 With that, I'd like to thank all of our panelists. I believe that our lunch is ready, and you should go ahead and get your lunch, come back to the tables, and we'll reconvene in about 30 to 45 minutes. So that we can finish our conference, get your last piece of cake for the day. I am very pleased to be able to say that our next speaker, Leon Firth, is the former National Security Advisor to Vice President Al Gore. Following 11 years as a Foreign Service Officer, Professor Firth joined then-Congressman Gore's staff as Senior Legislative Assistant for National Security, focusing on issues of arms control and strategic stability. As the Vice President's National Security Advisor, President Firth served simultaneously on the deputies and principles committees of the National Security Council, alongside the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the President's own National Security Advisor. After retiring from government service at the conclusion of the Clinton administration, Professor Firth came to the George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs and leads the project on forward engagement. Professor Firth holds a bachelor's degree in English and a master's degree in history from New York University, as well as a master's degree in public administration from Harvard. It is my great honor to introduce my friend, mentor, and colleague, Professor Leon Firth, who will talk about the next steps uniting foresight and policy in governance. Leon. I told you that there's a lag while the words assemble themselves on some marshaling line. Topic that I picked, uniting foresight and policy in governance, really now reverts back to bracket many of the questions that came up. Where would you put it? Would it be brick and mortars? How responsive to the politically hot issues of the day would it be? How would it be relevant if you successfully separated it from the sexiest issues that confront it in administration? All these sorts of things, which I don't intend to get into, I'm going to stress certain very basic ideas. One of those ideas is that we need to do this. We need to find a way to organize foresight into the output of a system. We need to find a way to involve the output of that system in the way that our national policy is made, and not as an afterthought, not as something that you plug into the thing at the very end of the process, but as something that is plugged into the system at the front end, the middle, and the back end of the process, and you're going to have to find a way to figure out how to do this in a very difficult political climate, and you're going to have to make decisions about whether you can afford to wait until the Congress will enable it by a massive new piece of legislation or whether there are ways to begin to do it, and hopefully in the process begin to bring the Congress along with some changes of its own that might make it a richer experience for members of the legislative body than they now have, and which could gradually build towards the point where we might hope that the proposition that we need deep reform in the government could be entertained in a way that permits political forces to reach agreement and compromise, which of course is not the way in which the system currently operates. And so I think I want to talk about those elements. By the way, as a teacher, I used my graduate students as a learning device for me. After I did my best to teach my students each semester how to think in this mode, I then presented them with a series semester by semester of things that I wanted them to think about that would try, that would possibly begin to answer questions that I was interested in myself. And you can find their papers. I'll give you the website, www.forwardengagementasoneword.org, and Evan, if you go into that, where would you look? Graduate seminar. What you would look for would be the collection of semester papers, which each class did collectively after we had finished about two thirds of the semester. And it's interesting because the very first scenario I wrote for them 10 years ago said you have a president-elect who sends a letter to his chief of staff saying the United States is at the very zenith of its powers. But there could be things out there that we are not watching that could catch us unprepared. And I'm not really satisfied that we have a system that's capable of catching that. And I'd like a wise person's panel to prepare for me an idea of what some of these forces might be and also to suggest ways to improve governance so that it has a better chance of detecting them at an early moment. And then successive classes begin to examine the different modalities. So you will find a paper in there that looks at umpteen different ways to organize foresight inside of the executive branch, including the question of whether it should be a dull us to insulate it from White House politics or inside the White House compound. Should it be virtual or should be brick and mortar, all those things. And these are well done discussions. You'll also find a discussion of how to create a foresight cycle in Congress. It's interesting that we got all the way through that without my knowing that there is something in the rulebook in the Congress that should, if it were imposed, create the market for this kind of thing. But in an event, the students looked at a single entity for both bodies, something for the House and Senate uniquely, a push me pull you involving the Congress and the executive branch, all of these modalities. And I'm very proud of their work. When I read these things, I concluded that I would be proud to carry their conclusions back into governance if I ever went. And I'm suggesting that if you want to find a lot of well presented thinking about and how do you operationalize these things, have a look at this body of papers. My assistant is sitting right at this table, that's Evan Faber, and I'm about to say something dreadful to him, which is maybe we should think of organizing this stuff in a way that makes the principal analytic conclusions accessible to people who are now inspired to try to figure out how in the real world you would go about creating these institutions. Now with respect to foresight in the executive branch, there are a lot of ways to proceed on a pragmatic basis. I believe that the president has a sufficient legal authority to run his own shop. Pretty much as he sees fit. And when presidents do that, it can result in some pretty dramatic operations. For example, Clinton assigned to Gore the job of responding on reinvention of government. Before that was over, there were several hundred people working in the new executive office building across the street from the White House, and they had virtually all been secunded from different parts of the administration. It was hardly any new hire to make that system work, and when it had done its job, everybody reverted back to their assignments. Nobody had to go to Congress to do this. Now, if you look at the assets that a president has within the White House, there are quite a few. It depends on how he uses his own staff. If you look at how the staff of the White House is organized, it's basically organized to help run herd on the legacy system of government that we have. What happens if you get it in your head, or the president gets it in his or her head, to use the White House staff to try to achieve a more networked approach in the executive branch? Well, one of the things he could do is use the chief of staff differently to try to get a more team-like approach in the cabinet. The British cabinet will occasionally organize itself into teams of cabinet-level people who address specific themes or challenges. Our cabinet is a photo op. That's all it is. But that's not all it could be. All the better, because it doesn't exist in the Constitution, and there is sort of a free field to design how you would ask your cabinet officers to operate. I only have a few minutes, so I can't start reaching into examples of how this can be done, but it can be done. It needs to be done. It's sort of silly not to be able to meld the resources of government starting at the secretarial level. You need a system inside the White House to give the president situational knowledge of where the government is going and how to move it in a certain direction. You could simply by the way in which you populate meetings dramatically alter the way in which information moves around. If for example you exclude intelligence officers from certain kinds of meetings on policy, on the grounds that they shouldn't be messing around in policy, well then you're also denying the intelligence community the ability to understand what it is you need in order to formulate and monitor the policy, and so they can hardly be blamed if they're not looking for it or don't find it, and the knowledge that you need is not available in real time, just in time intelligence data. And so simply by making sure that you have been talking to intelligence people as participants in governance, you can change the responsiveness of the intelligence community and in effect teach it to anticipate what is going to be needed by way of its product rather than have it sit around waiting to be told that it was too late to do any good, and I know I have dealt enough with this problem on my own operationally to feel that what I'm saying is correct. So in the first instance what it boils down to is situational knowledge for the president. Now one of the things that happened is that to my astonishment I discovered that there were some 37 people in the executive branch who are known as czars. It's a terrible misnomer because the czar is supposed to be someone who has absolute knowledge and absolute power. There are no such things among czars, they have partial knowledge and very limited power, but their presence scattered through the government at least concedes an important point, and that is things are too complex to be mastered by the normal linear or silo-based system that you need people whose field of vision is lateral and cross-cutting. But the problem with this arrangement is that it is scattered, random, not systematic. So one of the things the president could do is try to use this concept of people whose authorities are laterally defined in a systematic fashion and create a venue for them, have a look at where they are located relative to the president, relative to the cabinet officers, and think that corporately this group of people, if they were properly situated, would contain among them the body of knowledge that you as president most need, which is a collective awareness of where stuff is going, coupled to a sense of timing and pacing. So that's one way to use the materials in hand, illustratively, to achieve a better real-time and laterally dispersed sense of what is going on. The other problem is how to deal with the longer-term future and with the impact, A, of short-term decisions on that longer-term future, and B, the responsibilities that you have to try to provide for the needs of those who come later in the course of the decisions that you make on a short-term basis. How do you visualize and conceptualize that? And that, of course, is the subject that we are here to talk about. It's the focal point of the recommendations in this book that has been released today. The point I want to make is it is doable. I mean, in the first instance, you have to get beyond the prejudice that says it's too complicated. It is not manageable. It had better be manageable because otherwise, as I tried to point out before, we are going to be overrun and overtaken by events. I mean, our destiny as a country is now really coupled with the question of can we think long while we are forced to act short so that there is some kind of balance between what we do because we must and our awareness of what it brings to the future. None of this can succeed. Oh, by the way, we now, as you know, there are these series of reports, the national strategy of the United States issued by the President under statute with an X number of days, theoretically, after taking office. And then there are strategy statements by the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of State, the Director of Central Intelligence, unless it's moved to the ODNI function. None of these are synchronized. You would think that the President's statement of national strategy by law would be top of the queue and that the other statements of strategies would be designed by law to fit. And as the Congress would be interested, it's the Congress which has demanded this kind of reporting, the Congress should be interested to see the fit and finish of these different visualizations of national strategy inside the context of the President's own statement of what the national strategy is. It would make a great way to create an agenda for oversight. And what is the President said his strategy is and how Mr. Secretary of Defense or Madam Secretary of State, how do your departmental view actually meld with the national view that has been articulated for us and which is embedded in the administration's request for funding, which leads me to the relationship with the Congress. You can have an executive branch, let's say, which thinks perfectly in these systems. But if it can't communicate them with the Congress, they will go nowhere. Because in the end, the President proposes and the Congress disposes. Now, one of the great problems here is that if an administration learns to think and express itself on a programmatic, thematic basis, it's still dealing with the Congress that is ultimately writing a budget on a line-by-line departmental basis. That's a different language. How is it possible for there to be, even if there is goodwill, a communication between an executive branch that speaks this kind of new analytic language holistically, whole of governmentally, and a Congress which is still thinking in terms of committee and subcommittee and legal jurisdiction, ultimately tied to appropriations? We've got to find that methodology, have to find a way to communicate with the Congress on terms that both understand because otherwise the Congress will simply take this wonderful product that we're imagining that the executive will produce and pound it flat in order to make it fit the Congress' agenda. It goes beyond the nastiness of partisan politics and the will to destroy that one sees in partisan politics and it goes to the question of do they at least speak the same language some time? And I think care has to go in to start looking for what that common language is. Now, one of the things that could happen is that Congress could start to clean up its own act. Those of who have been around long enough automatically snicker as soon as you hear that it's in the category of comes the revolution, there will be nothing but peaches and strawberries and whipped cream. But from time to time they do it. And one question is can you not at least suggest a way in which the Congress can deal with complex pieces of social legislation? And the answer is yeah, you can. Some of the students came up with what they call component, what is the clip of component? What component level implementation process? And basically what it said is let's say you have a 20 year objective in mind. In their case they have given the year they were writing, they took how conversion of the United States to a hydrogen fuel economy. A 20, 25 year process. How do you deal with that in a Congress which is operating on very short cycles and can essentially reverse itself all the time? Answer, at least tentatively, design the thing in chunks, various plateaus, give the Congress the opportunity to see what has been done, try to design it around chunks of a progression that are useful to do in and of themselves even if you don't go any further. And so they looked backwards from a hydrogen economy and said what do you have to do to get there by 20, 25 or whatever the state was. They analyzed those in physical terms. They then said well here's what the money could buy. And then inevitably the Congress is going to have a look at it. So why don't we agree to have a look at it in terms of chunks that we buy? And we evaluate the chunks for their own sake and also we evaluate whether to continue on towards the larger goal. That was their idea of clip. I don't know of any better approach to this problem and I then had them present their ideas to a number of retired legislators who said yeah, under the existing rules you could break things into components. You could lateral them out to committees and you could reassemble them at the other end and what's more we've seen it done. And so again the flexibility to do these things exists in the rules as they are. And so at least one doesn't have to think of creating new rules. One has to think only of getting the existing rules used to maximum effect which is a lesser problem, though a huge one. So what I'm trying to say is we really need to do this. We are in a hole that's getting deeper. We are being out thought by our rivals. The margins that we used to have in this country for making mistakes have disappeared. And so the idea that we can just sort of blender along I think is a luxury that we can't stand anymore. It really is urgent that we consider how do we plan for the future because we're the only damn country in the world. Certainly of our stature that barrels along into the future as if it would take care of itself while everybody else in the world with whom we compete is out there making sure that the future turns out the way they want it to. That's my definition of a losing game over time. So we need to do it but the second part of the message is it is doable. And over the time that I've been working on this so many conversations that I've started have been with people whose opening premise is it's too complex it's too wide open even if we concede that you should expand the definition of national security nobody can handle it. Well hanging concentrates the mind. This is doable. There are systems to manage it. Okay. Except and the need for it is present. I think that's the starting point for change and I hope it's the end point of our discussions here. Leon has graciously offered to take questions. So if you have any left now is the time because I'm running out of grace. Yes go ahead. What troubles me is that's a bad sign. Yeah. No I agree with the need for the management system but but the biological analogy that I made earlier I think is key to designing the strategy for intervention. And it's I think it's important that people understand the the push here and it'll poke out their dynamic of complex adaptive systems. And so our strategy for for evolving these solutions cannot be the typical linear economic based stuff that we that we're that we're sort of especially people who are my age and older who are running the system are accustomed to thinking in terms of it's you know you and I have a long history of discussing these things and and you know that I agree. So we gotta we gotta get into the nitty gritty of the tools that that enable us to do that. It matters whether you're using an age and base model or a fitness landscape or or a network analysis or some of these other gaming tools that that rely on I don't even know what to just you know the the production function and all that stuff. It matters because they do not that the traditional analytical tools do not speak to the dynamics of complex adaptive systems. You're absolutely correct but I have to revert to what I wish had been my native language to express it. Anybody here familiar with the term Mishigas? Okay it's Yiddish for nuttiness laced with stupidity. You know our politics is based on a linear conception of the world namely that for every problem there's a solution. Usually the solution set begins with elect me to office and then all else will follow but the premise is my policy my unique policy identified with me and me alone will solve uniquely this problem and it will go away forever. I'm not sure how we get away from that but in a serious approach to these problems one has to recognize following the the insights that are offered by complexity theory that every step we take to solve a problem will move the problem someplace else that there are no solutions there is only the responsibility of permanent awareness of what is happening and a permanent effort to adapt in a timely way to what needs to be done to deal with it and the knowledge that this is a horse you can never get down from. That's one. Two is that these systems cannot be looked at as if you could twiddle one knob and expect predictable changes at the other. What complexity theory teaches you to think about is that everything is simultaneously interactive with everything else this can drive you nuts but on the other hand at least it warns you away from the view that there is a master fix which can be identified and then modulated to produce a predictable proportionate response. Think how much blood and treasure we have sacrificed on the theory that there is a master fix for a big problem only to discover that it just leads on to something else much bigger. You had a question. I'm Dan Gibbons independent consultant. You know I have worked with the project a little bit in a minor role and I have to say I don't agree with the idea that there is no unitary configuring vision possible for this system. I think that's what's lacking actually. In the Cold War we had a vision, a threat we identified, we had an orientation towards it, a posture towards it, you know a constitutionally based posture towards what we wanted vis-à-vis this system, this condition and we moved forward on those two prongs to I think a fairly evolutionary successful conclusion. I think that when we're thinking about restructuring here I'm not so sure that we might be looking at both a different environment but on some levels a unitary element must be identified in order for us to configure this system, institutionalize this system as we're trying to do. In the end you have to take action. There has to be a plan and people have to be assigned responsibility for what happens if the action doesn't work out the way you you anticipated and so from that point of view I agree that you have to consolidate around a system that people don't understand you can write the rules for it and so on. What I'm getting at is to find an antidote for a system that was designed for the world that no longer is. We need a system for the world that is becoming and one of the problems here is when you talk about 21st century government nobody knows what that is. We're just completed the first decade of the 21st century. How do we know what the second third fourth and nth decades of that century are going to look like? The only things we can say with some certainty is that our problems are complex they're global but complexity is not an empty term it's a term with real meaning and it has consequences for the way in which you think about the problems the way in which you gather and share information about it the way in which you gather and share information about how the system is handling the problems and hopefully even the rate at which you you change your approach and it also therefore does have implications for organization. I mean governance under these conditions cannot continue to look the way governance has looked to this point and the question we're really discussing is what should be the evolutionary shifts in our government to better enable it to appreciate the possibilities and to recognize the actualities of what is going on then we can presently. Okay thank you. Pam? So I will go look at those papers that you recommended from your students but I have I like this idea of chunking but it's almost a new science in itself because I didn't hear the critical word you like the new idea of what? Chunking. Chunking things up. Right. So in other words like if we could have a center let's say that did a futures approach and really looked at a range of scenarios and came up with a complex adaptive system way of looking at things that looked at the poking and prodding and kind of tried to come up with not a single answer but a family of answers then it's almost a science of how do you chunk that back into its pieces and I think that's an interesting piece of science that I don't think anyone's ever thought about because it's going to make a difference how you chunk it the temporal part of that everything will make a difference if you come all the way back down it may not come back up into the hole that you thought it was. And but my in my opinion the student insight that you could break it into units such that the units represent a progression towards an objective but such that each unit in and of itself has its own value so that if the congress decides to trash the program 10 years on into the future you've got benefit from it. That's that's something we don't think about doing but many of the of the national projects ahead of us actually have very long lead times or if you go back to the question of energy when we talk about the need for smart grid we're talking about something it will take a very long time to create even if they were not the problem of dealing with 50 state laws concerning the regulation of electric power grids plus the national laws plus the existing infrastructure plus the race of new technologies which make it uncertain which are the best to choose and so on. You I mean what really boils down to in more elegant language is we have to learn how to legislate on a systems basis which we don't. I'm a department of energy complex adaptive system modelers so you hit the right example there because really that's exactly what we're trying to do in a sense is saying trying to vision what it's going to look like in the future and then trying to figure out what the current situation how we're going to chunk it I just think it's almost an interesting science to look at that chunking process and I think that's something maybe some students should be looking at. Well I suggest that you look at it in terms of the legislative cycle as well I mean there's no way that you can escape the fact that Congress can change its mind and always does but maybe you can reach agreement that will buy a chunk and then we'll figure out whether we got what we wanted out of that chunk and are we still of the same mind that we should proceed. They do that after all let's say in some forms of defense purchasing if you're going to buy an aircraft carrier you can do I think five-year funding because you're going to have to buy a reactor lay a keel do things that can't be accomplished in a short period of time. We'll call it chunk science. I like the idea of becoming a chunk scientist. Okay other questions. Okay well then I think we ought to thank our speaker this afternoon and I want to thank Leigh Ann. I want to thank all of our speakers and panelists today. I also need to thank some other people Evan Faber from GW for all of his assistance. I need to thank obviously from PNSR Jim Locker and Ray Tang, Dale Pfeiffer, Elaine Banner, Richard Weitz for a lot of the support they have given me now for a long long time. Our host David Bertot who was unable to be here today and Tara Callahan who's right here from CSIS who helped us and of course our sponsor Walsh College and Stephanie Bergeron my boss who paid for our lunch today. And finally I need to thank my core team of the vision working group Bob Polk and Dan Langberg, Patty Banner, Elaine Banner, Kailin Ford, Richard Chasdy they're all almost all of them are here today and the task team led by Jim Burke, Chris Wakehoff and John Maher and John is also here today who helped us with those very complex scenario development activities and the national academies who really stepped up to the plate as well. I think as we develop the steps that will be needed to bring much of these ideas to reality and establish hopefully something like the center and the capabilities that we've described today. I also hope that we can count on the assistance of many of the people in this room because you're really the community that we're going to need. I think the world expects the United States to remain a leader. I think we can't do this unless we're strong and I think our strength is limited if we can't find a mechanism to infuse the foresight capabilities we need in our governance structures. To learn more about our project and keep up to date with our process and our progress please visit the website at www.pnsr.org. I want to thank you all for coming today and wish you a good afternoon.