Collaboration is never easy, particularly when dealing with complex issues like development. So imagine an attempt at galvanizing an entire continent to collaborate for societal change and innovation and the task seems daunting, difficult, if not impossible. Well turns out it's always worth trying and that the results can be greatly inspiring.
I'm talking about The Open Innovation Africa Summit (OIAS) I recently attended, hosted by Nokia, The World Bank and Cap Gemini. Over the course of three days, 200-plus leaders and innovators convened in the Rift Valley of Kenya, Africa to share, connect, and take action toward fostering innovation in and from Africa.
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Facilitated by Cap Gemini's exploratory process, this remarkable body of people broke out into working groups to focus and dive deep into four specific areas:
by Angel Rabasa, Stacie Pettyjohn, Jeremy Ghez, Christopher Boucek
RAND Monograph 2010 242 Pages Free Online or $26
Proactive measures to prevent vulnerable individuals from radicalizing and to rehabilitate those who have already embraced extremism have been implemented, to varying degrees, in several Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian, and European countries. A key question is whether the objective of these programs should be disengagement (a change in behavior) or deradicalization (a change in beliefs) of militants. Furthermore, a unique challenge posed by militant Islamist groups is that their ideology is rooted in a major world religion. An examination of deradicalization and counter-radicalization programs in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Europe assessed the strengths and weaknesses of each program, finding that the best-designed programs leverage local cultural patterns to achieve their objectives. Such programs cannot simply be transplanted from one country to another. They need to develop organically in a specific country and culture.
ISLAMABAD – A number of senior al-Qaeda members who had earlier opposed the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and some of whom were recently released from detention in Iran, have produced an electronic book critical of al-Qaeda's leadership vision and strategy.
The book, the first of its kind to publicly show collective dissent within al-Qaeda, was released last month. It urges the self-acclaimed global Muslim resistance against Western hegemony to open itself to the Muslim intelligentsia for advice and to harmonize its strategy with mainstream Islamic movements.
Google estimates that the Internet today contains about 5 million terabytes of data (1TB = 1,000GB), and claims it has only indexed a paltry 0.04% of it all! You could fit the whole Internet on just 200 million Blu-Ray disks.
Click on Title to Read at Huffington Post and Make Comments.
EDIT of 10 Dec 10 to add missing links and correct typos, this version only.
A Strategic Analytic Model is the non-negotiable first step in creating Strategic Intelligence, and cascades down to also enable Operational, Tactical, and Technical Intelligence.
If you want to drive yourself crazy, read the live twitter comments of an audience after you give a talk, even if it's just to ten people.
You didn't say what they said you said.
You didn't mean what they said you meant.
Or read the comments on just about any blog post or video online. People who saw what you just saw or read what you just read completely misunderstood it. (Or else you did.)
We think direct written and verbal communication is clear and accurate and efficient. It is none of those. If the data rate of an HDMI cable is 340MHz, I'm guessing that the data rate of a speech is far, far lower. Yes, there's a huge amount of information communicated via your affect, your style and your confidence, but no, I don't think humans are so good at getting all the details.
Plan on being misunderstood. Repeat yourself. When in doubt, repeat yourself.
Phi Beta Iota: Add to that cross-cultural, cross-language, and cross-faith blinders, and you end up with face to face that is at best 20% of what you intended to communicate, and out of context to boot. This would be an excellent change in focus for both the US Foreign Service Academy and all the schools pupporting to teach international relations.
Robert David Steele
