Analysis | How new ideas can reboot the State Department
And why we need them
Zed Tarar
This piece is part of ISD’s Fall 2021 blog series, “A better diplomacy,” which highlights innovators and their big ideas for how to make diplomacy more effective, resilient, and adaptive in the 21st century.
As I crossed through Glasgow to the COP26 climate conference on a clear and crisp November day, the earnest enthusiasm among civil society and diplomatic delegations gathered at the exhibition center was palpable. The U.N. framework offers the best path towards limiting global warming, and while cynics may deride the process as political theatre, few can deny the progress thus far, even though much work remains.
Yet one theme is ever present, whether the issue is climate change or conflict or trade: governments need to employ new ways of doing business and bold ideas to meet the challenges of the 21st century. This means re-examining assumptions and discarding old axioms. It means harnessing the power of expertise and maximizing innovation. The State Department’s new “Ideas Channel” comes not a moment too soon. The new initiative promises to give the State Department’s talent pool a method to harness “good ideas” as Secretary Blinken put it in his recent speech at the Foreign Service Institute.
The new channel is a step in the right direction, but for it to work, the State Department will not only need a new mechanism for cultivating ideas but a new appreciation for them. This will require a culture shift, as I have argued before. While adding this new process was needed, so too is the subtraction of barriers, both formal and cultural. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman notes, “to achieve change in behavior, there is one good way to do it and one bad way to do it. The good way to do it is by diminishing the restraining forces, not by increasing the driving forces.”
To this end, the State Department needs to create an environment in which new ideas are welcomed and a culture of growth and learning blooms. That is, a place where sound bets are rewarded even when outcomes fall short of expectations and where colleagues “stay curious about new routines to try out,” and “rethinking cycles are routine,” as Wharton Business professor Adam Grant writes in his recent book, Think Again.
By current measures, the State Department falls short of a learning culture. Recent Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys show fewer than half of employees feel they are rewarded for innovation. Critics note that the State Department fails to discard outdated policies, even when met with new evidence. And, as I have noted before, the State Department promotes a risk-averse culture that punishes perceived shortcomings while limiting incentives for innovation. The good news is that the State Department’s leadership is committed to reversing this trend.
The State Department will hardly be the first large static institution to transform itself into a dynamic learning organization — Grant’s writing on the subject gives us clear goal posts. “Evidence shows that in learning cultures, organizations innovate more and make fewer mistakes,” he writes, noting NASA went through a similar shift after the Challenger disaster. Grant’s recipe (simplified here for clarity) for learning cultures can be broken down into the following elements: psychological safety with accountability while driving for iterative improvements.
Psychological Safety
“When we see people get punished for failures and mistakes,” Grant writes, “we become worried about protecting our careers” and begin to self-censor, afraid to challenge the highest paid person in the room. What organizations need instead is to detach performance from outcomes, focusing on the quality of the initial bets. Netflix and Amazon both employ this approach, encouraging their teams to take thoughtful risks. Promoting this environment is no easy task, yet, leaning on the work of Amy Edmondson, organizations of all types have achieved success.
Grant puts this on a handy chart.
Accountability
While the term is overused in modern organizations, holding officials accountable for the quality of their bets is nonetheless key to creating a learning environment. For the organization to improve, the focus needs to shift away from measuring outcomes and towards the quality of the decision-making process. A policy decision that rests on the intuition of a handful of senior officials, lacking evidenced-based rigor, should not be rewarded simply because good fortune resulted in a positive outcome. And vice versa, decisions predicated on sound evidence that lead to suboptimal outcomes ought to be seen as learning opportunities, rather than branded as failures. At the same time, a frank culture where individuals are empowered to provide constructive criticism and poke holes in theories ensures rigorous, evidence-based policy design thrives. Grant helps us again with a graphic:
Rethink Best Practices
“Once we’ve declared a routine the best, it becomes frozen in time,” writes Grant, a declaration that most at State would recognize as frustratingly true. For example, writes Dan Spakojny of FP21, “An office’s influence […] becomes tied to the tool it wields, whether or not it is the right one for the job.” Bureaus jealously guard turf and happily torpedo rivals’ ideas to maintain the corporate balance of power. This focus on best practices, assuming a certain method has reached perfection and no longer needs to be reexamined, is the hallmark of a culture that stifles learning. Instead, we ought to encourage “better practices,” as Grant labels them. Replacing the notion, fed by status quo bias, that today’s way of doing things is necessarily the right way with a desire to routinely rethink assumptions and ask the question, “how do we know what we know?” Curiosity needs to replace complacency. The phrase, “that’s just how we do things here,” needs to be banished from the State Department’s gestalt — instead, officials should ask, “is this how we want to do things?”
No Time to Lose
Perhaps it is naïve to think that an emphasis on shifting State’s culture, absent any formal bureaucratic engineering, could result in an improvement in the organization’s performance. Yet, wishful thinking is also at play if one is to assume adding new tools will yield new ideas. Delivering a foreign policy for the benefit of fellow citizens will require nothing less than an agile, innovative State Department. That work needs to start now.
Zed Tarar is a career member of the U.S. Foreign Service and is currently serving 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.
More from ISD’s “A better diplomacy” blog series:
