. A group of experts is put in a room with a mishmash of materials—bits of plastic and odds and ends that mirror the resources available to the astronauts in flight. Leaders tell the team: This is what you have; find a solution or the astronauts will die. None of those experts knew a priori what would work. Instead, they had to let a solution emerge from the materials at hand. And they succeeded. (Conditions of scarcity often produce more creative results than conditions of abundance.)” Snowden and Boone, 2007, op. cit.

[12] Obolensky, op. cit.

[13] In many circumstances, the best we can seek is to create an environment that fosters a “positive emergence” or outcome, referring back to the previous discussion on emergence. Both complexity and chaos can produce emergences, but as leaders, we would like to understand them as they occur, and guide the environmental factors that might improve the likelihood for a good outcome.

[14] Ibid. These descriptions of the four environments are based on Obolensky’s recitation of David Snowden’s Cynefin Model, Obolensky page 55-56. Snowden also calls the “Simple” environment the “Obvious” and includes a fifth domain called “Disorder”. In this paper, we use the four domain descriptions as provided by Obolensky.

The Future of Leadership in Cyberspace

by Carl W. Hunt, Walter E. Natemeyer[1] and Chuck Hunt

This post[2] marks the first of several that lay out the case for what we are calling Adaptive Leadership and Power for Secure Cyberspace Operations. As RAP has done from time-to-time, we want to offer America and our leaders new ways of thinking about how we operate in cyberspace and how we build an even more secure nation for our progeny. We want to talk about the future of leadership in the connected age.

Our intent is that these ideas help shape and strengthen national connectivity. We want to talk about how industry, academia and government, as well as all of our citizens and communities, might safely connect with each other and the leaders of our nation.

The topics we’ll cover include how we can more effectively define the environments of cyberspace and how we might better orient to these environments. In addition, we’ll discuss what styles and techniques of leadership and organizational influence we have in our national cyberspace toolkit and how we can consistently practice the risk management techniques we need to succeed as a cyberspace power now and in the future. We’ll also introduce a few graphic models to help tie these things together visually.

Part One: Identifying the Environments of Cyberspace

Operating securely in cyberspace has been a tough challenge for many years. Gone are the days when we could easily analyze and respond to simple cause and effect relationships where a single threat such as a computer virus or a corrupted document file could be dealt with by one direct solution. Or, when we could simply tell a follower “don’t do unsafe things in cyberspace!” That kind of leadership in highly technical settings such as cyberspace doesn’t work anymore, if indeed it ever did.

Secure cyberspace operations (SCO) demands excellent leadership and organizational skills to stay competitive, collaborative and innovative. Both leaders and followers must understand the risks and opportunities that cyberspace presents to their organizations. Cyberspace offers one of the most challenging but potentially rewarding leadership environments that any boss at any level has ever faced in the history of organizations.

Perhaps the major challenge we all face in sustaining SCO arises from observing and orienting to where we are in the information-rich cyberspace world. For leaders to provide needed direction, motivation and support to their organization and followers, it’s imperative to understand the nature of the environment in which they work. That takes observation and orientation.

With a realistic orientation, leaders can make decisions that offer better opportunities for success. In cyberspace, there are instances where we operate in simple or even complicated settings, or in complex environments or even times when we are in all-out chaos. Each environment is distinct and requires different leadership behaviors: leadership behaviors that adapt to the environment as well as to the followers and organizational requirements. We must act as leaders appropriately, and often quite differently, in each environment. A mismatch in leader behavior to the demands of the environment will almost certainly bring about some level of failure to operate securely in cyberspace.

But, even if we can actually identify the four environments, how can we truly tell which setting we are in? It is important to know because each these four settings necessitate a different focus and approach for effective decision-making and leadership action. The rapid pace of information flow and new connections ensure orientation challenges will arise.

The vast multidimensionality of cyberspace, subjected to constant attacks and exploitations, makes it extremely difficult for anyone to consistently succeed. Therefore, leaders must develop the skills to assess, adapt and communicate effectively. In truth, we are just starting to explore, lead and operate in cyberspace, and leaders must orient and adapt to this truth.

We could label these four distinct environments as Leadership Orientation Domains (LOD). We suggest this labeling since the key to leading and operating in these four LODs is orientation to the environment. This orientation is what makes it possible to appreciate where the leadership challenges reside and what the likelihood of success might be in deciding and acting under this orientation. Orientation also impacts how leaders assess and use the tools and methods that offer the best chance of success.

In other words, adaptation in leadership is a required characteristic to understand and maneuver, in order to operate successfully across the environments of cyberspace.

By way of a teaser for the next installment of The Future of Leadership in Cyberspace, we’ll clue our readers that we as a nation can not only operate securely in cyberspace, but we can thrive in it. Next time, we’ll define the LODs more specifically and introduce John Boyd and his OODA Loop to show how we improve adaptability in leadership. The future of leadership in cyberspace is actually quite bright!

As an additional teaser, below is the top-level model that we’ll follow. See ya’ next time!

Originally posted: 8/1/2016

[1] Walter E. Natemeyer, Ph.D., is the CEO of North American Training and Development, Inc., Houston, TX. He taught at the university graduate level for over ten years before devoting full-time effort to teaching basic and advanced leadership skills in business and government sectors, including teaching at the Johnson Space Center in Houston for over 40 years. He has authored numerous books, articles, and training instruments on a variety of management topics.

[2] Editor’s Note: This blog post changes the current theme of Reconnecting to the American Promise (RAP) just a bit. To be sure, it’s still all about connection and the American people. For America to remain the world’s greatest center for connecting and balancing freedom and security, we must set the global standard for operating securely in cyberspace. In the wake of the recently reported intrusions of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee email files, this seems even more important. With costs of some data breaches now reaching into the millions of dollars, the effects to the bottom line are clearly increasing. The United States must demonstrate leadership in secure cyberspace operations on behalf of all of our people and our friends abroad.

What Technology Demands

NOTE:  This post is a bit of an experiment, involving three previous bloggers and a new contributor: regular posters, the brother-team of Carl and Chuck Hunt; Larry Kuznar, who has previously posted twice; and Carl’s friend, MacArthur Fellow Stuart Kauffman. [1]  We think it’s a sufficiently worthy topic that we thought we’d shoot for a multidisciplinary perspective: information technology, naturalism, anthropology and biology.  All of these disciplines are part of the connecting fabric of the American Promise.  This post commemorates our 50^th Blog Post! [2]

Carl:  Two weeks ago, my Samsung Galaxy IV told me I needed nine app updates.  Last week, it was another 13.  Every week, it’s the same thing.  Our smart phones are pretty darned smart the way they have us trained.  Don’t get me started about the constant care these things need in terms of recharging (feeding?)!  After years of similar experiences updating all the various versions of my Windows computers, I wonder less and less “who” the master is in this human-technology relationship: I’m starting to be convinced that it’s technology.  Larry, is this the future of mankind or is it the future repeating the past?

Larry:  This is very much the future repeating the past.  Our ancestors’ ability to develop technology has definitely been one key edge our species had over others.  That day (approximately 2.5 million years ago) an ancient hominid struck a sharp stone from a rock and used it to slice some valuable protein from a scavenged carcass set us on an irreversible path of technological dependence.  Today we are forced to adapt to our built environment (which concentrates the exchange of pathogens, relieves selection for heat or cold resistance, enables us to acquire mates without travel).  In fact, we adapt more to our built environments than to nature outside of our walls.

Chuck:  Larry, you are so right.  The issue about our “built environment” is huge!  We have to ask “where is our ‘think space,’ where’s our space to be human?”  In The Singing Wilderness, Sigurd F. Olson writes as though our technology-driven world, which is increasingly devoid of real things, is not optimal habitat for humans.  Hearing birds sing, smelling a field after a shower, or reading the skies are things that have been part of the human existence for thousands of years.  The abrupt shift, in human time anyway, to this stressful technology-driven life is likely causing behavioral and health dysfunction.  The biological foundation for Olson’s philosophy comes from a theory he proposed as “racial memory.”  He held that we humans have a biological need to connect with nature.  The societal ramifications of all of this will not be known for quite some time.  Generally, rapid shocks in habitat lead to species decline (or extinction), at least until adaptation occurs, which can take generations.

Carl:  The effects on nature and our interactions with it are a big deal, Larry and Chuck, and could indeed affect us for a very long time.  If we think of technology as a “living system” as Kevin Kelly writes in What Technology Wants, technology does seem to be better at adaptation than humans!

What really got me thinking about this lately was a Politico article entitled “How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election” based on some recent National Academy of Sciences research about the same topic.  I find it hard not to think of Google as a well-motivated and well-intentioned company, but what if technology is beginning to take on a life form that we are in fact are only now starting to visualize as Kevin Kelly claims?  Is it possible for our technologies to “rig a national election” without human intervention or intent?

Stu, you know Kevin Kelly and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt fairly well.  As a biologist and physician, is there something going on here that even transcends our human intentions and inventions?  Did biology enable technology or is it the other way around?

Stu:  Yes, something very big is going on.  Both the evolving biosphere and the evolving economy, including technologies, create the very possibilities into which they “become”, often beyond anyone knowing even what “can happen”.  First, Chuck is right. We are ever more alienated from Nature in late modernity to our rue and dysphoria.  We evolved as part of Nature, but now think we are separate and somehow “above” the Nature that is “ours” to command, not nurture.  Second, think of a web of economic goods and production functions, including technologies.  Once one exists, it creates “adjacent possibilities” into which it can become, although no one may have intended how the total system becomes.  These adjacent possible creations happen without a human plan.  This is Kelly’s What Technology Wants.  Somehow, we lost contact with our natural roots in the 18^th Century with the Industrial Revolution and the explosion of new technologies that enable the further explosion that rushes at us ever more rapidly.  We have not faced this in the past 50,000 years, nor do we know what is wise.  And, we definitely don’t know how much further this will drive us from our natural roots in the future: that’s just not prestatable, no matter how well we think we can plan for what’s ahead.

Larry:   And this is so much the story of human social (not biological) evolution. Technological innovations seem to have been entirely developed to solve immediate needs, with little or no consideration of their long-term consequences.  The earliest stone tools enabled a hominid with an increasing brain to feed this hungry organ, enabling an adjacently possible outcome of even greater reliance on intelligence and imagination as a means to adapt.  I doubt that any Homo habilis realized it was creating the foundation for metaphysical thought and the development of the World’s great religions.

Archaeologists have pretty well concluded that the domestication of plants and animals solved a problem of increasing hunter-gatherer populations, which meant increasing conflict over wild resources.  However, increased sedentism also enabled women to have more children, and these rapidly increasing human populations only engendered more conflict, which lead to the formation of tribal societies and ethnic violence.  A quick look at the world news demonstrates that we have anything but shaken off the mantle of tribal warfare.  The list goes on.  A technological innovation solves one problem, but opens up multiple adjacently possible pathways that humans never imagined.  As Stu said, these pathways are not prestatable!

Carl:   It appears that technology has learned how to build and exploit Stu’s adjacent possibilities better than we ever could.  Is this also what Kelly is telling us?  Has technology learned better the lessons that nature offered and we rejected to assimilate humanity rather than vice versa?  Could the possibility of a “rigged election” that the National Academy of Sciences study reflected be just another step in Kurzweil’s proposed “accelerating intelligence?”  Is it possible to think of technology, particularly information-based technology, as an emerging life form or species?  Does technology do a better job of fulfilling its demands from us than we do of it?

Chuck:   So now this discussion appears to be entering into the realm of philosophy or even ethics.  Perhaps the pace of technological change and our growing prowess is forcing us to take this issue more seriously, but it isn’t new either.  The pace may be accelerated and the impact may be new, but this is an issue that humans have struggled with since the beginning of applying technology to “make things better.”  Natural resource management abounds with examples of humans actually exacerbating problems through technology.

Just to offer one of countless examples and one with which I have been involved professionally, Tamarix, or Salt Cedar, was introduced to the United States from Asia in the early 1900s to help prevent erosion.  The goal was noble.  Erosion has many harmful affects including degraded water quality, loss of productive soils, lowering of the water table, etc.  However, within a short period, people noticed that Tamarix was taking over large areas, river flows decreased and water tables were actually receding.  Subsequent research showed that Tamarix actually are massive consumers of water and easily out-compete other vegetation.  Once lush, diverse riparian communities along rivers were becoming monocultures of Tamarix!  The environment of the American Southwest would have been greatly improved had Tamarix never been introduced.  It really was a technologically-derived dilemma.

The point is that mankind has been reckless in the application of all kinds of technology probably since the advent of “technology.”  As a result of Tamarix and other unhelpful exotic species, most nations have become more careful about introducing new flora or fauna to ecosystems.  However, I am not sure we have applied these lessons to the “human ecosystem” (which is really an integrated if artificial construct as well, isn’t it?).  Could we be disrupting our health through unchecked embrace of information technology?  Or, is an embrace of technology the only way to save us from the ecological effects of a human population explosion combined with rising standard of living expectations?

Hence, is this a philosophical debate or a debate concerning the survival of mankind, or both?  Likely it is both…we’re not going to reject technology and I hope we’re not going to stop being human; the question is how thoughtful should we be and how thoughtful can we afford to be.

Larry:  Great questions, Carl and Chuck!  Let me take an anthropological stab at each.  Does technology adapt to us better than we adapt to it? Historically, humans have been required to replicate technology, and the human environment has selected which elements would be replicated or go extinct.  Technology has been more like a virus or a domesticated plant or animal, basically dependent on its host for its replication. Had our ancestors been sufficiently aware of the effects of technology and how they wanted it to impact human life, they could have guided this evolution more rationally toward a desired end beyond our typically short-sighted need to solve an immediate problem.  For technology to adapt to us like an autonomous organism, it would need to have the ability to self-replicate.  With modern robotics and AI, some argue that technology appears to be gaining those abilities and may begin adapting better than us. [3]

Chuck, the Tamarix example is a great illustration!  I spent the better part of a decade conducting research on the Navajo Reservation, and indeed, Tamarix checked streamside erosion in the fragile biophysical ecosystem; but sheep and cattle can’t eat Tamarix, and its introduction further eroded a fragile human ecosystem, the traditional Navajo indigenous economy.

Is technology disrupting our health or saving us?  We are all familiar with the many ill health effects from the by-products of technology.  However, technology, through improved medicine, sanitation, and food production has caused global childhood mortality to plummet from over 40% to about 3% in the last 200 years. [4]  That’s a lot more people in the gene pool!  The net effect is astounding evolutionary success.  Of course, if the world’s 7 billion people increasingly demand and get energy from fossil fuels, they may destroy the planet’s ability to sustain them.  That would be an astounding evolutionary failure.  Talk about adjacently possible pathways!

Is this a philosophical debate or one about the survival of humankind?  I think it’s about the survival of ways of life that we value, and therefore, it is both.  When we’re concerned about what technology has done to our lives, we are expressing our concern about the state, or form, of things.  But evolutionary theory is a theory of process.

The questions that began this discussion reflect human values about the state of our lives.  However, all we may ever really understand is how we got to where we are and how we may proceed into the future; what the state of our future lives will be and how we would value it is, as our colleague Stu notes, just not prestatable.  By exploring the possibilities, though, we may avoid hurtling ourselves headlong into an adjacently possible future we would not want our descendants to experience.  Even then, we are presuming that our descendants will share the values we hold today.

Stu:  I think we are touching some of our deepest issues.  Larry and Chuck are so right about how we act in the biosphere with often unexpected consequences.   We were taught to stop forest fires, Smokey Bear, then learned that small fires were normal and we had allowed the understory to grow to enable vast fires.  DDT ravaged.  But the issues are very much broader, embracing not only technology, but the evolution of our economic system with its power structures, the banks too big to fail that evolve into a legal environment that itself evolves in often unprestatable ways as unprestatable loopholes are found in laws that enable new strategies with unknown payoffs that call forth new laws so the legal-economic-social system “becomes” in partially unprestatable ways, and finally into the opportunities that vault out of what is currently present.

Larry is also right-on about our “values”.  To borrow historian Thomas Cahill’s phrase, I think we are at a hinge of history, in which our thirty or more civilizations around the globe are weaving together, on a finite planet, where we still wage war: this is what the connectivity this blog addresses is all about.  What values will guide us?  It seems to me that this post touches, far beyond Kelly and What Technology Wants, how we “become” as a global set of interwoven civilizations, where what already is unleashes often unprestatable opportunities for good and ill into which we are almost ineluctably “sucked”.  If we cannot design what we become, our values must be our guide.

Carl and Chuck:  We are most grateful to Stu and Larry for joining us in this special 50^th Blog Post in Reconnecting to the American Promise.  While it may take a little imagination to see the connection to RAP and other important topics we’ve covered, such as reflected in the National Strategic Narrative, I think my friend Wayne Porter and his Strategic Narrative coauthor Puck Mykleby would agree that in the end it is our values, as Stu so eloquently concludes, that make us the nation we are and the individuals that form our society.  If in the end, we cannot prestate the design of how we Reconnect to the American Promise, perhaps we can reconnect to the great American values upon which we originally emerged as the United States of America.

End Note from Carl:  This morning, the date of the posting of this piece, my Galaxy Note IV needed only four updates.  That still seems a little needy, but at least not so demanding.

NOTES:

[1] Actually, some of Stu’s recent work has been previously mentioned in Survival at the “Hinge of History”, posted in this blog in June, 2015.

[2] This title is a bit of a takeoff on Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants, Viking Books, New York, 2010.  According to the book website, the topic “…suggests that technology as a whole is not just a jumble of wires and metal but a living, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies.”

[3] Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, Basic books, New York, 2015.

[4] http://ourworldindata.org/data/population-growth-vital-statistics/child-mortality/

Disconnecting America

When we were kids growing up in what was probably a “lower-to-middle” middle class neighborhood in southeast Houston, we rarely thought about politics at any level. Carl does remember the JFK nomination and election when he was in the third grade, primarily because some kids were actually walking around the playground carrying signs that read “Kennedy.” Chuck remembers a Jimmy Carter town hall meeting around 1976 and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan as events that started his thinking about the US political process.

However, neither of us remembers politics particularly dividing the nation in the 60s and 70s. From the little we saw in those days, there were different philosophies, and of course the Vietnam War was a divider (with apologies to Clausewitz…we recall that war “is the continuation of politics (policy) by other means”!). But both parties usually knew when to say “that’s enough politics” and to put America first. That’s all changed!

We started this blog precisely because we do remember the days when politics might drive elections and guide policy, but it didn’t tear apart the nation so deeply that America actually became two nations: Redtopia and Bluedreamia. It was this tearing apart that convinced us we had to say something. As we contemplated this blog, all we saw was increasing acrimony across the aisle facilitated by partisan media organs that had just gone too far…it was getting so bad that America was becoming dysfunctional and the country we love was at risk.

What we thought of as personal experience and intuition when we started this blog came to light for us this month thanks to a Washington Post Op-Ed piece by Dana Milbank, titled online as America’s new cycle of partisan hatred. “Up until the mid-1980s, the typical American held the view that partisans on the other side operated with good intentions. But that has changed in dramatic fashion, as a study published last year by Stanford and Princeton researchers demonstrates,” Milbank wrote. As Milbank and the Stanford/Princeton study indicate, it’s worse than we thought. [1]

Occasionally it takes a long time to circulate important insights about the changing nature of the American electorate, given the study Milbank cites came out last June; however, the implications of this study are worthwhile nonetheless. This is no longer the 60s, 70s and 80s.

When we started the blog, perhaps we were guilty of still living in the good ole’ 80s. We thought the political divide that facilitated the edge-driven politics we’ve cited many times was created by office-seekers and power-hungry politicians who couldn’t find anything good to do for America. But, as Walt Kelly said in Pogo “we have met the enemy and it is us!” [2]

The authors of the study Milbank cites, Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood, claim that Americans have allowed politics to pull us away from compromise that led to the foundation of the United States and towards the edges that politicians do in fact exploit. “Our evidence demonstrates that hostile feelings for the opposing party are ingrained or automatic in voters’ minds, and that affective polarization based on party is just as strong as polarization based on race. We further show that party cues exert powerful effects on non-political judgments and behaviors. Partisans discriminate against opposing partisans, and do so to a degree that exceeds discrimination based on race.” [3] The American electorate is in cahoots with politicians in creating our disconnects and divides!

As the authors and Milbank note, partisan political discrimination has replaced race as the main reason for keeping Americans from the Center. This politically driven partisanship inhibits and now apparently disincentivizes the function of compromise and cooperation that has been the root of American success and national prosperity. Political partisanship is trumping putting America first, and American voters are enabling it whether by design or by neglect.

Milbank writes that “partisanship is more tribal than anything — the result of an ill-informed electorate.” As Westwood, one of the paper’s authors, told Milbank for his Op-Ed piece, “…most people understand their side is good and the opposing side is bad, so it’s much easier for them to form these emotional opinions of political parties.” Redtopia and Bluedreamia now form the basis for tribes that insist on fighting against each other rather than moving forward together for America.

This is saddening to say the least, and politicians feel perfectly free to exploit it: “elected officials and professional partisans then reinforce the tribal tendency in the electorate with overheated rhetoric, perpetual campaigns, negative ads and increasingly partisan media outlets,” Milbank notes from the Iyengar and Westwood study. [4]

In other important ways, the social fabric of America is changing as well. “Americans increasingly live in neighborhoods with like-minded partisans, marry fellow partisans and disapprove of their children marrying mates from the other party, and they are more likely to choose partners based on partisanship than physical or personality attributes,” Milbank continues.

Instead of using the Connected Age to bring us closer together as a nation, our political tribes and those we elect to represent us use information age technologies to disconnect us across political party lines. Yes, this is most saddening indeed. The Connected Age is tearing us apart when it comes to politics.

What is the answer?

Sadly, it is almost impossible to write anything that won’t seem hopelessly naïve given the situation in which America finds herself, but here’s a stab. America: sober up! The right and the left edges driving politics today might be best viewed as drug pushers that are willing to take the nation down for their own short-sighted, selfish goals. To enhance their power, they feed us edge-driven ideological hallucinogens that reinforce and even build our fears and insecurities.

Just as we have had “Just say no” drilled into us in the past, it now seems time to “Just say no to extremism and personal attacks.” Our nation is truly at stake. Anytime a politician personally attacks his or her opponent, push away.

In our youth, we don’t recall many people personally attacking Presidents Ford, Carter or Reagan, as much as making light of them. There weren’t serious efforts to dehumanize them. Sure there were disagreements about policy, but we didn’t see nearly the same level of personal attacks we commonly witness today.

Since our politicians refuse to be adult, it is up to the voters to be “the adults in the room.”

Again, at the risk of being naïve, just say no to extremism and personal attacks. Could it be as simple as civility? We’d love to hear from readers…let us know if we’re off-base here!

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 4/22/2015.

[1] The news story of this study was also reported in The Stanford News as “Political animosity exceeds racial hostility, new Stanford research shows,” 10/4/2014 and “What Is Really Tearing America Apart” in an NPR blog post, 10/15/2014, by Linton Weeks.

[2] This quote was apparently originally provided by Walt Kelly for an Earth Day poster in 1970, something that seems appropriate given the publication date for this post.

[3] Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood, “Fear and Loathing Across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization,” June 2014.

[4] The restraints against this type of socio-political disconnect are self-feeding. Milbank continues in his Op-Ed: ‘“Unlike race, gender and other social divides where group-related attitudes and behaviors are constrained by social norms, there are no corresponding pressures to temper disapproval of political opponents,” they (Iyengar and Westwood) conclude. “If anything, the rhetoric and actions of political leaders demonstrate that hostility directed at the opposition is acceptable, even appropriate. Partisans therefore feel free to express animus and engage in discriminatory behavior toward opposing partisans.”

Washed-Up Thinking

by Carl W. Hunt

My wife and I are fortunate to live near the beach. As I’ve described before, we live in Lewes, Delaware, where the Atlantic Ocean and the Delaware Bay meet at Cape Henlopen. The bay and Cape Henlopen were first discovered by Henry Hudson; none other than William Penn, the first governor of the Pennsylvania colony, set aside Cape Henlopen to be a family “park” in the designation of some of the first public lands in America.

We can walk to Lewes Beach on the Delaware Bay side, but have to drive or bike to the Atlantic beach at Cape Henlopen State Park. We often find sea glass or pottery from sunken ships washed up on the shore…walking the beaches and looking for these simple treasures are a pleasurable pastime for us as coastal residents. This week we found a piece of well-weathered green sea glass washed up on the bay-side of Cape Henlopen Point. This discovery struck me as symbolic of what my brother Chuck and I have intended to demonstrate with Reconnecting to the American Promise.

In addition to just walking on the beach, bloggers are often inspired to write about news events or commentaries they’ve recently read…sometimes we feel compelled to make our thoughts known relative to our frame of reference. I found a bit of inspiration from that piece of sea glass and a commentary I read this week for work, tilted “The Menace of Menace” by Anna Simons, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School.

The observant reader might note the small seashell trapped in the mouth of the bottle-top of the glass my wife and I found. Perhaps the small creature originally in this shell simply got lodged within the glass by the movement of the water in the bay, or perhaps it sought protection and wedged itself in. In any event, this shell was not going anywhere without being damaged if was removed…it was stuck.

According to Anna Simons, America is stuck in a cycle of thinking and acceptance of being stuck that is damaging our present and dimming our future. This thinking cycle is disconnecting us from the American Promise.

Simons, an anthropologist like our friend Larry Kuznar (author of two posts in this blog), describes our thinking in the context of the “menace” of terror and violence that America and the West have helped to promulgate in the veil of social structures that exist today. “By having helped market to the world the notion that menace is an acceptable lifestyle choice, we have helped make atrocities more rather than less likely” Simons writes.

I had to go back and make sure I knew the dictionary meaning of “menace” to confirm I understood Simons’ use of the word, and in terms of what the social thinking of America and the West in this generation has empowered, she nailed it. We don’t use the word today as much as we have in the past, but the word is appropriate to the current age. Dictionary.com defines menace as “something that threatens to cause evil, harm, injury, etc.; a threat” or “a person whose actions, attitudes, or ideas are considered dangerous or harmful.”

Simons continues “We Americans have come to lionize menace on the big screen, the small screen, and the computer screen, in the music industry, the fashion industry, and the sports industry. Look at how legions of Americans dress, and listen to how they talk—with expletive-laced vitriol…It is not just those who portray menace, but also those who produce and direct menace-as-entertainment.”

I’m old-fashioned…I admit it. I find the “expletive-laced vitriol” as part of everyday language difficult to take. If this and “menace-as-entertainment” have become as mainstream as Simons writes, America is indeed supporting the acceptance of menace as a socially acceptable behavior and it’s pouring over into the rest of the world without our realizing it. This collective social acceptance is not only disconnecting our own people from the American Promise, it’s disconnecting the rest of the world.

There are probably several underlying causes of this social trend in America, but one stands out that’s consistent with this blog’s published philosophies about small towns and community-based living. Simons notes that “one downside to so few of us living in small-scale, face-to-face societies, villages, or communities is that bad social actors used to be objects of withering scorn and thus served as object lessons for how to not behave.” This is really important because it suggests the critical need for communities to be cohesive, be socially responsible and to police themselves.

Behaviors generated from the lower levels upward are the true builders of culture and society. This is right in line with what our friends Wayne Porter and Puck Mykleby have published in the National Strategic Narrative, also a source of blog posts for RAP.

According to Simons, we’ve stopped thinking about our responsibilities in growing good communities and culture in America and have let our society slip away as we accept and even nurture the growth of menace in the world. That’s where we as a nation have drifted in the wrong direction and gotten stuck in the sea glass, as it were.

It’s not too late to get unstuck, Simons writes: “…the only effective way to rescue future generations here and abroad from further innovations in crude violence…is to make less of menace. Otherwise, without doing something about the proliferation of this meme, the menace from menace will only intensify.”

To that, I would add that this acceptance of menace has washed up on our shores, just as that piece of sea glass, and we need to toss it right back into the water and get back to Reconnecting to the American Promise. Let’s not get stuck in washed-up thinking.

Originally posted by Carl W. Hunt, 2/8/2015.

Reclaiming Independence through Independents

Or: We’re Sick and Tired of Common Sense Ideas tossed off as “non-starters!”

October 17, 2014 could have been a bit of a watershed for readers of the Washington Post. The Post published an interesting convergence of ideas in what otherwise might have been viewed as three diverse columns by Michael Gerson, Catherine Rampell and Fareed Zakaria:

“Ebola challenges America’s ability to adapt”, by Michael Gerson, typically a conservative perspective. [1]

“Is sex only for rich people?” by Catherine Rampell, typically a Millennial (and often progressive) perspective. [2]

“Obama needs to dial back his Syria strategy” by Fareed Zakeria, typically a global and politically moderate to liberal perspective. [3]

These three seemingly disparate pieces are worth reading together, with an eye towards synthesis and integration, terms we rarely hear in our politics anymore. We won’t describe the contents of the columns, other than to say even though each of these authors comes from different points on the political spectrum, their arguments are persuasive and reasonable (certainly in the spirit of Public Reason we discussed last time).

Our “watershed moment” occurred as we discussed the futility of centrist politicians presenting reasonable and common sense options given the lack of “public reason” in our current political system. We thought about how we can and must do better in the exchange of ideas in this nation…that’s the power of public reason.

These three excellent columns, and the fact that they are practically useless within the context of the train wreck that now passes for American public policy, should cast a spotlight on the need for a way around the polarizing Democratic and Republican Parties. The way our two parties “work” together today is placing our American Experiment at grave risk.

With a little intellectual curiosity and imagination, taken together, these three Post columns suggest how to bring about meaningful and effective change and get America back on track, relying on a handful of states to elect Independent and Centrist candidates.

The November, 2014 election offers the seeds of a “work around” to the current mess. The candidates we mention here may not be optimal…they rarely are. Many might even say they are flawed by ambition or wrong-headedness. Admittedly, we don’t know because we only distinguish them by what we can read in the magazines and papers…these candidates aren’t on the ballots of our home states. But these candidates do potentially represent our future. For this, we urge objectivity and “public reason” to the voters who can elect these candidates.

We strongly recommend the voters of Kansas, South Dakota and Georgia (and maybe even Kentucky) consider voting for the candidates who actually appear to offer an independent streak. Greg Orman in Kansas and Larry Pressler in South Dakota are officially on the ballot as Independents. Imagine how powerful it could be for our Senate for these gentlemen to caucus with the other two Independents in the Senate – to be a strong voice for a Center of America which cares less about politics and more about our nation. Those four Senate voices and votes could be huge.

For example, consider how amazing it would be to hear that these four Independents refused to vote for the present leadership of the Senate—Republican or Democratic. This could set the stage for the beginning of a change our nation so desperately needs.

Rick Weiland is the Democrat in the South Dakota race. He may also be a good change as it appears he may have an independent streak, as well. In a sense, he is appealing since the national Democratic Party has shunned him for not being Harry Reid’s pick. However, we find it hard to not encourage a vote for a viable Independent whenever it is an option given the urgency of our current state of affairs.

We also include Georgia and Kentucky because we believe Michelle Nunn, even though she is running as a Democrat, to be very centrist. And, we feel we have to consider Kentucky also. Allison Grimes’ election would displace one of the current polarizing leaders of the Senate and send a message that the status quo is no longer acceptable. In a world of Independent thinking, we’d like to see both Nunn and Grimes say that they are disinclined to support present leadership of the Senate, as well. That would be courageous and independent…and maybe even what voters really want to hear.

We’ll also note that we have a lot of respect for Lamar Alexander and Susan Collins, Republicans from Tennessee and Maine for their centrist approach, but unfortunately they would almost certainly vote for the would-be Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell.

These hopefully independent thinkers and would-be legislators who are unfortunately affiliated with one of the two currently dominant parties could make a difference if they only showed more concern for America than their party. We believe Nunn and Grimes are more apt to do that compared to their highly partisan opponents.

But, even four Independents would make a difference if they can somehow remain as independent and strong as the current two have. Four Independents might also attract some of the independent nature of those in the major parties who decide America comes first!

In a more “independent world,” we would love to see Nunn, Grimes and even some of the current Republican candidates, running and legislating as Independents. In reality, we understand that it’s almost impossible to win as an Independent. After all, we see the national Republican machine rushing to the aid of Pat Roberts and Mike Rounds in Kansas and South Dakota. That’s what party politics does.

We can only hope the voters of Kansas and South Dakota at a minimum will seize this opportunity to vote to secure “a way around” our present political disaster. We so desperately need these voters to exert some independent influence in the Senate and in their home states and reinvigorate the flow of good ideas and solutions for our nation.

Yes, we are so tired of common sense approaches being non-starters. Four Independents who believe in the original Independence of our nation and our politics could make a real difference for America!

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 10/19/2014.

[1] The Gerson piece is focused on learning lessons at the federal level, on both sides of the aisle.

[2] The Rampell piece is focused on leveling the playing field about sex education across all parts of our population, taking the politics out of such an important and pervasive topic.

[3] The Zakaria piece is focused on getting strategy and rhetoric aligned and reducing the political influence on another tricky Mid-East situation.