My piece on the shutdown
Nigel Cameron
Beyond the Shutdown: Five Drivers for the Innovation of DC
October 16, 2013Posted in Commentary
Beyond the Shutdown: Five Drivers for the Innovation of DC
Nigel Cameron
It’s cheap to say “a plague on both your houses,” but what’s clear as the federal shutdown shudders toward a third week is that back of the positions and personalities shaping this piece of disastrous theater lie common commitments to a political culture that is dead but won’t lie down. Part of our tragic predicament is found in the fact, lately exemplified by the plight of BlackBerry and Nokia (and Kodak), that being the pro tem technology leader can mean little for the development of the kind of resilient culture that will drive mission forward in the context of rapid change. What lies ahead, then, for America?
It’s plain that whatever real value has accrued from efforts to innovate Washington’s ways – whether, for example, “re-inventing government,” or more recently the appointment by the current administration of high-profile CTO/CIO positions – the combination of the shutdown and the coincident deep-seated technical and managerial incompetence revealed by the farce of the federal healthcare website offer sharp shocks to our confidence that America – as in governmental America – has quite grasped the significance of the 21st Century. That’s a theme I will come back to, if, dear reader, you have the patience to persist.
These commentaries have never offered prescriptive advice, and they have carefully sought to avoid the naïve but in many (mainly West Coast) circles pervasive notion that “technology is the answer.” “Answers” invariably come from the intersection of people, and systems, and technologies, all alike embedded in a cultural matrix that sets assumptions and expectations and, despite appearances, severely limits the kind of answers that are considered acceptable. So many of the “answers” in this universe will stay adrift in inter-stellar space until someone snags them with the right question. Framing issues, asking questions, invariably involves two operating principles that are rarely espied in the federal city: Looking ahead beyond the electoral cycle (our C-PET rule-of-thumb is 5-7 years); and spanning silos (not simply agencies, or political traditions, but sectors, modes of thought, disciplines, generations, sets of cultural assumptions). Not all properly smart questions drive innovation. But framing them right is a necessary condition.
That having been said, I’d like to argue that there are five fundamental drivers of the innovation of DC, either already in evidence in embryo, or blatant in their absence, or blindly groping toward the goal. They are offered here as keys to the renovation of American governance. Yet each is also set in a global context, and a reminder of the increasingly subtle and potentially fragile context in which American influence is exercised as this century moves precipitately forward – a theme with which we conclude.
There’s no special order in what follows.
First, what I’ve termed “exopolitics” (and been glad to have others, including Michael Nelson and
In brief: The Occupy movement, the Tea Party, the revolt over SOPA, and other recent reactions to Washington’s business-as-usual reveal new fractures and the possibility of fresh alignments in the American body politic. Unlike more traditional grass-roots movements (from environmentalism to social conservatism) they show little sign of wanting to exercise influence over the traditional levers of power within the “establishment.” Indeed, and ironically, this very fact in the case of the Tea Party is a major factor in the current malaise. These movements don’t fit; they are asking questions of a different kind from those asked by standard-issue pols; they are operating on planes that barely intersect with the District. (I discuss this in more detail here. )
This is not the time to be naïve about the potential for success of reformist movements, but anyone who believes the eruptions of the Tea Party, Occupy, and the Internet Party’s SOPA revolt are merely footnotes to recent history is indeed naive. Exopolitics is the name of an ongoing game, and dramatic, dissident incursions into politics-as-usual are going to continue. Welcome to C21, Washington.
Second, the Valley. Silicon Valley, that is. Still the global leader in creative entrepreneurship, and still as little interested in the governance of the nation as DC is in learning from the Stanford-Menlo Park axis (as opposed to taking its cash, in contributions and economic boosters). These two zipcode clusters remain the planet’s most consequent communities, and, as we have argued before, the prosperity, security, and global influence of the United States depends more than most of their denizens could imagine on the extent to which their cultures can be brought into alignment, one degree of arc at a time. And with all due respect, as the pols say on talk shows before they slash the jugular, the efforts that the Valley has made to engage the policy community – from the well-meaning but ungainly FWD.us to fly-in participation in bodies like PCAST (the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which like most grandly-named advisory bodies in Washington matters so much less than its members expect and its title proclaims) to lend-lease exec participation in Plum List administration jobs – may have amounted to more than a hill of beans, but in the scheme of things not much more. This sad healthcare website has a lot to teach us. But it is not, of course, just about technology. It’s about culture, and an innovative mindset. How to bridge the Continental Divide?
Third. The major corporate players continue to play defense. It’s widely believed in the country that lobbyists essentially control the federal government on behalf of Big Business. And they sure can have influence. But standard-issue lobbyists report through the general counsel’s office; the game they play is defensive and short-term. The gap between strategists who work with the Chairman and CEO, and R and D people under the CTO – all working 7-10 years ahead – and the policy people, hired from the Hill and expert at 18-month timelines, is a wonder to behold. In a Moore’s-Law-driven marketplace it’s destructive of corporate value, since rapid change demands foresight to enable current-year decisions. And, of course, it saps the effectiveness of governance, as it offers no counter-weight to the two-year electoral cycle and the inbuilt tendency of political leaders to curry favor with electors. As anxiety over the impact of the sequester on R and D revealed, and most recently evidence of horror at the prospect of a U.S. default on the part of business leaders of all political persuasions, American business has secured much less influence for itself on Capitol Hill than resolute, resilient lobbying groups like the National Rifle Association, the National Right to Life Committee, and the American Israel Political Affairs Committee, which command comparatively minuscule resources. I made this point, politely, to one of the key technology lobbying networks during the sequester discussion, and suggested that gathered in the room were representatives of a million times the resources of the three groups named above, with plants in every district in the country.
I’m not making this up. Scenario 2: I had this conversation with the chairman of one of the top tech companies, who was interested enough to call his chief lobbyist and have him meet me a few days later. As I made this point, he smiled and said he was paid to think short-term; “I’ll tell my boss to read my job description.” 3: Another time, I sat in a room off Pennsylvania Avenue with the CTO and a dozen execs from another top company, and at his invitation laid out the same case. Why no alignment, I asked, between your own company’s strategy, R and D, and approach to policy? His lobbyist, and another lobbyist also in the room, chimed in “he’s right.” Scenario 4: Hiking in the Rockies with a former exec from yet another of these benchmark companies. “We had a big fight about that,” he said. In the end, “we have four people looking ahead on policy; everyone else is focused short-term. Only one of those is in DC. And she’s pretty junior.”
There’s a fundamental commercial rationale for the innovation of corporate America’s approach to “government relations” (which ties in with an offering we are developing for commercial clients, in parallel with our policy side – the C-PET Futures Platform).
And the engagement of corporate America in a vast, sustained effort to push DC’s thinking into the medium-to-long term is one key to driving the innovation of government and the future security and global influence of this nation.
Four. While its impact may have been less pervasive and subversive than many of us had once hoped, the application of information technology both opening government to the citizen, and enabling new levels of citizen participation in government, continues to become increasingly significant. “Open government” is one side of this equation (opendata.gov is the best example). Social media and more formal channels such as POPVOX are the other side. While “Government 2.0″ is no panacea, and while some naïve advocates see in technology a route to direct democracy rather than the renovation of our representative system, we are opening new channels both for information and communication that have begun to renovate government. Some individual politicians have shown skilled awareness of this new way of doing business – for example, from right to left, Darrell Issa and Cory Booker. It’s important to distinguish such individuals from mainstream pols whose social media is handled by their staffs. So far, very few senior political figures have demonstrated facility in social media engagement; but their numbers will only grow.
Fifthly: Leadership. I recall watching a vox pop interview with an elderly gentleman during one election campaign. He was asked how he was going to vote. His answer was the bumper sticker of the modern world. “If God had intended us to vote,” he deadpanned, “he would have given us candidates.” And while we have some fine women and men in politics, across the spectrum, his point needs not to be lost. There may be a million traits to effective leadership – unlike management, which is something of a science, leadership is undoubtedly an art, as I discovered when once I taught a grad school leadership class and had to read the literature – one thing is certain: A core competence of leaders, one could argue the core, lies in a capacity to grasp the future, plan for it, work toward it – and summon the support and enthusiasm of those whose focus is the immediate and short-term for a vision that is beyond their horizon. Leaders need to be able to do more than this. But if you can’t serve as the custodian of the future, I don’t think you are one, whatever our job title. And it’s true across the corporate and political spectrum. Think Jack Welch and (reaching far back to avoid being politically controversial here) Abraham Lincoln.
The recrudescence of leadership plainly lies at the core of the renovation of our political culture, and it is integrated in subtle ways with each of the four strands we have already noted.
Now, context.
The core context in which Washington is placed lies squarely here: The slow decline of U.S. global hegemony. It’s complex, as there are various forces at play – not simply the rise of other powers, and the collapse of the Soviet empire (which had locked a set of assumptions in place for half a century), but the steady erosion of the Westphalian system of nation-states in the global order, partly through the growth of inter-governmental organizations (such as the WTO and WIPO) and treaties such as NAFTA and the bilateral treaties that frame trade with the European Union, and increasingly through these new communications technologies that have given rise to social media. Point is: With every passing day, every dollar invested by every U.S. individual and company has returns that will be more determined by forces outside of our direct control. Most of us are content to flourish in this increasingly complex world order, though some, pointedly, are not, and as problems arise their numbers may rise. Two rapid conclusions on this shift to a post-Westphalian world: First, Washington, DC, has less power every day than it had yesterday. Second, its role in representing the interests of U.S. companies and capital in the many global contexts where power is shifting becomes more central to their interests. So: The heedless entrepreneurs of the Valley, for whom DC represents tedious irrelevance, and the major corporations who send in hitpersons to cover their interests as if the two-year time horizon were what “really” mattered, are guilty of deep strategic misjudgment. Not simply (I would say, not chiefly) because they have a growing self-interest in DC’s influence in these global fora; but, back of that, because they have a vital interest in the transformation of DC into a center of agile, innovative, highly intelligent, far-sighted, business-savvy, and generally world-beating governance. Reflect upon that, as the shutdown persists and a U.S. default is seen as a bargaining chip between the two ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
There’s a related point here, glaring to me as the President decides (rightly or not) that the crisis in DC prevents him from celebrating and advocating America in an Asian forum where a fresh and clear-eyed Chinese leader is on the march to win hearts, minds, and pockets – and where America’s Asian allies are anxious about our commitments. The global context will prove increasingly unforgiving of a clunky, klutzy Washington. In a way that our distant forebears in, say, the 1960s would have found it impossible to grasp, our possession of those ICBMs and carrier groups is less relevant to our global influence with every passing day. Soft power, always more important for this most principled and self-aware of nations than for others, is day by day more central to our interests. While we speak of a pivot to Asia, the world has been pivoting away from the areas where we are strongest and begun to redefine the rules of the game of global influence in terms not set by us.
So it is, that every corporate leader and investor in America should focus at the heart of their assessment of the global business environment the question of the kind of Washington they need to engage on their behalf.
No question, the federal city on the Potomac remains the global epicenter, despite the axis of sequester-shutdown-debt ceiling presently preoccupying its elites and, variously, amusing, bemusing, and causing anguish among our global friends and foes. It’s to be hoped this trifecta is also gripping the imagination of the citizenry and the corporate and investor leadership classes, and leading us to do something we do only under the greatest of pressures, which is think. Really, think. And, having thought, we need to move in accordance with our understanding. I have suggested five fronts on which movement can bring innovation to our culture of government. Washington is a city of generally decent, exceedingly smart and hard-working women and men. The core problem is no more partisanship than it is venality. They can both cause trouble, but at root the issue is a bipartisan culture of the short-term, and parties whose identities and programs are defined by the past and disengaged from the future they need to serve. These five taproots of innovation, renovation, and the re-fitting of our nation’s culture of governance offer salients into a very different way of handling what comes next.
Exopolitics and a new grass-roots. Silicon Valley and the Continental Divide. Corporate lobbyists and a new alignment with corporate strategy. New technologies of communication and transparency. And Leadership.
Are there others? Which will matter most? Is it merely naïve to frame these questions in such fundamental terms? Do we have grounds for hope?
Your thoughts will as ever be appreciated, as sequester and shutdown continue and the debt ceiling deadline looms.
President and CEO, Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies
Washington, DC 20002