</a>Options for global governance: the Holbrooke Option Selection Quotient

Considering All the Strategic Options (Part #13)

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The challenge in determining how to process potentially available information is what might a viable option look like? And in whose eyes? How to be sure that a viable option is recognized? And what if two or more non-viable options together trigger a creative response that enables a viable option to emerge (by analogy with binary weapons)?

A major lesson of the financial crisis of 2008-2009 is the totally unforeseen, and extremely rapid, transformation in the status of giants of the conventional economy -- General Motors and Chrysler -- from motors of the economy to beggars in need of a safety net. But the question is whether the range of management expertise on which those giants can draw enables them to envisage anything more than "business as usual" -- and whether government has access to the imagination and expertise to encourage them appropriately to do otherwise.

Metaphor is much used in selling new approaches to management and policy-making. Thus a former editor of the Harvard Business Review authored a book entitled When Giants Learn to Dance: the challenge of strategy, management and careers (Rosabeth Kanter, 1989). Another by Dudley Lynch and Paul Kordis is entitled Strategy of the Dolphin; scoring a win in a chaotic world (1988). Is General Motors capable of "learning to dance" to the sound of a "different drummer" in the words of Henry David Thoreau, "however measured or far away". The phrase was echoed by M. Scott Peck (The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace, 1987) in contrast with his study of the "people of the lie" (People of the Lie: The Hope For Healing Human Evil, 1983).

Who are the GMs and Chryslers of the "option production process" -- whose strategic insights are considered "too big to fail"? Is that a reason for the repeated convergence on "more of the same", notably in Afghanistan? Those complicit in the process seemingly include:

• intelligence services (including information from interrogation)
• think tanks: policy, strategic, military (Meta-challenges of the Future for Networking through Think-tanks, 2005)
• policy groups (Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, etc)
• eminent advisers (retired security/military specialists, etc)

There would seem to be no process whereby large numbers of options are collected, held, refined and commented in a common database (a WikiOptions or a WikiStrategies) -- one that is open to a wide variety of creative input. This would be a complete contrast to that ensuring premature cognitive closure as illustrated by Fig. 1 above. Such a database could then be subject to data mining techniques (notably using intelligent agents) to identify viable new possibilities -- the "green shoots" of genuine strategic recovery. It would also give all concerned a sense of what was on the table and why -- and what was not, and why. [A major step in that direction has been the compilation of the online Global Strategies Project profiling some 30,000 strategies of significance to various international constigtuencies.] This possibility is discussed separately (Global Solutions Wiki, 2009)

Such an approach would go far to guard against the risks of dangerous groupthink and tunnel vision. It would also ensure that alternatives are juxtaposed with conventional proposals -- avoiding the accusation that alternatives are systematically ignored (Framing the Global Future by Ignoring Alternatives: unfreezing categories as a vital necessity, 2009) .

This frames the challenge as one of "insight capture" rather than "insight exclusion" -- currently engendering "electronic middens" outside cyberdomains into which insightful creative chat and listserv waste is dumped. Such middens may be fruitfully mined -- preferably now rather than by a future civilization.

Any assertion by such as Richard Holbrooke, that all the strategic options have been considered, should perhaps be evaluated in terms of a "Holbrooke Option Selection Quotient" (HOSQ) -- namely an estimate of the percentage of extant or potential options that had been effectively open to consideration. The challenge for governance would be to ensure that the Quotient is increased from 0.6% (as in Fig. 1) to a healthy proportion -- perhaps 30-40%. As an example, when the flaw in the mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope was discovered in 1990 some 25 proposals were put on the table as possible strategies for remedial action. Creative response to unforeseen crises is not facilitated by focusing on predetermined "more of the same".

As with IQ, a higher HOSQ could be considered a measure of organizational creativity and intelligence -- or as a measure of organizational learning capacity. Any such measure should however be integrated with an indicator derived from the slope of the S-curves, namely the delay in time between crisis recognition and global response, namely a measure of policy lag. The examples of the delays between isolated recognition of Thai tsunami vulnerability and Italian earthquake prediction highlight the problem. Given the fatal delays in emergency response once the disasters struck (as with Hurricane Katrina), such indicators should also be related to indicators of the institutional capacity to act on crises rather than simply to predict them (Remedial Capacity Indicators Versus Performance Indicators, 1981).

In a NATO context, for example, it would seem curious that the organization of rapid emergency response facilities are so ill-equipped to respond to non-military disasters (NATO's Split Personality: Why The Rapid Response Force Is Not Fully Operational, Atlantic Review, 6 September 2007). Curiously the delays in response to the Italian earthquake disaster of April 2009 were immediately preceded by the NATO Summit in Strasbourg -- headquarters of Eurocorps, the multinational army corps within the framework of the European Union and NATO common defence initiatives, declared operational in 1995.

Ironically, in the case of the Italian earthquake on the occasion of the NATO Summit, more police and resources were probably assembled to contain the protesters in favour of consideration of alternatives, than were marshaled in rapid response to the disaster. This offers a splendid example of the capacity of the purportedly best coordinated institutions of governance to respond to emerging crises -- even when scientifically predicted and marked by foreshocks felt by all over a wider area. -- al the while engaging in processes of self-congratulation and expansion. For what other issues does this offer a powerful metaphor?

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