A Narrative for our Nation and our Promise

In 2010, I had the privilege of participating in the first of two Highlands Forum meetings I attended that year. This first meeting was in Newport, RI, and hosted a small group of remarkable thinkers and professionals from diverse industry, academic and government organizations. You won’t find much about the Highlands Forum from the official website, but there is a publically accessible site that talks about its background and purpose when it was first established.[1]

One of the government folks I met in Newport was Captain Wayne Porter, United States Navy. At the time, Wayne was serving as a personal advisor to Admiral Mike Mullen, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I had several intimate chats with Wayne, including a marvelous breakfast in which we shared our thoughts about the effects of cyberspace and emergence on the nation and the rest of the world. During breakfast, Wayne shared with me some of the initial thoughts he and his office mate, Colonel Mark “Puck” Mykleby, United States Marine Corps, were working on in a paper they were crafting for the Chairman.

The title of the paper Wayne and Puck created was illuminating. Wayne called it “A National Strategic Narrative.” He explained that they decided to call it a narrative rather than a “strategy” because the nation had plenty of strategy documents (e.g., National Security Strategy, National Military Strategy, and a host of others). What America really needed, Wayne said, was a narrative (a coherent story) that served to remind us of who we were and how we should think about going forward in the future as a “whole of nation” (or government) to maintain the essence of what made America great.

Wayne’s ideas really resonated with me at the time and thanks to a new project to which I’ve been invited to participate, it’s more meaningful than ever. Add to that the work in which Chuck and I collaborate with Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age, and the narrative becomes greatly relevant and compelling.

The “final” version of A National Strategic Narrative is available on the web, along with other supporting information about the project, but I’m reserving the remainder of this post to describe the priorities of the effort and compare it to some of the objectives of FAPITCA as we’ve presented them in this blog.

Wayne and Puck, originally writing under the pseudonym of “Mr. Y” (in memory of George Kennan),[2] assert that their foundation is “built upon the premise that we must sustain our enduring national interests – prosperity and security – within a ‘strategic ecosystem,’ at home and abroad….” This notion of a strategic ecosystem is also compelling and forms the basis of the remaining narrative. An ecosystem, as we’ve mentioned in a previous blog post, is energized by coevolution and emergence, and is another appealing way of expressing FAPITCA.

The Narrative proposes three “Investment Priorities” that align with FAPITCA. The first priority is “intellectual capital and a sustainable infrastructure of education, health and social services to provide for the continuing development and growth of America’s youth.” This priority is perfectly matched to the basis for achieving the American Promise: “freedom of access to an equal opportunity to succeed (or to fail).”[3] Investing in the social “infrastructure” of America empowers greater access to opportunity.

The second priority of the Narrative is “ensuring the nation’s sustainable security – on our own soil and wherever Americans and their interests take them.” According to Wayne and Puck, this requires us to think about American “power” as more than just defense and security, although these are vitally important areas. We should also think about America as a source of inspiration to our nation and the world for “domestic and foreign trade, agriculture and energy, science and technology, immigration and education, public health and crisis response….” This enables us to also observe national security through the lenses of our economy, the environment, our willingness to help other people and nations, and indeed our social fabric. This perspective can also link the Center of America to the rest of our world through Connected Age technologies.[4]

Finally, the third priority of the Narrative is to “develop a plan for the sustainable access to, and cultivation and use of the natural resources we need for our continued wellbeing, prosperity and economic growth in the world marketplace.” This priority has a clear connection to the second priority and speaks to sustaining a global ecosystem of natural resources that supports not only America but the whole world. In this way, America reemphasizes its role as a truly exceptional nation both in terms of leadership and stewardship of human and natural resources. This is consistent with one of FAPITCA’s key principles: “We are borrowing this land, culture and governance system from our progeny; what we pay back to them reflects on our legacy and lays the foundation for their legacy.”[5]

There’s quite a bit more to A National Strategic Narrative that deserves mention in this blog, and we’ll revisit it from time-to-time. Having the privilege of chatting with Wayne and Puck in years past makes this Narrative more personally meaningful as Chuck and I undertake our work with FAPITCA. I’m glad I recently rediscovered it and have a chance to cite it as an additional source for our effort. If the FAPTICA project makes sense to you, please read the National Strategic Narrative and understand where it could take us in Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age.

Originally posted by Carl Hunt, 4/24/2014.

 

[1] The Highlands Forum is a remarkable effort that has informed the development of US strategy, research and development for over a decade, and is superbly managed by Dick O’Neill, Captain, US Navy (ret.). Some of the presentations at Highlands Forum meetings are also available on the public website.

[2] As a National War College alumnus, I appreciate the nod to George Kennan, who was a professor at NWC in the mid-1940s when he was forming thought about maintaining a balance of power with the Soviet Union, a paper called “The Sources of Soviet Power” which he authored in Foreign Affairs in July 1947, under the pseudonym of Mr. X.

[3] As quoted from the Principles of FAPITCA.

[4] As proposed in the FAPITCA Principles.

[5] As articulated in the FAPITCA Principles.

Harnessing the Tools of Collaboration, “Section B”

– Creating Collaborative Law, Part III, Section B

NOTE: Due to the length and technical nature of this post, there are two sections: This is Section B (a technical discussion of a proposed solution as a thought experiment).

In Section A of this post, we proposed to use Lewes, DE as small town representation for a thought experiment. Our experiment proposed to implement collaborative technologies to enhance the way America might begin to initiate a stronger focus on bringing us to Center-based solutions and avoid edge-driven approaches. This experiment provides the basis for a response to the question we posed: “How can technology impact our potential to collaborate?”

To keep the description of these tools simplified, we’ll revisit the Wattpad application we mentioned in Part I of this series, as an example of an approach we could use. After what might be called an open online “solicitation for legislation” provided by the City, we could turn to something like Wattpad. As we learned before, this application allows multiple authors to co-create novels, articles and almost anything suitable for publication in a very public way that proposes drafts, refinements and ultimately “finished” products.

Citizens affected by the proposed legislation, in groups or even as individuals could respond to the solicitation using Wattpad in an online environment. The results could offer a reasonable starting point to address the initial solicitation for the required legislation. This should sound a bit like the discussion on emergence from the last blog post.

Once we have a fairly robust starting document that encompasses a variety of insights (likely divergent in both the social and political senses), we could turn to the development of a model accompanied by a collaborative visualization tool that allows the public to interact, pose questions and do online “what-if analysis” that can be recorded and played-back. [1]

One of the main the kinds of modeling technologies we have in mind include the agent-based modeling simulation and analysis environment. This modeling environment allows for encoding a variety of factors, including:

• Rules of behavior (of both actual and virtual entities such as people, property, traffic flow or existing law)
• Assumptions about future growth and behavior
• Virtual operating and interaction environment (that allows users to constrain or loosen actions to real-world conditions)
• Rules for conducting “what-if” analysis of new evidence or possible outcomes
• Real-world sensors; new sensor-based simulation capabilities even allow modelers to capture and reflect human emotion and a broad range of behaviors (both rational and otherwise) that can increase the fidelity of these virtual interactions

Another requirement for community-based collaboration is a visualization tool that allows the community users to interact over the same presentation of assumptions, modeling results and geographic information systems (GIS) data that helps orient us to the “real-world.” One low-cost GIS tool that has found initial success is in use by Texas A&M University’s Sea Grant Texas, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Delaware-supported Cape Henlopen Regional Plan to conduct community-based collaborative planning for better understanding coastal watersheds and sea-level changes. The implementation details for an example of this sort of tool, weTable, are worth reading but beyond the scope of this blog post. The figure below depicts the weTable.

The “weTable” in use during a Texas Sea Grant project. Picture credit to NOAA and the Texas Sea Grant Project.

These are the kinds of technologies and tools that allow us to come together as a community rather than keep us apart in our separate, “idealized” political environments that seem to split communities. Users would thus collaborate to produce not only proposed legislation, but also empirical evidence of the proposal’s ability to address requirements (both originally projected requirements as well as those generated in the modeling environment).

Whether any of this scales from a community like Lewes to a state or national-level “community” requires experimentation, but this is worth doing to improve the likelihood of success in collaborative law and policy.

There are some distinct advantages to these kinds of experiments. Such a system could allow users to:

• Control for bias and undue influence (e.g. model edge-driven media attempts at “public persuasion” and politically-driven campaign contributions)
• Provide filters for information overloaded concepts and terms
• Reduce waste of precious financial resources through low-cost highly-collaborative experimentation
• Better cope with disparate backgrounds and emotions
• Generate better and increasingly novel questions about assumptions and outcomes

We’ll talk in more detail more about these new kinds of decision-support tools in future posts and how they can help generate better and more objective lines of inquiry. Maximum objectivity is a fundamental key to Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age.

We also think that asking the “right questions” and seeking objective results and outcomes are the basis for better collaboration and interaction to produce policy and law that help us understand the increasingly complex world in which we live. Objective inquiry can help us overcome human bias and prejudice, a factor we must explore in addressing the second question posed in Section A: “Why are we reluctant to embrace new opportunities to collaborate (politically)?”

In proposing an answer to that second question, we’ll talk about how much power, influence and access to money sway those who resist using these tools and how much they would have to give up in a political or organizational setting. That’s for next time…

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 4/18/2014.

[1] A recent, though early example of this sort of approach actually did take place in the Lewes, DE area, as described in the Cape Gazette article, “Technology, talk allow towns to tackle ‘wicked problem’,” of 3/18/2014. This article describes some of the planning objectives, collaboration processes and technologies involved.

Harnessing the Tools of Collaboration, “Section A”

– Creating Collaborative Law, Part III, Section A

NOTE: Due to the length and technical nature of this post, there are two sections: A (this post) and B (a more technical discussion that immediately follows this post in sequence).

We’ve recently written a lot about collaboration and cooperation in producing common good for America. We’d like to think it’s straightforward to see what collaboration has to do with creating effectively implemented law and policy. After all, people have to interact with each other, whether in full agreement or not. How else do we achieve some level of cooperation and willingness in order to find ways to produce a meaningful common good that extends beyond the individual self?

Americans have been collaborating for centuries to produce what has become today’s United States of America. We’ve found ways to cooperate and produce the freest and most participative forms of economics and government known to history. However, many of us sense something is different now – collaboration and agreement have become difficult to achieve. The current environment for equal access to opportunity in America is diminished from what it was even 20 years ago.

We’re going to explore the current environment by posing and attempting to answer two key questions that reflect on our ability as a nation to Fulfill the American Promise in the Connected Age:

• How can technology impact our potential to collaborate? (discussed in this 2-part post)
• Why are we reluctant to embrace new opportunities to collaborate (politically; discussed in next week’s post)?

Technology has created an almost limitless fabric in which to communicate. In the “days of old” a political leader [1] relied on newspapers, local surrogates and a whistle-stop or two to communicate a message. Today they can almost drench the electorate with information right from their offices. [2] In fact, the trick now is to figure out how to wisely engage the electorate to avoid confusing or irritating them.

But it’s really a two-way street. It’s now easier than ever for information to flow from the constituent to the political leader. Sometimes the data come from sources outside their jurisdiction and leaders must discern the relevance from that perspective as well: does it apply to the local constituency or the national…or both? Different income groups may attempt to fill cyberspace with specific positions. This can generate a bias that even the most objective implementations of technology are hard-pressed to overcome.

Applying technology to enhance a collaborative process is messy at best, much like freedom and democracy are described through the ages. Unfortunately, while the tools and technologies are in fact emerging, we’re a long way from having the will and experience necessary to harness the full potential of this two-way street (really super-highway) of information; there are currently too many barriers, social and technological.

Most in the Center feel we must overcome these barriers and build meaningful and accurate information environments to support enhanced collaboration between voters, political leaders and the rest of the nation. Carl heard an interesting insight about the reality of these barriers in a talk given by United States Senator Chris Coons (DE) this past weekend during a community meeting in Lewes, DE.

Senator Coons pointed out that the media, congressional staffers and lobbyists often work aggressively to keep our congressional legislators from talking to each other and sharing information that might lead to collaboration. This is a disappointing insight about the reality of the barriers, particularly coming from someone recognized as one of the most collaborative and objective members of Congress. This begins to address the second question we posed above, but it also informs the way we want to respond to the first question.

We’ll address the technical aspects of the initial question we posed above in a separate piece that immediately follows this one, what we are labeling Section B. As an introduction to Section B, however, we’ll note that the new tools to which most Americans now have access offer the potential for much greater participation and inclusiveness than ever before; these new Connected Age tools can bring us together in ways no human has ever experienced. But, as most technology solution consultants do these days, we propose to start small — a thought experiment that might suggest an eventual prototype.

Imagine a community, perhaps a town like Lewes, DE (2,841 population, 2012 statistics) which wants to go beyond the usual public hearings and city boards to rigorously test proposed legislation affecting an important city function: say zoning from commercial to residential. This can be a divisive issue at the best of times.

There are clearly multiple stakeholders and positions involved when it comes to zoning any community, particularly one which prides itself in striving to balance history, tradition and diversity (as reflected in the Lewes Core Values). How might we better use Connected Age collaboration tools to pose relevant questions, model processes and outcomes and project solutions that lead to balance and preservation of core values?

We’ll answer that question and further address our initial question about technology in Section B of this post. See you after the break!

 

[1] Many call these “leaders” simply politicians, but we’ve decided to emphasize (perhaps challenge?) the positive and present the function of leadership to persuade our elected officials to behave like leaders in a political and social sense, serving on behalf of the nation rather than themselves.

[2] All too often this is politically dogmatic information rather than objective insight about how new law and policy actually support perpetuating American freedom, security and opportunity.

Creating Collaborative Law, Part II

Part I of this latest series on creating opportunity through collaboration and cooperation referred to the process of coevolution among the Federalists, Anti-Federalists and a public interested in the governance of America in 1787 and beyond. Coevolution involves multiple interacting entities, typically organic when thought of in biological terms, and the behavior that results from these interactions is typically described in the concept of emergence.

In his 2002 deeply insightful review[1] of the principles of emergence, FAPITCA contributor Harold Morowitz pointed toward some of the arguments we are making in this blog. Perhaps the most important was in his chapter on “Science and Religion” where he noted, “We have to give up on the simplistic approaches. The world is far more complicated than was envisioned by earlier philosophers.” How true this is in the Connected Age!

While the entire first chapter of The Emergence of Everything is dedicated to defining emergence, we’ll sum it up here with the contrast provided by Harold: “Emergence is then the opposite of reduction. The latter tries to move from the whole to the parts… The former tries to generate the properties of the whole from an understanding of the parts.”[2]

We want to propose that almost all law and policy in our current times has been approached from the reductionist perspective. The two parties, more or less, each have their own starting assumptions as to what law and policy must be in order for our nation to succeed. This drives them to visualize the “finished” law or policy first and then reduce it through the political process to derive the components of the law. Unfortunately, in this era of our nation’s governing history, this visualization process seems to be consistent with a polarized political process that motivates party positions.

This assumption that there is only one approach, particularly when driven by the arrogance of political dogma, is akin to a scientist establishing a hypothesis and then in the experiments that follow only accepting evidence that supports the original hypothesis. This is not how our nation’s science and technology research has achieved so much…it’s also not how our nation’s best laws and policies were produced, including our Constitution. We had differences in 1787 to be sure, but a desire to collaborate and achieve on behalf the nation drove the process and the emergent result…the edges did not control our politics in that time.

Anyone suggesting today that edge-driven policies are somehow more in alignment with our historical political processes either seeks to deceive or is not fully informed of our nation’s history. In either event, such an approach hurts our nation and rejects the value of science and reasoning in leadership.

If there is a science of emergence (and there’s good evidence there is from reading Harold’s book) this science can also inform how politics in our nation can work more effectively. Emergence is a product of interactions of constituent parts that produce a higher level behavior that works…the fact that it works demonstrates emergence’s special relationship with coevolution. The two go hand-in-hand to produce a process or product that is competitive for survival and gets the job of life done. That’s what we want for good law and policy in this nation: get the job done.

We want law and policy that is collaboratively created through the interactions of competitive parties…loyal oppositions, if you will.[3] We want law and policy that starts with assumptions about what’s needed to make our nation work better and become even greater. Then we want to test assumptions in a fair, representative and collaborative way. We want to grow success through emergence, just like life has.

We do not want law and policy that starts from a dogmatic position, informed by the strict rules imposed by the edges of a political party that is incapable of or unwilling to collaborate to emerge law and policy that offers maximum access to opportunity for everyone. We do not want to reject the diversity that our new generations of Americans have to offer in this Connected Age and marginalize them from the process before they even get a chance to enjoy the quality of life we boomers inherited.

One final note on the value of thinking about law and policy as an emergent process and product: Harold Morowitz proposes that emergence is nature’s pruning function, “which extracts the actual from the possible.” If we can somehow harness the process of emergence in our nation’s development of law and policy, we are actually making the political process far more natural and adaptive (and even infused with a meaningful dose of humility). This may help us overcome the arrogance of political dogma. We may be able to prune the best from the rest and facilitate more Americans feeling included, empowered and part of our political process.

In Part III of this series, we’ll demonstrate the convergence of some of these scientifically-derived processes with the tools of the Connected Age to show how better law and policy may emerge. With the world around us becoming ever more complex and the behaviors of many interacting forces descending upon us (including both social and environmental forces), we need to be far more collaborative and yes, science-based, in developing a political culture that brings us together rather than tears us apart. That’s for next time…

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 4/11/2014.

 

[1] Morowitz, H. J., The Emergence of Everything, Oxford Press, NY, 2002.

[2] Ibid., p. 14., It’s also worth noting that the remainder of the book provides rich examples of many types of emergences that greatly inform a broad understanding of emergence as a scientific concept (even its own discipline, in some ways).

[3] At this point, most in the American Center would accept modest respect and civility if loyalty is a bridge too far for the edges.

A More “Democratic” Democratic Republic

Connecting to the Principles, Part 5

In the months of discussions leading up to starting Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age, we debated a lot about what to say and how to say it. As much as possible, we wanted to avoid specific political positions. We wanted to expose and discuss in detail the problems we faced as a nation when we allowed ourselves to be governed from the extreme edges, whether right or left. Also, we didn’t want to rely on one party’s interpretation of the “correct way” to govern and develop policy.

It would have been easy to criticize attempts to close the government over fringe-led positions against health-care, just as it would have been easy to criticize the very methods used to create the current health-care law. The various factions of media (red, blue, “neutral”) have all presented their versions of critiques of Congress and the Administration. Rather than piling on more criticism, we wondered about the effect these critiques had. We wanted to know how they resulted in productive change in our system of governance.

Admittedly, we haven’t introduced a lot of insights on issues like that, other than try to expose both sides of the extreme edges for what they often appear to be: power-loving men and women seeking to serve themselves before the nation. We have recalled a few instances where our nation’s leaders could actually get along and sufficiently agree to create and maintain America (e.g., the Continental Congress). We also highlighted what is possible when Americans emphasize unity, shared sacrifice and progress rather than division (e.g., the United States in World War II and NASA from the 1960’s through today’s time).

Regardless of a given party’s dogmatism and over-confidence about “being right” that pervades the fringes of at least two political parties, no one person can know everything. We can think and do the best we can, leveraging a proper dose of humility, and try to move our nation forward. And it appears we do that best when we connect with each other and keep the communication lines open. That’s why the Connected Age part of this website is integral to the blog.

With this post, we are going to start focusing on the Connected Age side of FAPITCA for a bit. In keeping with the title of this piece, we want to look at ways to create a more inclusive “democratic” way to do politics and policy development in America. We want to explore techniques and tools that bring us closer together as a nation rather than pull us further apart…ways that expand access to opportunity.

A recent article in the NY Times, Web Fiction, Serialized and Social, got us thinking about web-based governance. This is hardly new, as E-Government and Web-Based Government Services have been discussed and implemented to varying degrees in recent years. Anyone who has visited My Social Security knows how much access to information Americans can have concerning their own individual role in the economy, for example. This type of access relates to personal information and is typically subscriber-based at an individual level.

We all subscribe in different ways to the success of America, however, and most of us don’t have a lot of individual and collective input to the process…yet. Next time, we’ll tell you how we think we might enhance the opportunity we have of Fulfilling the American Promise using the Connected Age tools available to us today. We think this approach might actually minimize the extreme edges, incentivize better politics and policy development and make us all better citizens at the same time.

If you’re into homework, take a look at the kind of technology that a tool like Wattpad offers (from the NY Times article) and see what you think. Hint: look at the title of this post again! Until next time…

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 3/25/2014.

Editor’s Note: Also starting with this post, we intend to take Harold Morowitz’s advice from a couple of weeks ago and start writing shorter pieces. If the Message is the Medium as Marshal McLuhan noted, we want to help our readers get the message through a more accessible medium!

Compliments to the Complements

Connecting to the Principles, Part 4

Millennials have sought to build a social life that is more visible, more networked and more transparent than any generation before them. To be sure, Gen Y’ers and even Boomers have used online social networks in numbers that would likely have surprised anyone 20 years ago…some might say “everybody’s doing it!” Millennials have grown up connected, however – that’s why they’re also called digital natives. The effects of all that connectivity compose the basis for one of our main premises in Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age.

There are some important questions to ponder about all this though. What are the effects of an online social life? Are we over-connected? What are the consequences of the new forms of connectivity in terms of the future of collaboration? How do we make collaboration work better in the connected age?

These are some of the questions we posed to ourselves as we articulated the Principles last month. We thought long and hard about collaboration when postulating that competition and compromise are key complementary components of our political process. We also thought about collaboration’s effects on capitalism the way it’s practiced in America. We were driven to think about this because our current Congress seems to have forgotten how collaboration works, even though we see business succeeding more and more through collaboration in the connected age.

So with this post we’re looking a little more closely at the complementary relationship of compromise and competition and the resulting outcome of improved collaboration in the connected age. We’re also examining how this improved collaboration is exploited by Millennials. Focusing on connectivity, a look at collaboration through this lens helps us better understand why competition is good, and so is compromise. If we learn how to balance the two, in collaboration, we can rebuild the American Center and perhaps even draw more from the extreme edges back to the Center.

Just to review, a complement is “something that completes something else or makes it better…or makes perfect.” While we’re not describing a perfect relationship in our thinking, we are proposing that competition and compromise work together…complete each other…to make it more likely for collaboration to succeed. If we only rely on competition of ideas or ideology to improve our ability to lead, and in the process avoid compromise altogether, we are destroying the potential for collaboration to work…that’s not leadership.

Since we’re all human, none of us can get it right all the time, no matter how strong the ideology behind our beliefs. There aren’t even two sides to most arguments in Congress so how is it even possible to be right all the time? How is it possible to think only in terms of the “other side is wrong” and has nothing to contribute? How did the concept of compromise become a negative? If we could answer these questions collaboratively we might find a way forward. Fortunately, at least two US Senators are trying to address these issues…that is leadership.

The “normal” way of doing business in Congress in recent years appears to be built on only competition, spurning compromise because that is allegedly some sort of sign of weakness, or failure to be responsive to a particular voting base. But that’s not how our nation came to be. In 1775-1776, ideas competed but the Continental Congress recognized that compromise made those competing ideas stronger when effectively blended. The Founders inherently understood that successful collaboration requires that compromise and competition work together to improve the chances of achieving good policy and valuable outcomes.

This isn’t just the case in government, either. In the FAPITCA Principles, we proposed as an objective that “American capitalism is largely based on the complementary functions of competition and compromise between buyers and sellers in the market.” This means that one party, sellers, provide value to the other party, buyers, through a complementary relationship that brings together a market that might not otherwise exist. This happens in the normally collegial world of academics, as well. Value is added through the synergy of compromise and competition.

The Millennial generation leverages their digital native nature through their online social life and has benefitted from the effects the synergy of competition and compromise has on collaboration. At any early age, they began to play online games together and discovered the power of cooperation and compromise to overcome the big “Boss” adversary in each level of the virtual world in which they played and interacted. Typically, they never even met their playing partners.

Millennials have friends, by their definition, on Facebook that they’ve also never met and yet still share ideas and learn from each other. The same is true to a considerably lesser degree to the older generations but it was tougher since it was like learning a new language at an older age. Millennials grew up with speaking this language!

Competition and compromise are the effects of the digital age that the digital natives have accepted and in which they now thrive. The consequences of this life (the life of the generation from which we’ve borrowed the Boomer and Gen Y environments, as we discussed in the last post) are leading to fascinating findings that will soon be informing the growth of the American Center.

An appreciation of this change is happening everywhere but the halls of Congress, apparently. The Boomers squatting on the edges of that hallowed venue have just not sufficiently learned enough of the lessons of connecting in this age. They have not learned the value of compromise as a complement to competition to make it possible to collaborate on issues like healthcare, employment, immigration, the environment, redistricting, campaign finance, military missions and expenditures, social welfare and almost anything else we could imagine. What collaborative tools they have at their disposal if only they could truly immigrate to the connected age!

Unfortunately, we’re not prepared to say that any effects or consequences the digital natives are experiencing in the connected age will flow into the halls of Congress and State Houses anytime soon. They all think they are connected and doing the peoples’ business using the tools of social media like the Millennials. The problem is they’re primarily using these tools to get reelected, and all too rarely to take care of the nation and their constituents. That’s the biggest difference between those so-called political-digital immigrants and the digital natives of the Millennial generation. That’s where leadership will come in, but that’s for another post – we’ll get to that soon!

Next time, we’ll be publishing our first guest blog post…from a real Millennial! We’re delighted to highlight the perspectives of the real future of America, and hope it opens the door to more posts from the generations younger than the Boomers who are currently the “caretakers” of America. It’s time that the learning and sharing flow both ways.

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 3/11/2014.

Resisting Demography: Then and Now

Connecting to the Principles, Part 3

In the introduction of a new book, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials and the Looming Generational Showdown,[i] author Paul Taylor notes “Demographic transformations are dramas in slow motion. They unfold incrementally, almost imperceptibly…”

Thanks in part to the connected age, we see changes differently than we did before. We now see that more minorities vote more often, we observe greater acceptance of social change than was possible even 25 years ago, and of course, the widening gap between the very rich and the rest of us is increasingly evident.

One wonders if King George III and the British Parliament of the 1760s – 1770s experienced this same phenomenon of changing demography that our nation’s government is experiencing today. Without the benefits of the connected age, it was far more challenging to process the changes that were occurring. Clearly, George didn’t understand the price he would pay for failing to grasp the shifting demographics of the time.

There are many statistically-based reasons for the demographic impact Taylor describes but in the end it is about change. America has experienced a great deal of change throughout its nearly two-and-a-half century existence. Fortunately, we usually dealt with change sufficiently well to maintain our global reputation as the Land of Opportunity. Even today, we still offer an environment for new opportunities available nowhere else in the world…so far.

Why only “…so far?” Up until the last couple of decades, we had a more resilient political system that could normally, somehow, cope with change and bounce back without long-term, systemic dysfunction (the Civil War was one glaring example). We were able to generally cope because we tended to embrace America as a platform for freedom, security, opportunity and growth (even if we were less than universal in application). Politics, money and personal power were somehow sufficiently mitigated to allow the “public interest” to generally prevail.

We, by design or by a wonderful accident, made sure (at least in theory) that almost anyone who was born here or came here from another land could have the same opportunity to succeed (or to fail). Obviously we sometimes fell short of that mark, but at least we were better at it than other nations. Of course, that was back in the day when competition and compromise could stand as complements instead of opposites!

Here’s a question, though: Has America of the last 20 years or so begun to look like King George III’s England? The American political system and too many of its voting citizens have been clinging to a time that existed before America’s current demographic transformation began; they have been pining for the “good old days” that can no longer exist. So did George.

The strategy to cling to this past can damage our nation. It creates a vast internal conflict between our political leadership that threatens to cleave us the same way America broke away from England…where one side took an intransigent position from which the other side had to no choice but to rebel and go their own way.

It was a different time in the 1770s, of course, and the America of the 21^st Century should wake up every morning thankful that our forefathers had the courage and creativity to break away from England and form a “more perfect union.” But the lessons we should learn from England letting America slip through her fingers should help us understand what could happen to a future America if our leaders don’t behave more like our Continental Congress than the Congress of 2014.

Lest we mistakenly think that it was easy to make this change and revolt from England in 1776, we should remember that a same, or even greater, level of disagreement existed between members of the Continental Congress who wanted independence and those who wanted reconciliation. It was not an easy decision, nor was the outcome confirmed until the final vote was cast.

In an earlier blog post, we referred to a recent work by Richard Beeman, Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor,[ii] recounting the years 1774-1776 leading up to the July 2,1776 resolution vote for independence from England. While we haven’t started doing book reviews in FAPITCA, this one would be a good one with which to start.

Even though we all know the outcome, Beeman recounts as a good mystery writer might, how the final vote took place on the heels of great differences existing only a month before. He shows how a group of dedicated, well-meaning elected colonial representatives finally agreed to step forward and build a new nation. In the end, the two sides set aside their differences, came together in the real meaning of congress (e.g., “make decisions”), and decided that American unanimity was more important than any other alternative.

This was perhaps the most important decision America has ever taken, and the two sides figured out how to get the job done. In a meaningful way, Beeman actually describes a model for our own reconciliation between disagreeing parties today – the representatives of 1776 sought to build a nation and we need our representatives to seek to preserve a nation.

The primary inhibitor to change today is our politics and the people we elected to lead us. Rather than look at demographic change and diversity as an opportunity, they choose to see it as a threat. This is just what King George III and the Parliament of England did in the mid-1700s. They clung to the remnants of a world that was changing all around them and chose to defend that way of life rather than exploit the opportunities that diversity and change were bringing to them and indeed all of Europe at that time.

The revolution we face today is one of demographic challenges to the old ways, as Taylor notes. On the surface, we seem to have one party that is at least open to the changes, but still clings to the old ways of lobbying and lust for power and money. Further, its legislative intent is typically viewed with suspicion in terms of whether it is advancing what is good for America or only the party. They are opposed by a party that almost systemically avoids change unless it benefits a core constituency; it too is subject to the same distractions of lust for power and enrichment. In either case, power and money appear to be at the root. While not all change may be good for us, there must be national debate about change, without a power and money agenda, to intelligently discuss rather than reject it out of hand.

If we want better and more effective government at every level, we have to embrace demographic change and turn it into an energy that lets us elect and influence leaders that can see as far as the Continental Congress did.[iii] We must change ourselves and elect leaders that will guide our nation and communities towards a less divisive path that learns from the past while looking towards the future.

Where England and its political system misunderstood the demographics of the late 18^th Century, we need to learn and transform our politics to better cope. This transformation, enabled by far greater connectivity than the 18^th Century, can lead to a stronger, more diverse nation, with even greater equality of opportunity.

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 3/4/2014

Notes:

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[i] PublicAffairs/Perseus Books, Philadelphia, 2014

[ii] Basic Books, New York, 2013

[iii] The authors recognize that not all members of the Continental Congress shared the same vision of the future, particularly given their disagreements. Beeman does a very nice job explaining those differences and exposing the lack of foresight of many of that original Congress. Nonetheless, the representatives possessed enough honor and commitment to the new nation that they converged on the common cause that created our nation and created a means to eventually perpetuate our nation through the next important event: The Constitutional Convention 11 years later.

FAPITCA Principles: An Introduction

We just established a new page on the website to introduce the initial draft of the Principles of FAPITCA. Our last post, Preamble for Principles, looked forward to the introduction. Our post today is also forward-looking: we’re looking forward to feedback, commentary and most importantly, your help to get these principles refined and more valuable to the work of Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age.

Sometimes, metaphor and analogy help to describe the way complex interactions produce meaningful outcomes. These literary tools can explain why something is important yet hard to describe at the same time. We’re using those tools in this post to introduce the Principles of FAPITCA.

Here’s the big picture:

We believe that most Americans (far more than the “majority”) are looking for a fundamental change to the way we conduct our political affairs at all levels. Americans are looking for our elected leaders to make decisions and actually lead, rather than avoid tackling hard problems because an election is “only” seven months away. We’re all losers in the current approach to government, but the biggest loser in the current way we do the business of the public is our middle class.

With few exceptions, literature and media of the last few years authoritatively tell us that the middle class is routinely losing ground, along with poorer Americans seeking the opportunity to climb into the middle class. The bottom line: No middle class—no opportunity…no America as we grew up to know it.

It’s also a matter of return on investment. The adversarial climate in Congress and too many state houses have fostered a political environment that no citizen of this nation should feel good about investing in. If we pay taxes, whether to the IRS, at the department store or even at the gas pump, we have to doubt the worthiness of the investment we’re making in politics and policy today.

It’s a safe bet we didn’t mean for our investments to empower the conflicts in the Congress and other elected offices of state and local government that “govern” in America (this doesn’t imply the Administration is off the hook, either). The return on too much of our invested tax dollars is hugely in doubt.

We must shift these politically-based conflicts away from being a two-team, winner-take-all competition into which the politics of today have sunk. Somehow, we have to wake up to the reality that we’re all on the same team…that we must practice and play on the local, national and international levels as though we were on the same team.

Though we may favor different solutions to the challenges we face, we are not each other’s enemy. The common enemy we face is the decline of the nation we love.

Here’s a football analogy to help explain the way we see this (sorry…we’re from Texas, remember).

Football and Politics: Not just a Texas thing

The field on which we play is an international arena because that’s the way it is in the connected age…everything’s interconnected to us, including our adversaries. But it’s not really some other nation that’s holding us back from scoring on our current field of play. No, it’s our internal strife that’s holding us back from moving downfield towards the goal line.

Our real challenge is that there are a lot of interacting and competing interests that distract our attention from moving the ball downfield and scoring: this freezes us from deciding the next play. But, every play we run (or don’t) has consequences for America. The opposition doesn’t want us to win because they prefer to see America decline. In fact, to us, American decline is the real opposition…decline is the “team” on the other side of the line of scrimmage.

Some of us may want to pass the ball and some of us may want to run the ball, or even kick. But we have to keep in mind what the real adversary is, and figure out how to beat the decline, not each other. We can’t keep fighting about whether to run or pass. A team at war with itself is a losing team.

We have to get back in the huddle, look each other in the eye as fellow Americans, communicate, decide upon and execute a winning play. We have to do this repeatedly, every play, every day!

Our teammates who can’t perform in this huddle and on the line need to head to the bench and cheer the rest of us on to solve our nation’s problems. Any teammate who criticizes another team member for speaking with and compromising with fellow Americans needs to sit the play out on the bench…they’re costing us the game, whether they mean to or not.

Of course, it isn’t really a game, is it? This is our American way of life at stake. It’s the life of the nation we love. We owe it to our family, our friends and to all Americans to execute a winning course of action.

Whether on “the field” or off, many of us from varied political perspectives have great ideas. The trouble today is that we can’t nurture and harvest the best ideas when we can’t even speak to each other. We don’t need “conservative” solutions or “liberal” solutions…we need the “best” American solutions that we can all embrace and make work. That’s the American way to get return on investment!

The Objectives section of the Principles of FAPITCA discusses the complementary actions of competition and compromise. Together, they are the energizing components of our political process and indeed American capitalism. Understanding and leveraging this fact is how we can work our way out of the swamp in which we find ourselves.

Briefly back to the analogy…

Here’s How We “Tackle” the Problem and Score:

First off, let’s get back in the game. Let’s all contribute to Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age by first playing the same game and by playing for the same team. Let’s energize the Center of America and use the best tools of democracy and capitalism—competition and compromise—as complements.

Secondly, we’re done with analogy and metaphor for the time being. From here on, we talk specifics like Mission, Values, Principles and Objectives. We’ll discuss how to operationalize these specifics. FAPITCA is about practical solutions that bring us together in the new American Center. The blog posts that follow this one will expand on the Principles document and reflect your ideas and comments. Time for you to get involved now!

Originally Posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 2/20/2014