The Price of Promotion

The State Department’s employee evaluation process is worse than terrible.  It is no better than a gamble.

Department of state seal

Consider this career choice: you are a second-tour FS-04 consular officer serving your country in an American embassy abroad.  You have tenure, which means that you’re more or less guaranteed employment with the State Department for the next 15 years.  You are now being considered for promotion to FS-03.  In a bid to speed up the process, the Management Bureau Office of Performance Evaluation approaches you with this offer: you may proceed with the promotion board selection process or, more simply, flip a coin.  Heads, you will be promoted.  Tails, you will not.

Even odds are not great but they’re better than the 2018 promotion statistics suggest you have, which is closer to one in three.  Still, you’re told promotion is a merit-based process decided after rational, impartial evaluation of your accomplishments.  You’re a hard worker and have made no mistakes.  Your peers and supervisors like you and your Employee Evaluation Reports (EERs) have all been stellar.  So you decide to go with the promotion panel.

Everybody in the department believes this, or at the very least, cynically behaves as if it were true.  And it may well be true.  But here’s the problem: social scientific research argues strongly that the State Department’s promotion process produces decisions little better than random chance.  The department has the data available to determine whether panel decisions are indeed correlated with future performance rather than blind luck but it has not used that information to improve the process.

This should alarm everyone and not just those being considered for promotion.  If the department cannot accurately select future high-performers, then we are rewarding people who do not deserve it and punishing those who don’t deserve that, either.  And it means, when it comes to the future leadership of the premier executive department, we are doing no better than throwing dice and hoping for the best.

The EER has a long history.  The Rogers Act of 1924 set up the modern Foreign Service, replacing prodigal heirs populating the diplomatic corps with a professional and meritocratic promotion system.  The 1980 Foreign Service Act instituted new reforms, significantly eliminating the evaluation of a diplomat’s spouse, then almost entirely women, as part of the employee’s evaluation.  The Foreign Service now uses a narrative system primarily devised in 2002, amended partially in 2015, resulting in the goals-oriented, short-narrative EER in use today.

Each year the Performance Evaluation office convenes around 20 boards made up of about six panelists, including an outside civilian.  For six to eight weeks each panelist reviews 40 candidate folders per day, which include the past five years’ EERs.  That accounts for some 30,000 EERs reviewed or more than 200,000 pages in total for each board, a daunting task by any measure.

The best thing to be said about this promotion process is that it is worse than a similar system the Israeli army abandoned in 1955.  Daniel Kahneman, then a 22-year-old psychology graduate, was asked to assess how the nascent Israeli army selected its officers.  The army used a process adapted from the British following World War II.  It involved evaluating a group of officer candidates working together to physically bridge an obstacle.  Here, Kahneman writes in his Nobel Prize biography,

[w]e were looking for manifestations of the candidates’ characters, and we saw plenty: true leaders, loyal followers, empty boasters, wimps – there were all kinds. Under the stress of the event, we felt, the soldiers’ true nature would reveal itself, and we would be able to tell who would be a good leader and who would not.

But the trouble was that, in fact, we could not tell. Every month or so we had a “statistics day,” during which we would get feedback from the officer-training school, indicating the accuracy of our ratings of candidates’ potential. The story was always the same: our ability to predict performance at the school was negligible. … I was so impressed by the complete lack of connection between the statistical information and the compelling experience of insight that I coined a term for it: “the illusion of validity.”

Kahneman, along with his partner Amos Tversky, documented another cognitive fallacy in this exercise: the human tendency to make extreme forecasts based on very little data.  Overconfidence in predicting future performance has been documented in fields as diverse as football, economics, the weather, and the stock market.  It should come as no surprise, then, that predicting future performance of diplomats would be shot through with overconfidence as well.

He continues:

Closely related to the illusion of validity was another feature of our discussions about the candidates we observed: our willingness to make extreme predictions about their future performance on the basis of a small sample of behavior. … As I understood clearly only when I taught statistics some years later, the idea that predictions should be less extreme than the information on which they are based is deeply counterintuitive.

Kahneman subsequently drew up a more objective measure of performance using a numerical scale to rank candidates based on certain attributes correlated with future success in officer training.  It was not perfect but it has remained, more or less unaltered, with the Israeli army ever since.

The similarities between the two evaluation systems are striking.  Like the Israeli army of 1955, the State Department panels rank candidates into three tiers.  Like the Israeli army, the Foreign Service Officers serving as judge and jury over lower-ranking strangers are not human resources professionals or executives with hiring and firing experience.  They are beneficiaries of the same system that selected them.  They have no reason to doubt the process that promoted them and in fact have quite a psychological incentive to perpetuate it.  Kahneman and his disciples were skeptical of expert judgment.  Kahneman cites as an influence the work of psychologist Paul Meehl, who famously determined the superiority of actuarial prediction to clinical judgment in medical prognosis.  Kahneman eventually came to understand the value of training and experience to improve professional judgement.  But the one-time panel members only receive minimal training for their task and rarely serve on a panel again.

The only fundamental difference between the two selection processes was the Israeli army actually observed the individuals being ranked.  The department, using a record of paper, is basing its decision on hearsay.  There is no interaction with the candidates themselves.  The selection process is done by consensus, which means the entire panel must agree on every individual file.  Indeed, officers I have talked to say there is rarely any dissent, that they all see the same things the same way, and that what they are seeing is blindingly obvious on its face.  Kahneman saw the same thing, too.  As he told the author Michael Lewis, “[t]he impression we had of each candidate’s character was as direct and compelling as the color of the sky.”  But he could not correlate these judgments to their outcomes.

The Foreign Service promotion system is explicitly designed to predict future performance.  It is projecting: EERs should tell us who will succeed at the next level and who will fail.  The Procedural Precepts for the 2018 Foreign Service Selection Boards specifically state, “[p]romotion is recognition that an employee has demonstrated readiness to successfully perform at the next highest level.”  It continues:

A recommendation for promotion is not a reward for prior service.  Boards should recommend for immediate advancement only those employees whose records indicate superior long-range potential and a present ability to perform at a higher level.

But as Kahneman demonstrated and has been amply documented from economists like Richard Thaler and statisticians like Scott Armstrong, people are very poor predictors of future human behavior.

In addition to overconfidence, Armstrong outlines two ways people often get predictions wrong.  First, he notes that agreement or consensus is not that same thing as accuracy.  The board process requires each member to rank the top promotable candidates but then, strangely, come to a group agreement about the order of those candidates (as well as those mid-ranked and low-ranked).  Second, Armstrong notes that increasing complexity makes prediction correspondingly more difficult.  Variables and uncertainty, which perfectly describes the Foreign Service career assignment system, make predictions of future performance much less tenable.

All this perpetuates a system governed by subjectivity and intuition, both of which Kahneman and his partisans have exposed as no better than chance.  There is very little objective measurement of performance or potential.  Not even the straightforward U.S. military requirement to tick a box recommending promotion or not is available in the EER.  State Department panel members, already unable to read the entirety of each individual EER because of sheer volume, must parse a hundred different ways raters recommend promotion, looking for evidence of faint praise or lack of enthusiasm.

Performance Evaluation considered these issues, including objectivity and bias, in an declassified 2013 cable.   The cable argued that the Defense Department’s system of numerical ranking was more appropriate to the task of evaluating hundreds of thousands of members of the armed forces.  But if it were simply a matter of scale, shouldn’t there be enough military officers reviewing their peers in similar ratios to Foreign Service boards?  More importantly, it is difficult to argue that the Pentagon is concerned more with efficiency than efficacy when lives are literally at risk if the system fails.

In another unclassified cable in 2015 accompanying the modestly reformed EER, the department attempted to address rank-and-file requests for a more objective performance evaluation system.  The department responded by saying it had conducted external consultations and concluded metric evaluation fed bias and grade inflation.  But these are precisely the problems with the current system as evidenced by the department’s concern with unconscious bias on the one hand and inflation of performance evaluation on the other hand.  A 2017 unclassified cable noted specifically how difficult board members found it to rank candidates who were all, to borrow a phrase, above average.  There is no question about the problem of bias and grade inflation.  The question to ask is which system – narrative/subjective or quantitative/objective – best reduces these biases and has the highest correlation with future performance of employees.

The consequence is a collective, department-wide effort to game the promotion system.  Conventional wisdom among the department rank and file accepts that there is a proper way to write or couch the EER, that deviating from this unwritten rule spells career doom, and that there is absolutely no quarter to be allowed to document poor performance, individual struggle, or personal failing.  The logical outcome of this conventional wisdom should be no surprise.  It produces highly inflated and hyperbolic EERs crammed with superlative performance and exceptional personal achievement, not any rational or reasonable measure of performance or readiness for promotion.  It is absurd, especially at the lower ranks, to expect that all officers will be equally excellent at all things, which is the picture the EERs in the aggregate indicate and about which promotion panels perennially complain.

Given this, the lack of quantitative measurement of performance is especially glaring.  This may not seem important given the depth and rigor of a professional, narrative evaluation.  But quantitative data is the standard measure of performance we get in high school, university, and graduate and professional schools.  High school grades are more strongly correlated than the Scholastic Aptitude Test to university success.  Performance in individual subjects can be aggregated in a grade point average, and that grade point average along with standardized test scores can be correlated with future performance as measured in future grades and earnings.

The 2013 cable notes eight systemic biases without addressing explicitly how the EER and promotion board system are designed to minimize bias.  It is worth quoting in full:

Boards can help to cut through overt or subtle biases at the line manager level.  In addition to invidious general biases (age, gender, race, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, religion), more nuanced types of bias are also workplace hazards.  The [Foreign Service] Board system, by having an impartial objective group, mitigate possible bias.  The Foreign Service grievance system adds additional safeguards.  Bias is simply a personality-based tendency, either toward or against something.

In other words, the boards are impartial and objective because the bureau says they are impartial and objective.

The department has recently required unconscious bias training for selection panel members and has long screened EER drafts for inadmissible information.  This is an important start.  But the panels themselves are structured in a way to protect, not remove, bias.  Panel members are not required to recuse themselves unless they are reviewing a family member.  The panel decision itself cannot be appealed; employees can only grieve language they have already consented to send to the boards.

While the department expresses concern about bias and forbids most explicit (race, sexual orientation, age) and implicit (“staffing” to replace “manpower,” for example) bias, importantly quite a lot of information is still not scrubbed from standard EERs.  Importantly, gender – a legally suspect class specifically mentioned in Equal Employment Opportunity laws and regulations – is permitted.  Additionally, names are also allowed which, in a diverse country like the United States, one can use to make reasonable guesses about a candidate’s religion, national origin, ethnic group, mother tongue, and race.

The department explicitly dismissed calls for a more quantitative or objective evaluation system.  The 2015 cable dismissing a proposal for quantitative performance evaluation specifically endorses a narrative approach and the 2017 cable reinforces it.   Unfortunately, social science research has repeatedly identified the “narrative fallacy” as a flawed heuristic people apply to interpret the past and anticipate the future.  The panels agree, in other words, to build a third cognitive fallacy right into the structure of the evaluation.

The lack of objective measurement lends itself to all sorts of abuses, including watered-down and “coded” language that experienced raters and reviewers use to communicate sub rosa to the panel, while lying to the candidate, that they are not promotable.  I am stunned that the use of coded language in EERs is not only an acknowledged practice but in fact accepted as the price of promotion in the department.  We would not tolerate secret communications from our children’s teachers or guidance counselors in letters of recommendation for jobs or university admission.  If such a practice were discovered, it would garner the same kind of legal and press attention the university admission-bribing scandal recently did.  Raters and reviewers who communicate in coded language are committing fraud.  This subterfuge would not survive an Inspector General investigation, Congressional scrutiny, or class-action lawsuit.

The EER, as a narrative instrument, lacks objective utility at a minimum and otherwise eschews any quantitative measurement of performance.  But this data is not entirely missing. The process has the statistical tools to correlate prior evaluations with future performance and promotion rates but has not used these tools. Promotion panels routinely rank EERs into three tiers and then rank order every EER in the top tier.  This could very easily be correlated with prior and future evaluations and promotion rates, but these ranks are not permanently assigned to individual officers or their EER files.  This is a mistake, the equivalent of grading classwork without issuing a transcript at the end of high school.

The panel’s purview is guided by two massive documents: the “Procedural Precepts” for Foreign Service Selection Boards (31 pages) and the “Decision Criteria for Tenure and Promotion in the Foreign Service,” confusingly also known as the Core Precepts (15 pages).  The Procedural Precepts outline the duties and procedures the panel must follow while the Core Precepts outline the skills and objectives an officer must demonstrate.  The Core Precepts refer to these as “guidelines by which Tenure and Selection Boards determine the tenure and promotability” of officers.  But nowhere in either document are instructions that explain how the board should apply the Core Precepts.  That’s the equivalent of applying the A-F grading system without explaining what distinguishes an A from an F.

There are six Core Precepts containing 31 subsections.  This is simply too much for any one narrative evaluation – the line count is just above 100 – to consider in any depth.  Even if several narratives over the last five years are evaluated, that leaves little more than 500 lines total.  So employees, raters and reviewers must select their most important accomplishments and skimp on covering all facets of the Core Precepts.

Panelists are left to parsing nuance of language, which is simply more noise above the randomness of assignment, location, experience, work product, and outcome, not to mention unconscious bias and writing ability.  How can a panel rationally evaluate a 25-year-old consular officer with no prior job experience working in a nonimmigrant visa mill in Mexico against a 50-year-old second career officer handling American Citizen Services cases following an earthquake in Japan?  How can panels distinguish between competent performance and sheer circumstance?

Fortunately, the Core Precepts actually provide the solution to this otherwise subjective mind game.  Instead of the laborious negotiation over the narrative evaluation, the employee, rater, reviewer, and a peer or local staff member would grade the employee against their peers in a given post on each of the Core Precepts subsections.  The employee would have no control over the grading but would be allowed to see it.  The individual grades and aggregate would be assigned to the employee’s file for future panels to view.

A numerical evaluation has more utility than its narrative counterpart.  It is more objective because in this case the reviewer is rating the employee directly against their immediate peers whereas under the current system the panel measures performance against an unseen global population.  The global view introduces much more noise, subjectivity, and randomness to the process.  A graded system can be averaged over a year, a grade, or a precept; it can be correlated to future performance; it can track improvement; it eliminates sub rosa sabotage (using regression analysis, we could determine whether a particular low rank was within the standard deviation of the other reviewers or prior evaluations).

Any kind of human evaluation system is prone to bias, error, and luck.  The best we can do is find the tools that limit our bias, reduce error, and account for luck.  The current State Department promotion system makes no systematic attempt to do that.  The result is the opposite of meritocratic: it is pure fortune.

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The opinions and characterizations in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. government.

 

Religion, politics, and public diplomacy

Today my interview with the Public Diplomacy Council — the association of retired US Information Agency and Foreign Service Officers involved in public diplomacy activities — was published online. I talked to Donald Bishop about my recent book and some other subjects of recent import in the arena of public diplomacy. I was especially pleased to be able to talk about religion and faith.

Once again I am happy to extend my sincere and great thanks to Don Bishop and the Public Diplomacy Council for publishing this interview.

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Do We Need A Cultural Foreign Policy?

The historical archives of Sarajevo, attacked and burned on Feb. 6, 2014 (via http://www.arhivsa.ba/)

This month in Bosnia-Herzegovina citizens protested government paralysis in every major city in the country, in some places leading to destruction of municipal government buildings. In Sarajevo, somebody took advantage of the chaos and burned the city archives – a terrible echo of the war of the 1990s, when the beautiful National and University Library was shelled by federal Yugoslav gunners and gutted, destroying the entire collection.

This event is particularly poignant given the recent release of “The Monuments Men,” the George Clooney film about an odd clutch of Allied soldiers tasked with saving art looted from across Europe by Adolph Hitler. Such an action may seem superfluous in the middle of the titanic struggle with fascism in Europe and nationalism in Asia, with literally millions of lives in the balance. Indeed, as the movie and the book by Robert Edsel make clear, the treasure hunt was seen by some as a distraction from Allied war aims. But Lt. George Stokes, Clooney’s character, understood the stakes all too well. “If you destroy a people’s history, it’s as if they never existed,” he says. “That’s what Hitler wants.”

Unfortunately, as events in Sarajevo demonstrate, the world’s cultural patrimony faces an array of threats less immediate but all the more dire and insidious for it. And we lack a coherent, coordinated ability to respond to threats to art and culture that measures up to the achievement of the monuments men.

The Sarajevo Haggadah (Wikimedia Commons)

Today the Sarajevo Haggadah – the oldest Hebrew codex in the Balkans – sits in the National Museum of Bosnia-Herzegovina which has been closed for a year, unprotected. The Bosnian national parliament cannot agree on its status as a federal institution and refused to fund it. The Balkan Wars, both world wars and the wars of the former Yugoslavia could not shut down the museum, which until last winter had remained open for 125 years. This is only part of the reason why Bosnians are protesting.

Without funding and support, professional curators and preservationists cannot ttend to their collections and artifacts. Climate goes uncontrolled. Collections are left unguarded and unmonitored. An entire nation’s patrimony is at risk. And Bosnia is not alone in Europe. Due to the financial crisis, the governments of Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania cut funding and closed many or parts of their national museums and galleries. Their collections, too, were threatened.

Direct threats remain as well. When the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan, they ripped out a part of the Afghan nation. When Ansar Dine extremists destroyed the mausoleums of Sufi Muslim saints in Timbuktu, they assaulted an ancient center of Islamic history and Malian identity. It is difficult to justify intervention on behalf of works of art, but it is impossible to say we won’t help restore them the way the Stare Most was rebuilt after it was destroyed more than 20 years ago in Mostar, Bosnia.

But the United States today has no means, no unified institution and no philosophy – in short, no foreign cultural policy – to do what the monuments men did 70 years ago: to advocate on behalf of, preserve and, if necessary, rescue endangered art and culture around the world. What we have now in the United States is a hodge-podge of various agencies, bodies and private foundations – the Smithsonian Institution and National Gallery of Art, the State Department, USAID – each pursuing its own, limited projects without coordination, direction or support to match the need.

Some of these projects are important and noble. For example, the Smithsonian moved rapidly after the 2010 earthquake leveled Port-á-Prince to rescue Haitian art. The Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation provides flexible funding to U.S. embassies to support museums and galleries. But programs like these are small-bore or one-off. The Ambassadors Fund amounts to little more than $5 million per year for the entire world and only a fraction goes to securing the art works themselves.

In my recent book, I proposed creating a public-private entity called the U.S. Arts Restoration Trust to coordinate government and private resources for the advocacy of art and culture around the world. USART would need to work with the State Department, because execution of these projects would by necessity be enabled through American embassies which have permanent personnel on the ground. And it would need to work with private foundations and galleries with the financial resources and technical know-how to help preserve and restore art in foreign countries.

USART would represent, too, an ideological argument in our particular American approach to promoting art and culture. Culture in the United States is not entirely cut loose in the free market, but it is far more so than the rest of the world. American galleries and museums depend on philanthropy, particularly in contrast to their European or Asian counterparts. While the Smithsonian receives some federal funding, most municipal galleries and museums rely on local foundations and corporate charities. More precisely, we have a far deeper and longer history of philanthropy to draw on. When the European arts community was hit by the financial crisis, it was largely a recession of state support, and they had nowhere else to look for funding. As a result, their collections and personnel suffered.

The Ma’il Qur’an, British Library (via http://www.islamitalia.it)

While traveling abroad I saw the Ma’il Qur’an at the British Library, one of the oldest copies of this sacred text in the world. The importance of a library for preserving a codex becomes clear when you hear what senior conservator David Jacobs told the Arab News about the Ma’il Qur’an. “The problem with that particular manuscript is pigments that are quite friable and flaky, so obviously it needs care and attention and constant monitoring of its condition.” That kind of monitoring is no longer available to the Sarajevo Haggadah and possibly countless other irreplaceable texts and art pieces around the world.

When viewing treasures saved by the monuments men or preserved in the British Library, it is impossible to imagine them not existing. But that is because they survived and are protected to this hour. Rescuing threatened art was a mission we assumed 70 years ago and it is a duty we should take even more seriously today.

Gen. Dwight Eisenhower (r), Lt.Gen. George Patton (c) and Gen. Omar Bradley (l), inspect art looted by the Nazis (NARA via DeutscheWelle).

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The Corrections

Graphic of hand-corrected manuscript of 1984 by George Orwell, via GeorgeOrwellNovels.com.

I found an error in Table 7.2 on page 124 relating to languages spoken in the United States. All of the numbers are from the U.S. Census Bureau and are accurate. But French (including dialects) at 1,358,816 inexplicably appears as the sixth-most spoken language in the United States after English. It should be fourth after Tagalog. (Jan. 1, 2014)

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From a friend working for an independent observer mission in Tblisi, Georgia, come the first corrections to my book The United States and the Challenge of Public Diplomacy.

She notes on page 147 that during the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia Russia sent forces into South Ossetia, not North Ossetia, and Carl Bildt is the Foreign Minister of Sweden, not Finland (apologies to Mr. Bildt!).

I am very happy to make factual corrections such as these as well as engage in debate about the more subjective policy proposals in the book and on this site. Feel free to contact me here. (Dec. 31, 2013)

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The Last Three Feet

Hear my interview with The Public Diplomat’s PDCast, courtesy of Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications and its Master’s Program in Public Diplomacy. I talk about working at NATO, my new book, and effective public diplomacy. Many thanks to Michael Ardaiolo for conducting the interview!

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“We have met the enemy and he is us”

(Walt Kelly, via Language Log, University of Pennsylvania)

Attending a conference of public diplomacy professionals and academics last week at the U.S. State Department, a particular comment made by a participant during one of the main sessions struck me. He described the positive outcome of a recent YES Program exchange from Indonesia (if memory serves) with the students describing to him their delight in learning that Americans are not as violent, profane and promiscuous as they have been led to believe from U.S. television and movie exports to their country. Given the small scale of the YES Program (hundreds of secondary students each year) competing with the Hollywood juggernaut, he came to the unavoidable, pessimistic conclusion cribbed from Walt Kelly: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

The most depressing aspect of this observation was not that he was necessarily right but that it passed without comment or rebuttal from the audience made up of diplomats, academics, policy-makers and students of public diplomacy. That is, his opinion — that American culture is a political weakness and strategic liability — has become the fixed, conventional wisdom of the governing class.

This is as dangerous and backwards as it is also plainly wrong. The obvious shame and embarrassment many of our diplomats, scholars and others share about our culture — which hundreds of millions of real people consume and enjoy around the world without coercion — demonstrate an elitism that blinds them to what is in fact a strategic asset. And it keeps them from recognizing and harnessing an extraordinary delivery vehicle for American culture, values and democracy, a mechanism feared and repressed by regimes we stand against.

A glance at the Pew Global Attitudes Project demonstrates, at the very least, profound diversity of opinion about the United States, Americans, American culture, and American values. These opinions do not always appear to jibe, but they are not uniformly low. The pleasure that people get from American film and television is remarkably high, and even in those countries that suggest fewer enjoy our movies and shows, they include a solid minority — suggesting a cultural debate is fermenting there.

These numbers are worth examining in detail. Like all public opinion, they are dynamic and subject to the particular socio-political environment in which they are taken. Pakistan, for example, is directly affected by the neighboring war in Afghanistan, U.S. drone strikes, and American rapprochement with India. Opinion towards the United States in Turkey has taken a bad hit since the war with Iraq and is only slowly recovering. Israel feels strong cultural affinity for the United States as an ally. And so on.

But the larger frustration I felt, as I kept my arm aloft trying to rebut during the session last week, was the point that Hollywood is a platform and megaphone, arguably the largest and loudest in the world. Holding it at a contemptuous distance ignores the potential of working with the Dream Factory to tell stories we want to share with the world. As I have written in my book, when Hollywood authentically captures or broadcasts a foreign culture to international audiences, that faithfulness redounds to our benefit. Why shouldn’t we try to influence how that is done? The Pentagon does.

During the conference last week, participants of all stripes lauded the Jazz Ambassadors and jazz broadcasts via Voice of America during the Cold War over and over again. Did they think America jazz represented this promiscuous, profane, and violent culture? Of course not. But the countries to which those broadcasts and programs were aimed certainly did. Which is why they claimed then that jazz was as poisonous as chemical weapons. Or, more recently, that Disneyland was as radioactive as Chernobyl.

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Pretty Gr8, Embassy London

I was recently forwarded this video, produced by the U.S. Embassy in London to promote to and educate the public about the G8 Summit hosted this week by Great Britain in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland. I don’t have an inside track about who produced it or how, but it surely deserves more views on its YouTube Channel. It demonstrates what a creative approach can do not just for public diplomacy, but for public education on major international issues.

Embassy London produced this short video to explain, literally, the who, what, where and why of the G8. Under normal circumstances, this would be a gold-clad snoozer, a bore-fest guaranteed to fetch a dozen or so views before expiring in Google’s cloud farm gulag.  But something great happened. This video is funny, relevant and informative. It doesn’t take itself too seriously. And the usual Embassy seal capstones aside, it doesn’t look or sound like any State Department official product you’ve ever seen. No wonder Macon Phillips, Director of White House Office of Digital Strategy, cited it as an example of department “best practice”.

It’s worth a few lines to take it apart and understand why this video works so well as an example of virtual public diplomacy.

Why It Works

It’s easy to miss because  the format is so simple. A man reads a text (in English) and a woman illustrates the lecture with a felt pen on a white board. That’s it. For all the high-tech whiz-bang of YouTube, desktop video and social media, you could probably do this at home with your kids and a chalk board.  And the producers have embraced and put those low-tech features to work to their advantage.

The text is fortunately pretty straight-forward and well-read (more on that in a moment). But it’s the felt-pen illustration that really makes this work, for two main reasons. First, obviously, it places pictures to capture the narration neatly and smartly in sharper focus. Just like a good political cartoon. This is NOT EASY – so more commendation to the artist and creative team, whoever you are! It’s obvious that a lot of creative thinking and planning went in to executing this. Coming up with snappy images to contextualize a complex international meeting is much harder than it sounds, and they do that with vim here. State’s got its own little Conrad and Walt Kelly working over there in London.

Second – and this is something else you may not notice on first watching – replaying the act of the illustration introduces a kind of comedic tension to the video.  You sit there, watching and wondering what the artist is drawing, where she is going with that line, and then, bingo, there it is! (You can see another, more graphically sophisticated example of this here.) It’s like watching a comedian set up a joke, and you lean in, waiting for the punch line, and then, WHAMMO!  It’s a clever use of the constraints of the medium.

Still…

It runs a little long. Explaining why the G8 is really the G7+2, or G9-1 (or whatever; it’s still a little confusing) could probably have been done with two or three sentences – organizational history is not really that interesting to the lay audience. Listing every country and international organization participating was no doubt the politic thing to do, but I bet 30 seconds could be saved by listing the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization by its universally recognizable acronym, UNESCO, and the same could probably go for the rest of that virtually interminable (and perfectly pronounced) list. But the accompanying graphic is really impressive, with anonymous faces crushing in around a too-small table labeled “G8” – it demonstrates that “G8” is really a misnomer and that the table is in fact a grand forum for far more countries and international organizations to come together and discuss major issues of common concern. (Just like NATO.)

Finally, since this is an American product, I would expect the Embassy to articulate the U.S. position on issues relating to the G8. Maybe they decided that’s not exactly what they wanted to do with this, that they didn’t want to use an educational product to make a hard sell. But even articulating what’s on the table would not only demonstrate why the G8 is so vital, but what’s really at stake when all these countries and organizations sit down to talk to one another. That, when you think about it, is the real purpose of public diplomacy.

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Winning the Long Game – Public Diplomacy, Public Opinion and the U.S. Elections

What winning looks like (MCT/ZUMA via Mother Jones)

Tuesday’s reelection of Barack Obama confirmed few people’s confidence in American democracy – least of which was the utter failure of $3 billion in “outsider” Super PAC money to effect the overall makeup of the federal government. But the election results did confirm the general accuracy of much-maligned public opinion polling which, with appropriate aggregation and correctly applied judgment, could accurately forecast much of the election results.

 

This brings me to the importance of international public opinion to public diplomacy practice. In many respects, public opinion is public diplomacy, or to be more precise, the entire point of public diplomacy: we engage with the public to change minds and mold opinion. We ask and check and monitor opinion through public opinion polling and surveys, both public and private, in order both to know what people think but also to determine how to change what they think.  It is impossible to think about public diplomacy without understanding and caring about public opinion, polling data and methodology in great detail.

This information does not exist in nearly the kind of depth and sequence that it does for something like a national race or for presidential approval ratings. For a national race, high-quality public tracking data can be produced on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. Information on presidential approval ratings can be produced on a monthly or weekly basis and on a variety of issues. This sort of information, about the United States and a variety of issues, is not available nearly as regularly, nor for as many countries, nor in as much depth.

But they do exist: GallupPew, and (to a lesser extent) the German Marshall Fund all produce regular, multi-national surveys of public opinion on a variety of issues. The data is fascinating and rich and worth spending quite a lot of time reading and absorbing.  Sinking down into the data, as I have, will demonstrate the astonishing diversity and dynamism of public opinion not just around the world, but within demographics, relating to the United States and on a variety of different issues.

But if public diplomacy is about affecting public opinion, then two ready questions come immediately to mind.  Why aren’t those in charge of public diplomacy held to account for the global public esteem of the United States? And, if they are, then why isn’t the public diplomacy apparatus organized and equipped better to change global public opinion?

I found these unanswered questions – or rather, the questions disconnected from solutions – during my time at NATO.  We were interested in public opinion but lacked the resources and tools to understand it in greater depth. We didn’t really know what we wanted people to know or think about us, other than generally to understand and support us.  And we had no real way to gauge how to resource that mission in any event.  I suspect the State Department is in a similar position.

It’s important to note there are imperfect comparisons between public diplomacy and an election campaign. There is no “vote” in public diplomacy, only a continuing series of referenda on U.S. foreign policy and our leaders. And there is little compromising on matters of national interest and prerogative and certainly none when it comes to those whom our people choose as our leaders.

If we told the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy that her job performance was contingent on public opinion ratings, that would certainly tighten her job description and focus her resources. (There are, for example, about 1,000 qualified public diplomacy officers in the State Department. The Pentagon has probably 10 times that number.)  It certainly argues for an organization within the State Department such as the U.S. Information Agency, whose dedicated mission is entirely focused on foreign publics. Unfortunately, it might also lead to the elimination of some of the more popular (and necessary) programs in the State Department, such as the Fulbright fellowships, that have long-term benefits for the United States but less immediate impact.  It might also lead to the accusation of propaganda, if not its outright activity.  Just as with the “air game” during an election at home, the obsession with public opinion may lead us to find an “easy way” to influence foreign “voters”.  An undue focus on public opinion could force our diplomats to succumb to these temptations, like studying to the test.

Perhaps we need to return to the recent election for another model for public diplomacy. It is becoming clear that the Obama campaign won the election through a gritty application of the ground game – a serious, methodical application of organization that found committed supporters and got them to the polls. There is something to be learned from that example. The ground game is also the best public diplomacy: building rapport, strengthening the organization, mobilizing allies, reaching out to the undecided. In the long game, it’s what wins.

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