Analysis | The State Department’s generalists are withering on the vine
The Foreign Service is losing the perspectives it needs the most
This piece is part two in a miniseries on the importance of generalists to the mission of the U.S. State Department — and how the department’s leadership can work to retain them.
It is a part of ISD’s ongoing blog 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.
As the pace of technological and geopolitical change continues to accelerate in the 21st century, citizens are becoming all the more dependent on their governments to predict and respond to these changes to their benefit. For public servants, and especially diplomats who work in volatile and ambiguous contexts, predicting how policy will interact with the real world is a critical skill, one that requires the right sort of “mental models,” as Phil Tetlock and Dan Gardner write in Superforecasting. “Our expectations of the future are derived from our mental models of how the world works,” they write, “and every event is an opportunity to learn and improve those models.”
An efficient update to mental models comes from diverse experience and from working in an array of disparate domains, which is why teams of individuals from diverse backgrounds outperform experts on their ability to accurately forecast events. When public servants use mental models anchored in government experience alone, they risk allowing noise and biases to cloud their forecasts.
Unlock better forecasting
“Being able to see around the corner is quite important for an organization like the State Department,” David Epstein, author of Range, told me recently. Epstein’s writing weaves together findings from diverse domains, including research that examines creativity, invention, and forecasting abilities. The thesis remains the same however one categorizes the output: teams of generalists, or generalists embedded within teams of specialists, do better at forecasting than specialists alone.
Developing generalists in the first place is critical. One method to encourage well-rounded professionals, writes Tetlock’s in Superforecasting, is to encourage continual interdisciplinary professional development. To that end, he spoke to retired general David Petraeus, former CIA director and head of forces in Afghanistan, on his approach to career development in the military. “Petraeus supports sending officers to top universities for graduate education, not to acquire a body of knowledge, although that is a secondary benefit, but to encounter surprises of another kind,” Tetlock writes.
According to Petraeus, “It teaches you that there are seriously bright people out in the world who have very different basic assumptions about a variety of different topics and therefore arrive at conclusions on issues that are very, very different from one’s own and very different from mainstream kind of thinking, particularly in uniform.”
One of the keys to better forecasting is the ability to break free from “the mother of all cognitive illusions,” as Tetlock frames it. This illusion is what the Nobel winning behavioral psychologist Daniel Kahneman and long-time collaborator Amos Tversky label WYSIATI — What You See Is All There Is. “Th[is] egocentric worldview […] prevents us from seeing any world beyond the one visible from the tips of our noses,” Tetlock writes. Epstein himself echoes this sentiment in Range, “Seeing small pieces of a larger jigsaw puzzle in isolation, no matter how hi-def the picture, is insufficient to grapple with humanity’s greatest challenges.” Whenever a foreign affairs expert might be tempted to make a forecast based on a narrow set of expertise, however deep that expertise might be, WYSIATI rears its head. Whether it is the Sovietologist who is tempted to view geopolitics through a great power lens or the Arabist who sees hydrocarbons at the center of conflict, deep expertise can sometimes interfere with good judgment.
How to strangle growth
Congress has bluntly given the State Department failing grades on its current career development programs, writing in the most recent Authorization Act:
“the Department’s investment of time and resources with respect to the training and education of its personnel is considerably below the level of other Federal departments and agencies in the national security field, and falls well below the investments many allied and adversarial countries make in the development of their diplomats.”
Left out of the Authorization Act is the U.S. diplomatic corps’ culture of eschewing formal professional education and experience outside the halls of government. So aggressive is this discounting of external experience that the Foreign Affairs Manual — the State Department’s bureaucratic bible — explicitly forbids diplomats from including any reference to outside educational institutions or degree programs in their annual review statements. This paperwork forms the basis for career advancement, and yet it actively censors any attempt to acquire new skills. Instead of providing pathways for diplomats to attend business school or a PhD in data analytics, the State Department seems to have installed roadblocks. Secretary Blinken admitted this in his speech at the Foreign Service Institute in late 2021, “We need to empower employees and create more opportunities for advancement so mid-career professionals don’t have to make painful choices about whether to stay or leave.”
Congress itself seems to have recognized this particular shortcoming, writing in the 2021 Authorization Act that the State Department ought to send diplomats to formal programs “at partner organizations to provide useful outside perspectives to Department personnel.” That is precisely what the consulting companies McKinsey and Bain do with their “externship” program: the firms’ talent leave their home offices and are seconded at client or partner organizations to tackle problems while gaining new perspectives. While the State Department has a similar program, the Eagleburger fellowship, its scale is microscopic and the bureaucratic hurdles are painful.
Similar friction is built into the State Department’s sabbatical program (formally labeled “leave without pay”). An impromptu focus group of former foreign service officers told me recently that they had given up on the State Department’s sabbatical system, describing it as unwieldy, confusing, and stifling. “I was told it was up to me to figure out how to make [the sabbatical] work,” one former colleague told me, while another vented, “I wasn’t willing to wait for State to give me permission to do my [new] job, as usual.” While the State Department’s top leadership recognizes the value of letting diplomats broaden their horizons and bring relevant skills back to the State Department, the poor execution of the sabbatical and “externship” programs betrays the bureaucracy’s sinesence.
Now or never
Given the immense organizational challenges inherent to the State Department, the macro headwinds it faces in the knowledge economy, and the bureaucracy’s slow yet consistent atrophy, nothing short of a radical reset will suffice. This reset will need to include a close examination of organizational practices with a tolerance for upending jealously guarded bureaucratic imperatives. My informal polling of colleagues suggests many believe in senior-most leaders’ desire to change the cabinet agency for the better. Yet incrementalism will fail. A radical and swift reboot will be painful and messy, and the window to embark on such a journey may be closing. As foreign policy scholar Eliot Cohen put it succinctly in Foreign Affairs recently, “Statecraft […] entails speed. Acting swiftly is a matter not of doctrine but of mindset, culture, and preparation.” The stakes are high.
Daniel Pink warns us in Drive of the consequences of failure, prescribing a deceptively simple antidote: allowing people to pilot their own careers. He writes, “Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive. In the long run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is expensive — and autonomy can be the antidote.”
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.
Read Part One in our Generalists miniseries.
Read more from The Diplomatic Pouch’s “A Better Diplomacy” series:
