I had occasion to look at the Report of the Secretary General on the Work of the Organization, and thought this would be a good time to integrate some of what I have learned from working directly with the United Nations (UN), and what I believe could be helpful to the UN as it contemplates “next steps” into the 21st Century. My thoughts are deeply rooted in my perception of how badly governments have failed at governance, and how dysfunctional the Industrial Era approach to bureaucracy and information channeling has become. As the world prepares to migrate to hybrid forms of public governance, the UN's Industrial Era forms of organization and delivery are an impediment to its future viability. That is a challenge I would like to address, treating the UN as the logical hub for my emergent theory and practice of Public Governance (a mosaic) replacing Public Administration (a stovepipe) in the 21st Century.
Below the line is the document I have drafted in full text, followed by a number of links that are not in the document.
When I was selected for an interview to be the Defense Intelligence Senior Leader (DISL) for Human Intelligence (HUMINT) at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), it was General Ron Burgess, USA and Ms. Tish Long that decided whether to accept panel recommendations or not. [Today DIA is under new management — one can only hope that General Mike Flynn, USA, has it in him to clean house, restructure, and start being effective at providing decision support to policy, acquisition, and operations, leveraging what he can control: use MASINT as the bill-payer, and execute full-spectrum HUMINT in M4IS2 mode, while flushing the DI. I continue to believe an Open Source Agency is needed, but NOT under intelligence auspices.]
I learn from every experience, and was inspired by Peter W. in particular, then Chief of Staff for DIA/DH, to the point that after my interview I went home, sat down, and wrote the following in one sitting (polishing it considerably over the weeks to follow). I am including the pre-publication approval letters below because I understand there are still köyün delisi out there who think that just because I have been under non-official status these past 20 years, I have somehow forgotten my obligations.
The single most important graphic in the above work is shown here to the side.
Today I want to focus on one of the fifteen HUMINT slices, the Inspector-General (IG). Although some progress has been made in developing Inspectors General for every agency and department, and in creating networks of Inspectors General both across the federal government and internationally, I do not believe the fundamentals of the Inspectors General have evolved properly, and therefore consider most Inspectors General to be doing the wrong things righter (reactive micro audits) instead of the right things (proactive holistic meta-training and education — integrative program formation).
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Executive Summary:
The role and responsibility of the Inspector General (IG) should be reframed, to encourage the critique of programs from an additional perspective. For IGs in national security, in national competitiveness, and in national intelligence (including education and research) that perspective should hold up as a standard that the IG communicates well to policy makers, acquisition managers, and operational commanders; at the same time that the information provided is relevant to whole-of-government action, serving whole-of-nation interests, with inter-agency and inter-agency transparency allowing for error detection and correction. Such a perspective is assumed to be the responsibility of those higher in a hierarchy, but that is a mistake. It is a perspective that can be applied at all levels, and in fact can only be effective if it is applied at all levels. IGs might be better at applying this perspective exactly because they are in the middle – able to connect operational knowledge with national interest. Just as the General Accountability Office (GAO) changed from Accounting to Accountability, so also must Inspectors General now follow suit: my vision empowers IGs and those they support by enabling a holistic and integrity forcing function to operate across all boundaries….in addition to inspecting they are sensing, engaging, empowering, educating, and above all, ensuring that the public interest is addressed in a coherent holistic honest manner at every level (strategic, operational, tactical, and technical). Beyond an order of magnitude increase in the IG's value within their individual relative domains, there is an opportunity at the grand strategic level. The ultimate task of a 21st Century IG, in my personal view, is to work as a body whole across all boundaries, to assure the public that its government will always seek righteous ends, administer cost-effective ways, and live within our means, the public means. St.
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Table of Contents
Historical Gravitas of the Inspector General
Inspector Generals Today (Focus on the USA)
Dr. Russell Ackoff’s Wisdom — Bright Light for Inspectors General
Intelligence is Irelevant
Communications is Broken Beyond Repair
Irrelevant Noise
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Does Not Manage
Inspectors General as the Seed Crystal for Elevating Intelligence with Integrity
What Is the Big Picture?
Appreciating Waste in the USA Today – 50% of Every Tax Dollar
What is Our Starting Point? Intelligence with Integrity, Championed by Inspectors General
Your Aide Memoire came to my attention today. Apart from wishing you every success, I thought to contribute a few ideas.
01 The new meme that has replaced Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) — I taught this to 90 countries including all NATO/PfP and six UN missions in Lebanon — is M4IS2 (Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making).
02 Government is the least important of the eight communities (I used to call them tribes) of information and intelligence (decision-support). The eight communities in alphabetic order are academia, civil society including labor unions and religions, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government/non
03 Governments have failed to be relevant or progressive for two reasons: first, they confuse intelligence (decision support or the outcomes) with secrecy (the method or inputs); and second, most government do not actually make evidence-based decisions, but rather decisions of convenience driven mostly by a mix of ideology and corruption–decisions that favor the special interests of the few against the public interest of the many.
It is fashionable now to talk about data as the new oil (or dirt), and to proclaim breathlessly that the ever-increasing masses of data allow for ever more wonderous things to be done including my personal favorite, situational awareness.
However, no one is yet serious about holistic analytics (which also implies a holistic collection management strategy and a clear definition of both what is to be collected and what is to be done with anomalous data encountered in passing). Neither is anyone serious about True Cost Economics, Man-Machine Translation, Global Near-Real-Time Crowd-Sourcing (for observations, translations, and culturally-grounded interpretations) or M4IS2 (Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making).
I cannot help but recall my briefing to the National Research Council in 1994, when I was asked to comment on the US Army's multi-billion dollar communications plan for the future. I pointed out the obvious: the US Army was assuming that all data would be generated from within the US Army or other US Government systems, and was making no provision for ingesting and digesting data from the 99% of the data sources outside the US Army. Of course they blew me off then, and they still do not get it today, 22 years later.
This is an updated version of the 2002 original, “Citizen in Search of a Leader.” We are now in Epoch B. Instead of leaders, we need facilitators, and the leadership comes from within the larger collective as it achieves ethical transparent consensus.
Summary of Qualifications
America needs a facilitator that is balanced, thoughtful, integrative, supportive of dissent and debate, and above all, educated enough to craft a national strategy for security and prosperity that will stand the test of time. I want a facilitator who is at least as committed to the future of my children as to the passing security and prosperity of the moment. Individuals obsessing on being elected or re-elected need not apply.
In my view as a citizen, there are four areas where the right individual, as a team builder rather than a personal icon, could help America restore its balance. These four areas are: 1) electoral reform, 2) intelligence reform, 3) global issues & national security reform, and 4) governance reform inclusive of corporate ethics and accountability.
I would sum up the objective of all four reform initiatives with the phrase: “Creating a Smart Nation,Of, By, and For the People.”
