Friday, 19 May at 1200 eastern we welcome Adam Oler to discuss contemporary Israel in our Timely Topic series. If you need the link, check the notes section last week or shoot me an email message. Adam is excited about discussing this with us.
I ventured into the District, specificially my old haunt of Fort Lesley J. McNair, this morning for a meeting with a colleague who has asked me to provide feedback on his curriculum. In the course of catching up on a long list of topics, he mentioned the need to shift the location of an international meeting which will occur in a mere three months. My eyebrows drew straight up.
If you haven’t attended, much less organised from scratch, a government meeting overseas, you probably have no idea how many hoops one must cover to execute the meeting on the public’s behalf. Some are policy questions: does the Ambassador for the proposed location approve? Many people misunderstand that as the president’s personal and Congressionally-approved representative in a foreign capital, the ambassador is a big deal in approving or disapproving decisions. Should she say no to a location, a date, a topic, proposed participants, or anything else, then the issue is likely dead. The Ambassador links into the Department of State, speaking for professional diplomats in the approval chain. One can ‘reattack’ a veeto but one is not likely to win if without the ambassador’s approval.
If it’s a Defense Department meeting, the head of the combatant command with responsibility for the proposed location also gets a voice. A meeting in Amman, Jordan, for example, requires the head of U.S. Central Command to examine the proposal for security, timing, interactions with local officials. The Combatant Commander cannot approve if the Ambassador rejects something but she can turn down the proposal which brings it to a grinding halt.
Then there are negotiations with the host country about whether the timing works for them. Again, theoretically, the Embassy staff does liaison with host nation personnel often enough to have a good idea whether a concept will fly before this process gets too far along but one never knows. Glitches well into the process can occur as dates of importance shift on the ground, personnel in attendance become clearer, and/or life happens.
There are security briefings, visas, often passports, and various other clearances to assure everyone who might have a perspective on the question is aware of the event and can offer thoughts on its implications. Moving from Nagoya, Japan to Cairo is not just going to different continents but brings into play many different concerns.
The costs differ from place to place, of course. Oslo or London are expensive locales while Quito is cheaper but probably harder for some participants to reach. What were the hotel arrangements, availability of meeting space/audiovisual equipment, and penalties for abandoning one site in favour of another? What will travel to and from CONUS (the Continental United States) or other locations do the the budget overall? Will the foreign interlocutors speak more freely in the United States or abroad? How about your own folks? Speaking overseas as an American citizen is so much more relevant than we seem to think since others take our words seriously, even if we apparently don’t often enough.
Will the location influence who attends? Uh, yes, it certainly does. Asking a diplomat from the Netherlands to fly to Marseilles is easier than spending eighteen hours getting to Perth, Australia, for example. Multiple that one diplomat by perhaps 150 people at a mid-sized global event. With three months out, keynote speakers are set but can they move? Participants may bring their spouses but will the new venue work for them as well? If not, then the participants may well cancel.
In sum, there are many moving pieces that must play into a revised itinerary or wholly new location.
Our ability to make that transition mandates we have agility, a capacity I treasure in others. Why? Because agility requires maintaining an understanding of and focus on the desired objectives for a conference, a task, an article, or anything else while substantially moving our preconceived expectations. That must be easy, right?
Wrong. Agility is seriously lacking in too many of our intellectual pursuits. We become attached to a fixed method of achieving an outcome, unable to envision a different manifestation of the same effect. Put another way, we become too enamoured either with the means to achieve something (training from Vladivostok to Moscow may be one of the great marvels of our age but completely impractical at most times) or with doing something through a single approach (but we have always administered flu shots in the autumn in anticipation of flu season).
Agility is shifting when one has confronts diminished conditions, often with few options. Agility is recognising the task, the figuring the steps needed to adjust, then executing those steps to accomplish something. It precludes agonising about the lost opportunities in favour of meeting the outcome.
Agility helps avoid the dreaded but ubiquitous ‘paralysis by analysis’.
In our hectic world, regardless where we are, agility is one of the most desirable attributes I can imagine. Intellect is phenomenal but not if one cannot apply it in case of a typhoon preventing a visit to Manila to discuss something with a Philippine official, what value does the intellect play? How will you change the meeting—all aspects of it—to assure you meet the objective? Moving to Zoom, in case of power outages, may not cut it.
What happens when an accident shuts down the route across San Diego that you have taken for 34 years? Sounds easy but what if it’s because earthquakes preventing the power and cellphone grids from operating, while you have no paper maps in hand? Agility gives you the energy, the focus, the flexibility, and the confidence to move between prearranged positions into a new and more appropriate approach.
This all sounds so easy but too often under stressful conditions agility degrades. It’s worth recognising that becoming attached to a single process, perhaps a check list of steps to pursue, can have its downsides as well as strengths.
Government in particular faces this set of trade offs when attemping agility. Every single rule government established protects the rights of someone, every single one. Someone likes the routine, the law may encourage it, and the person providing new ideas might advocate steps inappropriate, if not illegal. None of that can be ignored in public service. The equities of that person are important but may not be as valuable as the end one seeks to accomplish by trying a different approach, going to a revised country, or stepping aside from one method to try another.
But we too often bemoan the lack of agility. We rarely laud examples yet they exist in abundance. Many of the most creative, agile folks do actually work in government because they commit to meeting society’s needs. But they operate within a system established to limit their freedom of action for the sake of creating equity and assuring those aforementioned protections. There are in fact occasions that protecting the public, continuing equity, and acting with agility to accomplish a mission can happen successfully, legally, and satisfactorily.
Trying a new step does not mean government or anyone else is wed to something forever. Instead, agility may lead to undiscovered benefits long term or it may bet through a crunch. It depends on the circumstances. Evaluating those questions is also why we examine past actions for comparison sake much of the time.
I am not discussing agility synonymous with every end justifying someone’s means. We can all call to mind actions done in the name of achieving a better end that are just plain stupid, such as loosening seven million snakes in Hawai’i (currently a snake free environment) for the same of ending birds chirping so early they awaken people. Of course I am draw absurd parallels but for a point.
Agility has its role in our society. We need praise those who exercise it cautiously and appropriately. I am not saying it is a free license but, when I in academic administration for lo, many years, I was more thankful for mental agility in the classroom than I was many other attributes. It allowed the world to go round far more successfully than stifling commitments when confronted by circumstances beyond our control.
I worry we are abandoning mental agility by celebrating exerptise alone. There is a role for both in a successful contemporary America.FIN
Kim, Thanks! Such a better example than any I conjured up. Thank you. Yes, yes, yes.
Great column — I completely agree that agility is an under appreciated superpower! As a meteorologist in Okinawa, I made recommendations on evacuating aircraft and battening down the hatches when typhoons threatened. I often said one of our most important decisions was knowing when we had to make a decision. Acting too soon might cause wasted efforts, but waiting too long could increase the risk to aircraft, infrastructure and people.