Analysis | Did email kill the diplomat?
(Yes)
This article is part one of a miniseries on the relationship between technological innovation and diplomatic practice.
It is part of ISD’s series, “A better diplomacy,” which highlights innovators and their big ideas for how to make diplomacy more effective, resilient, and adaptive in the twenty-first century.
On a warm May day in Paris in 1865, nearly two dozen delegates from Europe, at Napoleon III’s invitation, gathered in an ornate room in the Quai d’Orsay, home of the French foreign ministry. They would establish by treaty the first formal supranational body, the International Telegraph Union, tasked with ensuring common standards and interoperability in the rapidly expanding area of electronic communication. It’s easy to see why the technology forced international cooperation — before copper wires carried messages, it took trains, ships, and horses months to deliver a message. Over a century and a half later, the ITU (now the International Telecommunications Union) still coordinates standards and is arguably one of the most pivotal governance bodies on Earth.
Just as the telegraph forever changed life in the mid-nineteenth century, so too did frictionless and instant digital correspondence in the mid-twentieth. Thanks to networked computers, the second decade of the twenty-first century witnesses a diplomatic corps that is more concierge, less local guide, more travel agent, less agent provocateur, more Siri, less Sherlock Holmes. Could diplomats regain their lost status as experts in foreign affairs, skilled operators in persuasion and bridge-building, chief correspondents in a complex world? The first step will be to recognize the problem, the second to rebuild systems that focus on the task and not the individual.
The death of remoteness
Thousands of miles from Paris and a century after diplomats gathered with Napoleon to form the ITU, engineers at IBM’s New York headquarters designed an interoffice mail replacement system that let users send each other messages, using the volume of mail to gauge how much server capacity they would need. Within a week, the mainframe crashed under heavy use. Prometheus-like in their innovation, they had unleashed the uncontrollable force of email on the world of work. Having removed nearly all friction from sending messages, IBM employees sent orders of magnitude more notes to each other.
A wise elder-diplomat once told me that email forever robbed envoys of the agency and value they once had — an idea I initially dismissed as hyperbole. How could a single technological innovation, one that largely iterated on telephones and the telex, fundamentally alter an entire profession? I changed my mind after reading Georgetown University professor Cal Newport’s treatise against the scourge of digital correspondence, A World Without Email. Newport argues that we should reframe the way we look at email: it isn’t an iterative improvement on earlier work processes, a new interoffice mail, rather, it is a fundamental shift in how we organize knowledge work. Less a tool that we use, and more an event that happened to us. Newport argues,
The issue is that we tend to think of email as additive; that the office of 2021 is like the office of 1991 plus faster messaging. But this is wrong. Email isn’t additive; it’s ecological. The office of 2021 is not the office of 1991 plus some extra capabilities; it’s instead a different office altogether — one in which work unfolds as a never-ending, ad hoc, unstructured flow of messages, a workflow I named the hyperactive hive mind.
The hive mind (Star Trek fans, rejoice in your shibboleth) is the blizzard of messages that flood screens incessantly, each pinging off the next with little prioritization or thought, every item an obligation that colleagues look to shift as quickly as possible (see Newport’s excellent re-enactment of the dreaded meeting schedule volleys below). Instant messaging tools are simply parallel email systems, more alerts and pings: WhatsApp, Slack, Teams. The largely frictionless and costless apps, warmly glowing in our hands, prove a siren song too powerful to resist. The result, Newport documents in detail, is chaotic, inefficient, and yet inevitable — absent a methodical intervention.
The Grim Reaper of autonomy
In a bleak windowless office in the State Department’s headquarters in Foggy Bottom in the mid-1990s, engineers received $32 million to upgrade the oldest cabinet agency’s computers, forever altering the American diplomat’s reality. No longer were envoys required to have an in-depth understanding of strategy and objectives; they could simply ping Washington at a moment’s notice for more guidance. And foreign governments were a bit less foreign — simply a keystroke away from D.C. When such a powerful tool is haphazardly layered on a reflexively risk-averse cadre of foreign service officers, the temptation to check with senior officials before almost every decision can be overwhelming.
“Shouldn’t greater coordination with higher-ups and Washington be net-positive?” you might argue. In theory, better communication ought to mean closer collaboration, but in practice instant messaging erodes the need to deeply understand mission objectives — we can outsource the bigger picture to someone more senior, and senior still, until we reach the cabinet secretary.
An apocryphal entry in the Foreign Service Journal warned in 1971:
To apply automation without either imagination or planning could truly threaten to make the computer master over human beings […]. [Resulting] from unbridled automation which creates confusion beyond the abilities of either man or machine to control, unravel or rebuild.
Yet, there are better ways of organizing ourselves. Thanks to Newport’s work, I began using the deceptively simple yet richly useful Kanban system, which software teams have used for decades to great satisfaction and outcome. I employ Trello, though any similar application, or indeed even a white board with sticky notes, will suffice. At its center, the system divides work into projects, then projects into individual components, which are further divided into tasks, which are worked on by individuals.
We need a mega-Kanban board for the State Department — one that places the emphasis on the task at hand rather than the merciless hum of activity for activity’s sake. A return to the tradition of empowering diplomats in the field will have the dual benefit of more informed decision-making and better execution.
In the meantime, perhaps we could all count to ten before pressing send on a message and force ourselves to acknowledge our role in the problem. When you’re in bumper-to-bumper gridlock, you’re not stuck in traffic, you are the traffic.
And finally, an ode to the meeting dance from Newport:
“We should meet. Let me know when works for you.” “Should we shoot for next week?” “Sounds good to me. Generally speaking, Tuesday and Thursday are probably best.” “I’m sort of swamped those days. Friday?” “Sure, when?” “Morning?” “Maybe I could do 11:00 if not too late?” “I leave for an off-site meeting around then. How does the following week look?” And so on . . .
Zed Tarar is a career member of the U.S. Foreign Service who currently serves in London. He is a contributing writer for The Diplomatic Pouch.
Disclaimer: While Zed Tarar is a career U.S. diplomat, the views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of State or the U.S. government.
Read his recent posts on State Department reform:
