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Fog, Friction, and the Dark Forest

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

When I read Liu Cixin’s The Dark Forest (the sequel to Three Body Problem) some years ago, I found myself “depressed.” Not in the clinical sense, but in the sense of feeling smaller, scared, dampened.

The Dark Forest states that we humans exist in a dark, enormous environment called space with high informational entropy, asymmetry, and massive lag (on account of distance and physics). In that environment, predators lurk. A species realizing its state as surviving not by prowess or power, but by lieu of simply not being noticed, must by necessity go very, very quiet. In the Three Body Problem, we don’t realize this and send out a brief beacon instead. That beacon is picked up and fate comes for us (some flattening is involved).

Recently, a book inspired by Yancey Strickler’s Dark Forest Theory of the Internet had its second printing, and I eagerly hopped on. I encourage you to as well. Broadly, it takes the idea of the Dark Forest and applies it to our interactions online today. We glom onto social platforms that cast us as resources, and become encircled by predators in the form of bots, influencers, and ad-tech. The various authors present solutions, ideas, and trend speculation (cozyweb is everyone’s favourite, myself included as I have a few instantiations of that in my life, this newsletter arguably included): but reading the collection of essays, I found myself wondering what getting ahead of these platforms might look like?

Fog and the Forest

I’ve often written about Boyd, but in my academic writing, I found myself writing a LOT about Clausewitz. Very short version: Clausewitz was a Prussian general who saw the insanity of Napoleon’s conquest of Europe, and it gave him some ideas. Those ideas were developed through the redevelopment of the Prussian officer corp, and synthesized and captured in his book On War, which was posthumously published (and likely completed) by his wife. Clausewitz’ theories of war, uncertainty, and decision-making serve as the foundation of modern military strategy, and uncertainty is at its core.

The Fog of War was introduced by Clausewitz (the idea anyway) to describe the uncertainty a commander experiences when in the field with the imperative to make decisions. Planning is great, but even with perfect knowledge of an enemy’s capabilities and position, things change quickly on the battlefield.

The idea of the Dark Forest isn’t quite the “fog of war.” Clausewitz’ idea is situated in ones capacity of plan from the outset — something is known of the enemy, something is known of the territory. Whereas the Dark Forest is intrinsically unknown. Using space and the likelihood of other intelligences (or some alternatives), we might be entirely alone in the cosmos, or we might not. Our eyes are slowly adjusting to the dark, and where we have awareness of the landscape but not awareness of the evolving state of that landscape — that’s where the fog comes into place.

There’s a story in qtmn’s excellent book, Valuable Humans in Transit that discusses a “grey goo” scenario. You should read it, but basically: humanity has space travel and a team discovers as “dead” planet. They investigate the planet, but doesn’t realize the planet is investigating them in turn — learning from their capabilities. As the situation becomes clear to the captain (too late), they flee back to earth to try and warn the humanity before it’s too late. In this story, the unknowable unknowns of the Dark Forest give way to the known unknowns of the fog of war — creating a context around which actions and decisions can be taken.

Unfortunately while the fog of war is an intrinsic characteristic of any situation where adversaries meet in time and space, its effects are not symmetrically applied.

Asymmetric Forest Bathing

The problem with inhabiting the dark forest is that we basically can’t know what is out there. Liu Cixin argues in the Dark Forest:

The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.

In both the universe of the Three Body Problem and in qtmn’s story, the moment of realization that another hunter has been spotted or has spotted us can become “the end” immediately. In the Three Body Problem, the San Ti are massively our technological superiors, and yet they themselves live in fear of even greater powers. The delicate infant and tottering old man metaphorically represent different stages of technological advancement, so our species that may have embraced pacifism or struggle to escape our galaxy might be an infant compared to the species with capabilities entirely outside our ken.

The landscape of the internet isn’t far from this metaphor. Centralization of wealth within the tech giants, the business incentive to establish and protect moats, undermine regulators, and leverage network effects all drive these actors towards ever-increasing advancement. The result is that individually we are ridiculously, absurdly, helplessly under equipped as individuals to protect ourselves in the current internet landscape.

Maybe our only hope is to become as hard as possible to spot.

Wading Boots

Clausewitz has another critical concept in On War, which is Friction. Broadly, friction in Clausewitzian theory is a state of taking action under negative circumstances. A simple example might be planning a straight line course and encountering a muddy field and a mountain you need to climb. A more complex example might be starting at a new company with a “clear” hierarchy, and then running head first into the Dark Matter of the organization.

Activity in war is movement in a resistant medium. Just as a man in water is unable to perform with ease and regularity the most natural and simplest movement, that of walking, so in war, with ordinary powers, one cannot keep even the line of mediocrity. This is the reason that the correct theorist is like a swimming master, who teaches on dry land movements which are required in the water, which must appear grotesque and ludicrous to those who forget about the water. This is also why theorists, who have never plunged in themselves, or who cannot deduce any generalities from their experience, are unpractical and even absurd, because they only teach what every one knows—how to walk.

In the Clauswitzian model, Friction is an equal opportunity irritant. It can’t be eliminated, it is variable with context, and it just happens to you. Hence the idea that only an experienced swimmer can effectively theorize about swimming. To operate in that environment means engaging with that modality of friction.

But according to Clausewitz, YOU aren’t a source of Friction. Friction is purely PvE, and not something that any individual actor imposes on others. Except I don’t think this entirely applies in the Dark Forest-y internet context. We’ve seen the internet’s friction systematically “managed” by and to the benefit of the apex predators of the internet (the FAANGs), either by lieu of evolution or simply because they are “born” to the network and we aren’t. In exchange, we are forced to give up bits of ourselves to continue within this environment.

Take Email. One, you needed a computer that was always on, configured as a server, with that server kept online, mostly at a static address with a domain, that had some sense of authentication and privacy, that could receive emails via a broadly published and open protocol like POP3 or IMAP. You nrequired some way of storing what you received, and if you wanted to get very fancy, you needed some way of writing emails, formatting them correctly, and then broadcasting them to another server that you knew the address of via a protocol like SMTP.

Or you would use Google’s Gmail. And you would be associated with Gmail. And your messages on gmail (sent and received) could be used to sell you things because your preferences became more transparent to Google, who runs the largest advertising platform on earth.

Now, there are benefits. Setting up your own server and figuring all that out is a pain, and Google’s encapsulating that friction into a clean and easy service for someone who has never heard of SMTP is useful. But by opting into those systems, you light up as a beacon with a known coordinate, value, and behavioural pattern to any others who might be swimming about.

Unfortunately for us, this use of reduced friction at the expense of being observed extends pretty far down. Obvious ones like signing in to an account, using chrome as a browser, and similar cause us to broadcast in the forest, but even things like using your modem’s default and incredibly reliable DNS server (Google’s 8.8.8.8 and 4.4.4.4) undermine that imperative as a denizen of the dark forest: to not be seen because you don’t know what is witnessing you. But with actors whose entire survival is predicated on finding, identifying, observing, and extracting targets on the internet for ad revenues, it’s gotten to the point where the whole forest seems haunted.

Burrows

So let’s figure some way around it. I’ve shared this drawing by Maggie Appleton before which visualizes the relationship between the Dark Forest and Venkat’s description of the Cozy Web. She significantly puts an interface layer in-between the Dark Forest and the Cozy Web: namely the digital garden, communication, and anonymous stream following interface layer.

I think the rendering of Cozy Web as a network of warrens and burrows is an apt one: it isn’t that the cozyweb isn’t interconnected, but rather that its connections are controlled, finite, and only really observable from within.

Thinking in terms of the Clausewitzian ideas of Fog of War and Friction though, these burrows do four significant things:

They reduce the surface area for initial visibility, i.e. its less likely for the predators to see you in the first place (eg. Specific domains, closed content, word-of-mouth sharing of access)
They increase control over the terms of that visibility, i.e. the fog of war acts in your favour to manoeuvre around them (eg. access to logs, authentication, non-public content)
They eliminate the “low friction lure” that the apex predators leverage when searching for prey (eg. self hosting solutions, reliance on a technical person as guide vs. platforms to navigate infrastructure)
They present an opportunity to change the script on the “familiar friction” to which our World Wide Web predators are native. i.e. make it hard for these predators to move, breath, and hunt. (eg. leverage new protocols as in web3 world, self-host key tools like storage and communication, anonymize or use burner accounts)

By selecting the terrain we operate within (the burrows), we suddenly have some choice over how we engage with these predators. Obviously we might still need to zip out from time to time. In Denmark, Facebook utterly dominates for community organization, so if I want to know when events are held or leverage marketplace, I’ve no choice but to use facebook.

But for friends and family, I’ve actually started using Letterloop. I run a newsletter for myself, brothers, and cousins, and we’ve been using it to keep up with each other while living in different countries and parts of Canada. My wife does the same with her family back in British Columbia. It’s still a hosted platform on firebase with google analytics with a social sign-on… but it’s still pretty good.

There are other situations where we can’t uncouple our burrows from the forest. Twenty years ago, Malcom Mccullough spoke at length about the role of the network, sensing, and data and we live that now. Entering an apartment complex via rfid key fob gives the building owner a fantastic understanding of the comings and going within their developments, and the same can be said for cars, public transit, etc. These are aren’t really things we can do much about. But allowing a google home or an Alexa device into the house within any degree of control is a decision one should make very carefully.

For my part, I self host the open source Home Assistant platform and self-host a DNS server that gives me agency over what gets in and what gets out. This completely blocks ads from appearing on my home network, and also gives me a heads up on certain devices behaving badly. Admittedly this also makes me the house technician, and when I’m negligent in upkeep… well, a glitching smart home is basically a haunted house. But at least my family and I are haunted by ghosts of our own making.

Fog, Friction, and Favour

Returning to the original question, what would it mean to get ahead of these platforms? I think an answer lies in triangulating across a few observations:

The Internet is a Dark Forest and the apex predators within it are native to it. In other words, the Dark Forest is what the Dark Forest is.
The internet dark forest isn’t instantly fatal like Cixin’s Dark Forest. Instead, it is parasitic and once tracked, escape is incredibly difficult.
Predation on the internet relies on reduced friction to incentivize discovery of prey. The internet is filled with Anglerfish, dangling an attractive lure.
We are not the predators.

Ultimately, I’ve come to believe that the internet that’s emerged today was inevitable given the parameters that were established. Platforms emerged naturally because platforms enabled consolidation of resources, moat building, and monopolization over user information and attention. It’s not a mistake that advertising revenues are the fuel that drives these predatory platforms. It’s also not a mistake that user experience design has becoming such a competitive focus for these platforms: we’ve been the light they’ve dangled in-front of the unwary.

Believing this then, getting ahead becomes a function of building the burrows we want under the current forest for the lives we live today, and then investing in seeding the forest we want to live in tomorrow.

The first means finding privacy and community in smaller places, and engaging in activities that might look a bit like digital homesteading.

The second means taking things like Web3 and other protocol innovations seriously. The internet we got doesn’t need to be the internet that we are stuck with. Evolutions and replacements do occur, and maybe the forest of the future doesn’t need to leave us feeling quite so drained.

Of course, predicting what kind of apex predators might emerge in any new forest that springs up might be impossible. But perhaps then we can lean on Clausewitz a bit to help navigate those unknowns.

Notes

If you’re interested to learn more about Clausewitz, I’d suggest giving this a listen. https://librivox.org/on-war-by-carl-von-clausewitz/ Low stakes, podcast based reading of the book. The Art of Action is a good look at his theories from a business lens (along with his contemporary, Jomini), and if you’re up for a really interesting look at its application in modern militaries, give this paper a look: https://www.clausewitz.com/readings/Watts-Friction3.pdf

Homeric Design Strategy

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 12:00:00 GMT

I was one course away from a minor in Classics when I graduated from the University of Toronto. It was a weird rabbit hole that I fell down — utterly engrossed by the overlapping systems of symbol and myth that had wrapped itself around the Greco-Roman psyche. It got to the point that years later, I’d get a pretty large tattoo depicting the Golden Bough scenes from the Aeneid on my leg where the titular character descends into the underworld to commune with his past and learn of his future (really a bald-faced Imperial puff piece by Virgil, the poet come propagandist).

The storytelling and symbolism of the Greco-Roman classics are quite casually affecting us today. We associate vain individuals with the cautionary tale of Narcissus, we visualize entrapment and confusion with the Minotaur holding Labyrinth of Crete, or one’s contradictory nature with the “two-face” preface — referencing the Roman deity Janus. The sticking power of these concepts is frankly incredible given how quickly language changes, but it’s also unsurprising. References build up over time — becoming networked in their own way to one original source. So the oral tales of Narcissus become tied to individuals, places, curricula, stories, and things (like flowers) — and perpetuate themselves over time despite individual references being pruned from time to time.

The Greco-Roman classics are the founding lore of the Romance languages, in the same way, that much of the Norse lore is tied to the Germanic languages of Northern Europe. And that lore has incredible staying power. Generated both individually and collectively, the early stories of entertainment and moralistic pedagogy were shared by the many bards we call Homer and became a many-thousand-year frame of reference for two billion English speakers globally — whether they know it or not.

What’s somewhat scary and fascinating is that lore is kind of easy. We excrete and accrete lore automatically. One of my personal strategy consultant tricks, when I start working with a new organization, is to pay super close attention to repeated words, phrases, and jargon in the context of process work, decision making, and tension points. These frames of reference almost always harken back to some past experience the team or company has — either positive or negative. A file format like JSON might accumulate meaning associated with individuals or factions, with past history and decisions, with firings or promotions, and with cautionary or elevating frames of reference.

In 2021, most of you have probably heard of the legendary design sprint — a mythical tactic where an intrepid but divided team forces themselves into a wedge area, following a series of purification and summoning rituals to elicit direction and guidance from the gods of 3M and Prototyping. Codified by the shamanistic designer Jake Knapp, many try the design sprint but few do it with sacrifice and intention — the necessary steps to see that guidance emerge. Still, upon the lips of designers and leaders around the world, we constantly hear a ward against the unknown uttered — design sprint.

Lore emerges by default, but it can be a bit difficult to manufacture. We see this a lot with different companies attempting to imbue their products with a narrative “special sauce.” It often works. Apple’s history of filled with tales of genius, individual heroism, loss, and redemption. Individuals come to play very specific narrative roles, even if their own contributions were much more complex than that role would describe. Steve Wozniak, by way of example, might be compared to the Hephaestus character in Greek myth — the craftsperson and blacksmith, content to create the vital armour and weapons that the more bombastic gods. He is also one of the few gods with a physical impediment. Hephaestus becomes an allegorical figure depicting humility and deference despite great competence; a figure who is focused, dedicated, but ultimately in the background. This is pretty objectively not Wozniak, yet in a lot of media he is depicted as the quiet and focused inventor — part of the computer club that was happy to Tinker while the Great God Jobs went out to share the true value of that invention. The truth is that their roles were much more overlapping and complex. Apple has done a brilliant job shifting and simplifying their lore, such that one of the wealthiest companies there is becomes somehow personable.

Sometimes, companies specifically manufacture lore. Games Workshop emerged as a tabletop gaming company in the mid 1970s, but only really started to gain traction with the advent of its Warhammer games and the dense layers of storytelling associated with them. The now wildly popular universe of Warhammer 40k emerged from a small boardgames and story called Rogue Traders, which sets the scene with the following paragraph:

“For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods and the master of a million worlds by the will of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is Carrion Lord of the Imperium to whom a thousand souls are sacrificed each day, and for whom blood is drunk and flesh is eaten. Human blood and human flesh- the stuff which the Imperium is made.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. This is the tale of these times. It is a universe that you can live today if you dare- for this is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort of hope. If you want to take part in the adventure then prepare yourself now. Forget the power of technology, science and common humanity. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for there is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter and the laughter of thirsting gods. But the universe is a big place and, whatever happens, you will not be missed….”

(My source for all of this is here, as an aside)

Here’s the 90 second version of the “Grim Dark”:

▶ Watch on YouTube

This open and loosely defined universe planted a seed that 30-some years later is one of the most successful narrative franchises of all time. So much of this success isn’t in the expensive plastics and paints the company sells (though those are certainly the profitable endpoints of the enterprise), but through their Black Library enterprise — hundreds of books that weave together the histories and references of the universe and serve to establish the “lore” of that universe — and the critiques of fascism and dogma that are the dystopic setting for the universe. That lore, in turn, finds its way into countless pop culture references: from the visual aesthetic of the Starship Troopers movie (itself a more overt critique of fascistic creep in society) to the weirdly ubiquitous “BLANK for the BLANK god!” meme, and beyond. Personally, I accidentally fell down the rabbit hole on the narrative side with the Horus Heresy books — Horus Rising in particular (send help).

What’s fascinating about this is that as much as we might try to shape “Lore”, it has a life of its own. Games Workshop does so with an iron fist, but is constantly running afoul its fans who becomes frustrated by the monetization of a universe they feel ownership over 40 years down the line. Apple does so through secrecy and careful media releases, but quarterly deals with the fear that their prestige and genius narrative will slip with the release of weaker products or things that lack a market fit. Now, Musk’s Space X is doing so with its brilliant but somewhat flawed Inspiration 4 show), attempting to reignite popular interest in space flight and give an accessible-but-still-heroic face to extraterrestrial travel — as a direct competitive counter to Bezos’ cowboy-hat wielding Blue Origin, and Branson’s playboy stylings of Virgin Galactic. All three of these companies are taking civilians to space, and all are crafting lore around their endeavours whether they intend it (like Space X) or not (like Blue Origin’s phallactic launch).

I’m always on the lookout for the lore. It’s everywhere, it’s exciting, and it can become the hook that might make an otherwise banal experience or body of work compelling. It can also explain so much about the dysfunction you find yourself in. The lore provides those clues and cues for deeper exploration, and whether you’re diving into a decades-old game universe or a 160k+ person company (like I experienced with Ikea), the lore becomes the hook, the map, and the troubleshooting guide for your own small contribution to that universe.

Designers in the Military

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 12:00:00 GMT

What does it mean to design for the propagation of security? In a way, this is one of the grand questions of international relations and its sub field, security studies. Exploring what contexts (events, regimes, situations, etc) create or compromise our understanding of security, how security is constructed through foresight and hindsight on these contexts, and who experiences — or sees a loss of — security given those contexts (and whether it’s equitable, uneven, or even mutually exclusive).

I’ve been slowly working my way through a masters program in security studies, prompted by my earlier experience working as a product and service designer in the Pentagon. The experience there left me with some great experiences, and some humbling realizations. Some of this came from the pretty early realization that even before stepping foot in a defence facility, part of my own understanding of strategic design had actually emerged from a military context. The thinking of John Boyd — best known for his role as the designer of the F-16 fighter plane and the originator of the OODA loop construct — has had a pretty distinct influence on my thinking; not just for the OODA loop as a way to think about cognition and competition, but also for Boyd’s writing on the ideas of grand strategy and tactics in situating ones work and design. Other theorists — from Clausewitz (I really recommend the book reviewed here, actually) to McCrystal, Jomini to Naveh — have also served to decorate the language that I use to transition the ambiguous into the impactful, and the intangible into the real.

While I was drawing inspiration from the military strategy and theory realm to inform my thinking about design, however, there were a broad swath of military planners, strategists, and thinkers who were doing the same from my chosen discipline. A year or so ago, I attended a seminar at the University of Copenhagen on design thinking and the military, after being hilariously targeted by Instagram ads for the same. There, I met a professor at the Canadian Forces College, Dr. Philippe Beaulieu-Brossard, who turned out to be my neighbour, and we got to chatting. He then served to introduce me and graciously welcome me into a community of military and design practitioners he was forming around this question of using design as a lever for reflexivity and foresight within the defence community.

I spent the past week participating in one of the key outcomes of Philippe’s time in Copenhagen, a design and security workshop looking at how a well established pillar of the military planning community — games and game design — could be used as a wedge into teaching design skills to security practitioners. Fully vaccinated and frankly somewhat starved for in-person collaboration after emerging from our most recent lock down, it was an opportune space to doff my usual facilitator or speaker’s cap and join as a participant. I’m incredibly glad I did.

The participants came from academic and defence institutions from across NATO and NATO strategic partners, and most of whom had some existing connection to — or at least disposition for — military design thinking. But only a handful of us were design practitioners in the traditional sense of using design to create objects and experiences — a game designer, a hacker/maker, and myself as a service designer and prototyper. I had some trepidation around this, since in general I tend to believe that without the making part, you’re not actually doing design. What I was dismissing with that criticism was that while most of the participants weren’t engaged in design in their day-to-day, they were perfectly willing to make things tangible with whatever they had access to.

Given the constraints of Covid, only a limited number of folk were able to make it to the workshop in Copenhagen. In the two weeks preceding the event, a few online workshops were hosted to help seed initial thinking and also “soften” the participants to co-creative and iterative processes. These ranged from small lectures with breakout sessions, wherein teams would quickly run through a series of concepts and filter down to ideas that fit the scope (or at least tried to fit the scope) of the in person workshop.

For the main body of the workshop, our goal was to create a functional game mechanic that could serve to “teach” a facet of the design process. We were guided through a pretty standard cycle of activities that reflected the double-diamond framework, lightly but effectively moderated by Philippe and Ilan. In the background, other members of the University of Copenhagen Center for Military Studies were hustling around making sure things ran smoothly — wrangling resources and testing schedules via Discord, pushing for documentation of processes, and facilitating connections with remote participants.

Unfortunately, that latter point is likely one big failing — and I think is more a quality of remote collaboration than it is the design of this workshop. Event inclusivity when potential participants can’t travel (either because of economic means or for the Covid of it all) is the right idea in principle, but I’ve yet to see an event actually pull it off. Whereas established conferences have all been going the learning archive route, until they can host in person events again — most newcomers have been struggling with flagging attention, poorer learning results, and a generally less engaged community with fewer meaningful connections formed.

We saw that result with some of the remote participants in the workshop on two levels — those who were paired as remote contributors to in-person teams, and an entirely remote team. For the mixed remote/in-person teams, the on-off cadence of participation made it difficult for those participants to get the whole picture, and as a result, ended up primarily adding value through “on-demand crits.” In the best scenarios, they helped us speed up our iterative cycles and get to results that we wouldn’t have seen without that on-demand external eye. In the worst cases, it actually served to disrupt the relatively tightly packed working sessions as we struggled with Discord and connections. But ultimately for each of the in-person teams (who, I’ll remind you, were packed full of senior NATO officers, academics, and strategists), we got to a prototype that one could understand, if not directly play.

For the entirely remote team, they struggled a bit more to get to something tangible. Instead of drilling down to something that was playable, they mostly stayed at the theory and principle levels. Though it didn’t get us to the goal of the workshop, as an outsider I found this part to be pretty useful as a frame on the way that design-curious strategists and theorists frame the work of design. Put somewhat pessimistically, design thinking is one of the best sales tools available to the practicing designer. If you can access a “design thinker” who is bought into the value of a design process, then the process of selling through and executing on good design work becomes infinitely easier — and often more impactful.

After experiencing the work and collaborations that emerged during this workshop, it’s hard not to see a lot of value in these types of challenges to the fundamentals of design practice and strategic thinking in the military. First, the scope that defence practitioners are working within is substantially broader than that which most designers find themselves working in as defined by our job titles — but we SHOULD be working at these more strategic levels to properly consider the equities at play in assessing and implementing design decisions. Understanding the skills that senior defence practitioners bring to bear in managing stakeholders and their equities is a skill that can dramatically improve the outcomes and impact of any design work. We have a few of these already — mapping tools, facilitation, immersive research — but I think there’s a lot more to learn there.

Second, defence practitioners are rarely empowered to make and break like designers — but they find other effective ways to critically iterate on problems. I think part of the appeal that design practice presents to defence practitioners is the dogmatic belief in critically failing your way to success by way of a foam core strewn trail of discarded prototypes. Those practices just don’t appear in the military context as frequently as tools for ideation (though it does for sales and persuasion, as demonstrated by the movie Pentagon Wars). But things like drills, war games, red teaming, quantitative and action-based simulation, and similar things DO exist in a military context, and these are tools that frankly the design community could learn a bit more from. Especially red teaming.

Finally, Security is more than bombs and war. Defence practitioners aren’t just dealing with the core material of conflict — which is a reasonable thing to object to and ultimately ones politics are ones own. When I worked DOD, we were quite careful not to work on weapons systems as part of the US Digital Service, BUT we also worked on systems that were just that, given a different lens and context. A more efficient and better designed recruiting system in peace time can be a tool of social mobility, and in war time can be a ticket to the front for the most vulnerable. But “security” encompasses topics of migration, international institutions, climate, economics, ecological, logistic, epidemiological 🦠, and all sorts of different challenges that make for a wildly interesting problem space for designers. Today’s defence practitioners are working actively and energetically in these domains because they are vital and affect all of us. Security never becomes so pressing as when it disappears, so designing for a security context is — by its nature — designing for better human outcomes. Now, I’ll also say that we need to take a critical eye to all of that since you’re also designing within the context of a state existing in an anarchic system if you listen to some folk, but I’d suggest finding the topic that interests you, and then engaging in the theoretical literature that helps you engage that topic critically.

So. This workshop was great, and huge congrats to Philippe and his team at the Archipelago of Design for pulling off a meaningful convening under great stress and logistic challenges. I can’t wait for more.

I’d definitely recommend subscribing to the Archipelago of Design’s newsletter for future such events, and can’t wait to see what comes next.

Professional Warning People

Tue, 15 Jun 2021 12:00:00 GMT

There are professional Cassandras out there and their curse isn’t coming from Apollo this time — but from the institutions they serve under.

Warning intelligence is a function of the intelligence community that manifests in different ways, but at its best tends to come about as a small and senior team filled with experienced professionals with the ears of decision makers. The problem is, that while this structure emerges with some frequency (the CIA’s National Intelligence Officer for Warning, or NIO/W is an example of this), these offices tend to pretty quickly get a reputation for crying wolf.

9/11 tends to be the most widely known failure in warning intelligence that many think of — a coordinated strike on American domestic targets, both civilian and military, by a well established terrorist network, whose rhetoric and actions forwarding a religiously-framed war against the United States were known to the American IC. But actually, you could argue this wasn’t a failure in warning intelligence — whose purview fits the six month to several year timeline according to one of its great practitioners and thinkers, Cynthia Grabo — but rather a failure in tactical intelligence and interagency coordination (which is one of the arguments put forward in the 9/11 commission report). Warning intelligence had actually done its job. In the chapter “The System was Blinking Red,” the commission outlines how many of the warning functions were operating well — sharing indications that major attacks were in the works — but the different security functions of state were not. In many ways, Cassandra was being ignored.

Most of us operate less in the present, and more as a kind of smear between past and future — with our present moments coalescing like a Gerhard Richter painting. Strategic thinking at its best orders this natural chaos: providing the structure and tools to look ahead, look behind, and actually make decisions in the moment that support futures. Ladder that up to decision making for not just oneself but others’ time, resources, etc. and you get some pretty clear examples of strategic decision making. Taken up even further — with thousands and millions (the American Department of Defense has about 1.4 million employees when considering both civilian and uniformed personnel) people relying on different tiers of strategic decision making — and the impulse is to embed those sensory and analytical functions within specific teams and career paths. This is what makes it possible for an elected official with a four to eight year mandate to move into the chief executive role and actually do anything coherently.

Warning intelligence is one such analytical organ within the outsourced and institutionalized cognition of a chief executive. But like the weird pain or feeling of apprehension that we might easily ignore, warning intelligence isn’t the thing driving the ship. Rather, it might try to influence at best — but often gets ignored.

During his presidency, Bill Clinton didn’t have a great relationship with the security establishment. This was during a period when the somewhat bloated American military was being reduced following the close of the Cold War, and American engagement in overseas adventurism was manifesting in some weird ways. Amongst these was a loss of the “great enemy” of the Cold War, around which national security interests in America had swirled — which in turn shifted how the American public saw foreign wars. America’s engagement in the UN mission in Somalia during the Somalian civil war, for example, was initially seen as a natural extension of American hegemony, but the Battle of Mogadishu (Black Hawk Down) in 1993 put a pretty stark end to that with the resulting death of 19 servicemen.

These events led to a kind of souring on intelligence and foreign engagements by the Clinton administration, who felt like they were being pulled into these engagements, less because America should be involved, but rather because it had the strongest capabilities — part of what drove the multilateralism that was dominant during his presidency. But this view also served to block out the warnings that the Clinton admin was receiving about other regional conflicts. Following the Battle of Mogadishu, Clinton was said to have an explicitly pessimistic view on further military engagements in Africa. He didn’t want to know. But the point of warning intelligence is that things happen ANYWAY, irrespective of whether or not you want it to or not. So despite warning intelligence indicating that stockpiling and ethnic tension were occurring in Rwanda, the Clinton government didn’t do a thing as a million Rwandans of Tutsi ethnicity were massacred by fellow Rwandans of the majority Hutu ethnic group.

Warning intelligence doesn’t make the decision, but rather serves as a function in intelligence with two primary roles: to track uncertainty and threats, and communicate effectively to decision makers when those threats manifest into risk. When driving, our eyes move constantly: flicking across our vehicle’s status indicators, the road (and its external status indicators, like dividing lines and shoulder), other cars and their trajectory and the mirror, to alert us about things from behind. If we see something that’s a threat (like a big truck pulling up alongside, or one that we’re trying to pass), we’re a lot less anxious if we see it coming. The risk is small and we have contingencies (maybe pulling onto the shoulder, maybe deciding not to drive between two trucks, etc). But if we’re reeling from a near miss moments earlier, or are caught unaware by its speed, then the potential risk we’re taking in responding to this new threat is substantially greater.

Later, the Clinton admin had acknowledged that many, many Rwandans could had been saved with a relatively small American deployment of just a single division (around 10,000 soldiers). But the proximity to the Battle of Mogadishu meant that even though warning intelligence was serving its function with its analytic output, it had been systematically locked out from its communication function. Apollo’s curse manifested in cancelled meetings, edited documents, and shifted priorities.

These days, there’s more of a structure that John Gentry calls “Every Analyst a Warning Analyst” in his book Strategic Warning Intelligence, which basically tries to diffuse this warning function across many different analysts. The problem is that perceiving threats from the miasma of risks and uncertainties out there requires a particular disposition and is frankly a job. Thinking about something really, really hard — worrying about it until something emerges and then validating that what emerged isn’t just in your head — that’s a full time thing.

In a lot of orgs, designers and researchers can play this kind of role by serving in a kind of foresight and prototyping function. While not attuned to decision making per se, the designer and researcher surfaces the right context for product decision makers to move effectively. In others, product owners do this type of work, looking ahead to where something needs to be and gaming out the risks to the product and the business surrounding it. These risks are surfaced incrementally in roadmaps and are responded to and acted upon by decisions makers.

I’m personally curious to learn a lot more about these kinds of institutionalized foresight functions within organizations (though I’ll say that I think warning is different from foresight in specific ways — both in lens and communication), so expect some more writing like this.

However, if you’re interested in warning specifically, take a look at some of the links spread throughout, as well as some of these resources below. Cynthia Grabo’s book is free and was recently declassified after decades of service as a key resource in strategic warning training. I also wrote about Gentry’s Strategic Warning Intelligence book, which is fascinating and very much worth your time.

Some further reading

National Intelligence Warning: The Alert Memorandum (U)

Cynthia Grabo’s Anticipating Surprise

Strategic Warning Intelligence

Bureaucratic Mysteries

Thu, 01 Feb 2018 12:00:00 GMT

These tools were taught as a workshop to the first Code for Canada fellowship *team in November 2017. Article originally published in Medium*.

Building the actual product or technology is rarely the coda on the work that is social entrepreneurship and government software. More frequently, we see much of the labour existing in collaboration with our government and civil society partners: in building consensus, forming coalitions, cutting through roadblocks, and mapping the bureaucracy.

In my time at the US Digital Service, IDEO, and more recently New America, there are a set of tools I often apply in working through this complexity and communicating that complexity with my team. And a significant part of this technique I believe comes from some mental muscles I developed in college studying classical literature. In Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the characters create a densely interconnected — but logical– community of influence. Zeus sits as king: impertinent, meddling, and cruel. Hera is at his side, manipulative, jealous, but loyal. Athena is the goddess of wisdom and all things military: untouchable, disciplined, and wise. Hercules is the human face of divinity: brash, contradictory, and flawed.

Each of the gods in the Pantheon represented a place in Greek cultural thought. They are metaphors through which people described the world, and rationalized what they observed in it. In doing our work as government technologists, we daily encounter the same mythologies. Bureaucracy ebbs and flows in its daily patterns, but when the dam bursts or the crops die, we scramble for explanations as to why.

The goal of these tools is to untangle the web of stakeholders that make up any given technology project and to identify from the chaos the actors who appear most frequently in the story, who wield the most power, and who seem to hold sway over the narrative. If we can see that clearly, maybe we can push towards a better ending.

Sisyphus

Bureaucracies are enduring because they codify understanding of a system through regulation and daily practice.

One of the strangest things I encountered in government and civil society was a manual practice of estimation. Every week, a group would run an ancient desktop program that created a model of resource distribution. This model would be manipulated by two operators (one of whom we’ll come back to later) to create a “recommendation” for how these resources might be moved between locations. This model was then transmitted through a variety of systems, and eventually landed at the desk of a planner. The planner promptly threw it out, and proceeded to run their own model through a combination of automated and manual processes. These processes were then implemented and acted upon. One of the operators who I mentioned earlier, having realized their sisyphean task, had more or less given up. His colleague continued to diligently push the boulder uphill.

Sisyphus is a Greek legend of a cursed king forever pushing a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll down again. He is also patron saint of bureaucracies (at least to me). Nominally, he is being punished for his ways of subversion and deceit — breaking rules that were core to the Greek understanding of society. Bureaucracies are created to enforce and act along defined rulesets, and to enforce these rulesets, specific structures and systems calcify around them. These systems tend to follow rules themselves, each of which is specific to the organizations in question.

Playbook

You’re a young social entrepreneur with a head for technology and a desire to have impact. Unfortunately, you have just beamed into a confusing landscape of different agencies and organizations, interests and histories. Your mission is to figure out what is going on, and hopefully identify why your constituents are receiving such terrible services. However, you don’t know everything: after all, you have your experiences to work from and don’t really understand the experiences of those who have been working so long to deliver these services in the first place. You need to get to know the landscape before you can hope to change it.

Here’s a quick checklist of things to know BEFORE and DURING your use of these tools.

PRE-REQ

Get introductions
Know the ranks (eg. in US, GS scale and mil ranks)
Know the acronyms (USTRANSCOM, FYSA, USCENTCOM, etc)
Know the key players (commanders, public figures, major past projects)

Environmental Scan

Go to whatever agency you’re in
Get to know the stakeholders
Find the highest level buy-in person you can: in DOD that was a combatant command general or a secretary
Go to the place where the work happens
Stay there for a while and just wander around talking to people and knocking on doors

Situational Awareness

Map out the territory
Who is everyone? Be specific. Write down names, job titles, what they do, who they report to, where they sit.
Get security card access. ALWAYS.
Get to know the security people.
Get to know the people who do the work (low levels)

So once some of all of these are in place, now what?

Below are four tools that build on top of each other, and will give you some of the hard-to-get information you need to move forward and make decisions.

Archetypes — Identifying Roles

Who are these roles and what do they do? Why are they effective at their job and why are they not? What are their strengths, what are their weaknesses, and who do they depend on?

How long have they been there and where were they before?

Understanding the archetypes within the system allow us to break down the individual components of the system.

Working in government, the space I found most effective was in mapping out connections and “jobs.” Similar to a “jobs to be done” framework in product management, individuals in a bureaucratic organization tend to have very specific jobs and responsibilities. These responsibilities are then mapped across the hierarchy, and sometimes accomplished by delegation and management.

Why?

Articulating the archetypes you’ll encounter in your research gives you the basic knowledge to navigate a bureaucracy which often is self-replicating. It also forces you to narrow down the set of actors and look for commonalities across departments. Fundamentally, this is the building block of a number of clustering activities.

How To

Archetypes are an artifact that emerge out of research and exploration. Go into a team and start exploring. Ask yourself: who is doing the most talking? Who seems to be deferred to? Who is responsible for what? Who is mentioned the most in one-on-one interviews?

If you have a research team mate (I hope you do!), review your research notes and transcribe to post-it notes. From these notes, whittle the whole thing down to the worksheet provided below. Even if you didn’t get a chance to interview someone, try and fill out their role as much as possible.

Don’t fill in the Archetype name until last!

**EXAMPLE Names include: **The Trickster, The Explorer, The Caregiver, The Hero, The Rebel, The Artist, The Ruler. However, you should come up with your own archetype names. Sometimes “the Trickster” is actually a brilliant synthesizer of information, and works tirelessly to move the organization into a more progressive and effective direction. Perhaps they aren’t “The Trickster,” but “The Revolutionary” or “Hercules”, to return to the Greek theme.

When you are finished, you will have duplicate roles. This is fine, and you can simply enumerate them. A thing to keep in mind is that too many of one archetype may actually be part of the problem you’re trying to solve.

Worksheet

Example Scenario

Mapping the Pantheon (Mapping the Roles)

What is the story that creates the bureaucratic machine that we’re investigating? What is the myth that its operators believe? Its customers? How is that myth perpetuated, and who are the protagonists, the bit players, and the people sacrificed to the plot? The Pantheon as depicted on the Greek Parthenon and in friezes and artifacts across the ancient world, describes discussing the relationship between the different parts of a workflow or service. Its actors, its artifacts, and its outcomes. By visualizing, it gives us the basis to ask critical questions, and shift our understanding of the problem space

This activity requires you to embed with and map the existing system, and to extensively

Here, we map out a series of blueprints that map to the bureaucracies core functions, and weaving together the different stories that construct the system that you’re trying to intervene on.

Why?

The goal of this activity is to make this flow, failure points, and handoffs of a system obvious. We also need to be able to easily re-tell the story to the stakeholders involved. This tool pays dividends later on as well when re-designing a service, beyond our focus on stakeholder mapping in this group of tools.

How To

Print out a few of these sheets, and ask yourself: “Okay, what is the first step?”

In your notebook and during your interviews, you should have already started to map out some of these dynamics. Where does the information come from? Who owns that information? Who talks to the customer and who doesn’t? What is the catalyst for one of these workflows, and what causes the event or flow to be delayed?

These notes should be purposefully sketch-y. Don’t be afraid to cross out paths, make corrections, or work side-by-side with one of your government colleagues as you figure out what’s going out.

The path is important because it tells us where one smaller story starts, where it ends, and what new story starts where it left off. It helps us take a strategic lens to an information or human system, and trace it through its lifecycle. Finally, it surfaces the unknowns that are vital to making headway in this work.

Worksheet

Example Scenario

Mapping the Actors (Figuring out your wedge)

Mapping the importance of characters within the ecosystem is a tool for the individual and for the team to prioritize characters within the narrative. Matthew Weaver, one of the early US Digital Service leads who went by “Rogue Leader” often said “There is no bottom” when referring to bureaucratic challenges. But if there’s no bottom, then at least we can focus on the space around us to try and affect change.

This activity is focused on looking at our cast of characters and our maps, and developing a sense of who is important. Who is on our core team, or our confidant? Who is in every meeting and has a stake, but isn’t that core trusted figure? Who needs to be kept in the know or appears from time to time, but doesn’t need to be apprised of everything, or might contribute very specific and narrow value? Who do you want to push out, or just inform on a need to know basis?

Why?

This framework is an excellent consensus building tool for your team, as well as a good way to communicate your understanding of the stakeholder map to the stakeholders themselves.

By asking these questions objectively and looking at the dynamics of who you want to bring closer and who you want to push out. You can push the question of “This person should be on the core team but wasn’t invited” towards “how do I get them closer?” or “Why not?”

How To

Start by going through each of the archetypes. In pen or pencil, draw a little caricature or symbol, and write their name and what they do along the graph. You can also write them on small post-it notes or stickers, to let you move people around.

Looking at the two axes on the graph, plot where they might be. This particular graph is intentionally biased towards importance to project vs. importance to bureaucracy when defining the different circles. If there are other biases or relationships that need to be captured, make sure you do that as well! As you draw out the different actors, always write down the REALITY of where they are, vs the IDEAL of where they might be. To represent that ideal, use arrows to communicate with your team where these folk should ideally be, and use that as a starting point to discuss how you might get them there.

Worksheet

Example Scenario

The Mysteries (Mapping the dark matter)

There’s the HIERARCHY of a bureaucracies and the SUBSTRUCTURE of the bureaucracy. The hierarchy exists above the surface and is often already mapped (or at least overt). The substructure exists below the surface and is non-obvious, but becomes intuitive to those who exist in that bureaucracy for long enough.

Consider the legend of Zeus and Dionysus. Dionysus is a translation of a hedonistic cult religion in the very early days of Greece. He’s the god of wine and alcohol, and also of madness. He doesn’t fit very well into the Pantheon, and yet is pervasive in Greek legends and tragedy. The Dionysian Mysteries were a set of practices that effectively undermined social constraints: a classical world version of basement concerts and beer pong. EVERY society has these things, as does every bureaucracy. They play the role of subverting the entrenched structure to really get things done. In this case, we want to understand WHO is a catalyst for this, WHERE these events occur, and WHY things have ended up this way. What are the stories behind the stories that make us need to break free?

In a research sprint I did at a hospital, I discovered that the real connectors were program admins: across deeply siloed research and technical units, the program admins were all only one or two steps removed from each other and always knew which other admin to connect with after about 6mo on the job. These admins became de-facto gatekeepers to the programs, despite not having substantive power or title, and ultimately the design work (building more densely networked and open programs) resolved around their needs and capacity.

Why?

This penultimate tool is meant to be a practical and evolving sketchpad throughout the program’s evolution. It should serve as a reference point within the team when making decisions about stakeholders and developing strategies for moving forward.

Also, and I apologize to our government friends, it’s also not always the best tool to share with your clients and government partners. This is a planning tool for the consultant team to make sense of an environment that everyone else takes for granted

How To

This is the last step, and is the raw material for a strategy to influence the program. I always start with the core team, and organizing around them. This is a very practitioner-centric approach and not always the right one, but it is often where I am the most engaged. From there, go through your list of archetypes and the folk that you’ve listed on the Mapping the Actors activity, and list them all out. Start to draw lines between them, one-by-one. Who is a close friend? Who collaborates? Sometimes you can have both: rivals who nonetheless share intel, or teammates who are also close competitors.

Indicate the directionality of relationships too. These can sometimes be bi-directional. I’ve seen situations where managers are managing those who see them as competitors, or mentors whose status has been uplifted by their mentees. If there are other types of relationships, fill them in and find a way to represent them.

This activity is best done in a team setting, where everyone can contribute their opinion and perspectives on the relationships.

Worksheet

Example Scenario

What’s next?

You’ve used these tools to try and get an understanding of this landscape. So what’s next? Hopefully, you should have a good understanding of who all the major players are, who you want to be involved where, and how you might move forward on having a positive impact.

Here’s a quick checklist that can get you going on asking the questions to have impact.

Use these tools to sketch out current AND ideal states
Bring sketches along so you can show people in future interviews (“is this right? does this make sense?”)
Who do you want closer to the project? Who do you want pushes out?
Use your understanding of the Mysteries and Dark Matter to figure out who you need to win over and convince to push the problematic people out
Who do you need to get in a room in order to collaborate?
Who do you need to kick out of the room because they force themselves in?

This enhanced knowledge will help you understand where your technology and where your skills as a social entrepreneur will have the greatest impact, and by bringing those who you’re hoping to work with along for the ride, hopefully you’ll have made some great allies along the way.

If you have any questions, contact me at alb@andrewlb.com and we can chat about how this approach might work for your specific challenge.

Originally published at pit.andrewlb.com on February 1, 2018.