Sunday, November 18, 2012

We Can't Keep Learning and Relearning Things This Slowly, and Succeed

commentary by Roger Erickson

“If the agony we experienced in Iraq and Afghanistan-due to our inability to grasp the nature and scope of those wars-has taught us nothing else, it should have taught us to pay attention to the aspiration of the local people and thereby avoid inflicting pain on ourselves and others”

This was never a problem of available knowledge. Ditto for managing fiscal currency operations.

It's an ongoing problem of sampling, hearing and listening to data already available - far enough in advance to make educated guesses about whom to start trusting differently - thereby changing your pattern of trusted sources in real-time. That defines managing ongoing situational awareness while traversing an unpredictable survival path, and how we chase it well enough to stay within recovery distance.

If you wait for "credentials" to catch on to emerging reality, it's always too late. By definition, that means waiting for people who are experts in obsolete situations to become expert in today's situations. That can never happen in real-time, obviously. It's adequate for historians leisurly writing entirely academic opinions, but not for the people tasked with actually surfing and surviving situations.

Iraq and Afghanistan sure sound like situations where policy people meddled in tactics, rather than defining a worthwhile goal and trusting delegates in the field to rapidly improvise ways to shape the situation to a satisfactory conclusion - relying upon painstakingly tuned and retuned automatic stabilizers (aka, whatever operational reflexes work). The influence of orthodox economics on real-time fiscal/tax/monetary policy sound awfully similar.

Once supposed leaders don't trust their staff, and staff - including electorates - don't trust their leaders, any organization is completely vulnerable to top-down blunders.


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