Episode 10: Simulating Diplomacy
Alex Bollfrass interviews the Harvard Davis Center's Arvid Bell about creating realistic training environments for foreign policy practitioners. fp21 CEO Dan Spokojny reflects on events in Afghanistan.
Transcript
[Alex Bollfrass]
Hello, I'm Alex Bollfrass. It's my pleasure to welcome you to fp21 minutes, a podcast dedicated to evidence and integrity in foreign policy. We bring you conversations between practitioners and researchers about how American foreign policy is made and how it can be made better. This week's guest is Arvid Bell, who leads the Negotiation Task Force at the Harvard Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. One of Arvid's specialties is creating realistic crisis scenarios where he generates immersive environments that bring participants closer to the chaos and complexity of real life and asks them to solve problems and achieve their objectives. I should disclose that we are collaborators on one of the projects he mentions, the Red Horizon exercise. We have written about our philosophy for creating that in an article with the spicy title “To Hell with the Cell: The Case for Immersive Statecraft Education.” I will put a link in the show notes. In the conversation, we first talk about the range of programs the Negotiation Task Force runs at the Davis Center. Then we talk about some of the differences we've seen in how the military and the State Department think about training exercises. We then touch on the benefits we see in immersive simulations for public servants at all career levels and conclude with Arvid’s description of the principles that drive him in designing these programs. After that, I'll step out of the interviewer's chair to share some personal reactions to an item in the newsletter that caught my attention. In light of the situation in Afghanistan, I also asked the fp21 CEO, Dan Spokojny, to share his initial personal reflections. The episode concludes with those.
[Arvid Bell]
My name is Arvid Bell, I am a lecturer on Government at Harvard University and I also lead the Negotiation Task Force based at the Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. And the NTF is an organization that looks at international security problems from a negotiation perspective. But even though we are based at a university, we are very interested in the practical relevance of our research. What is it that we find out about international conflict that practitioners benefit from and also that what can we learn from diplomats was felt in various countries? And then we think about how to make sense of the world using this toolkit. And we do research, we do training, and we work with the government people and try to facilitate exchange between scholars, diplomats, and other people. One thing we do, for example, are highly immersive negotiation training workshops. They range from workshops we do for our own Harvard students, but also all the way up to executive education programs that are very popular among diplomats or even military officials. We recreate complex international crisis scenarios, almost in a laboratory kind of way. And then we bring people to campus and we confront them with an immersive environment that makes them feel like “Oh, wow, I'm really entering a crisis situation room at the State Department or like a military headquarters.” We confront them with specific challenges in real-time, and they need to negotiate internally with their team or confront other actors for different rooms, different buildings, and so they wrestle with complex security problems in real-time. The reception is mixed among State Department officials in a very different way. Look at how the military officials who also join us on campus for these training exercises, right, negotiation, conflict resolution exercises, how they look at training. One thing you notice is that the military, talking mostly about the American military, are very used to training and exercises as work that they do. So if you're not on deployments, you are preparing, you’re training all the time. For them, the format of an immersive training exercise or a crisis simulation is not really something that's very surprising to them. It's more common among State Department officials to approach training exercises a little bit more with an attitude of “I already know what's going on in the world.” The notion of “I need to train and train and practice all the time” is not that widespread. That's not the general theme, right? We have people who are extremely enthusiastic and who remain lifelong learners and then return. We also learn from them. Maybe there's something to be gained from cultivating more of a constant training mindset among diplomats as well. Even if you are highly experienced, there's still something you can learn.
[Alex Bollfrass]
The military has a really clearly laid out plan for how you educate someone in the armed forces, and that starts fairly early on. Like you say, it's completely natural to then come back and do an exercise and get smart about the latest methods, technologies, and doctrine before you go back out to work. But in the State Department, it's not just that there isn't a tradition of mid-career, more late-stage career training exercises, there isn't one at the early stages.
[Arvid Bell]
Obviously, the American Foreign Service is the largest, and probably most professional, diplomatic corps that exists. As the Foreign Service Institute, which does excellent work, we all want to be a little bit careful as to tell them what they should do. I just find it very surprising that when it comes to core skills, such as negotiation, that there wouldn't be some sort of standardized training curriculums. Institutions can also always learn from each other. I don't see anything bad about the State Department or learning a little bit from some aspects that the Pentagon cultivates, when it comes to education, or maybe some things that policy-oriented academics do.
[Alex Bollfrass]
One can imagine a seasoned diplomat saying that negotiation is not something that you learn in the classroom. It's not something you learn by reading books, it's an art form, in a sense, that you acquire skills for negotiation in the course of your career. You develop what works and doesn't work for you. And you can pass along your experiences, your insights, to the diplomats who come up after you in the organization.
[Arvid Bell]
There are many other professions where we would also not be satisfied with people making this argument to justify why they wouldn't constantly work on themselves and educating themselves, and also reaching out to other people that can learn from and experimenting with new methods, while mentoring younger people, for example, and while passing on knowledge. These things are not mutually exclusive. The Negotiation Task Force specifically is interested in pushing the boundaries of what's possible when it comes to highly realistic, immersive training. If you take our most advanced executive education program, for example, Red Horizon, we have senior government and military people in these kinds of workshops. Because you are tasked with solving very complex problems with maybe 40, 50, 60, 70 people working on the same problem over the course of a weekend, you will have to unleash your leadership skills, your communication skills, your decision-making skills. Sometimes these problems are similar to the challenges that diplomats face, or even senior diplomats face, when they have to lead and make decisions in high-stakes situations. The great thing is, if you're already so good, well come and join us, and you can show everyone how it's really done. Or maybe you aren't as good as you're saying, and you make a mistake. And it's also great, because at the end of the day, that happens to you in an immersive learning environment, you can talk about it, and then at least some other people will pick up on that and say, “Okay, now I know how it should be done, how it should not be done.” We are very lucky that we are working on the design of our workshops with the current and former ambassadors, also high-ranking military people, and have them educate us on how to make things more realistic. And then we bring our design methodology into play. Our work is based on current trends, data-driven research into especially Euro-Atlantic security issues, trends in the Indo-Pacific, for example. I find it always fascinating to have very diverse crowds, you're on campus, we have academics on the one hand, but then you have people from the State Department, from the armed forces, but also international diplomats.
[Alex Bollfrass]
It's also an opportunity for academics and scholars to practice interacting with policymakers. One example that comes to mind from our Red Horizon project is one of the participants of one year who's a real-life, top leading expert on the topic that he was tasked with working on in the simulation, came away completely flabbergasted and frustrated at how hard it was to convey that knowledge in the right format at the right time, even in the simulated crisis kind of environment, and came away with the objective of practicing and learning more about how to brief a government. That's tremendously valuable, just creating a space where policymakers and academics can discover each other's problems and think through solutions.
[Arvid Bell]
Immersive training environments, and if properly designed, and if complex enough to also be compelling for senior government officials, for example, to participate in that, they are also great environments to embrace failure and to learn from it because you wouldn't want to fail when you are overseas and negotiating an important agreement. So you don't want to fail, that's just not an option. But if the way you prepare is mostly like reading, studying or listening passively to what others tell you, you also cannot fail, you can never make a mistake, maybe you forget to read something, but no one even cares. And so I think this idea of recreating some of the decision-making environments that you are going to encounter, and to allow you to experiment with those, we all learn from our failures. Giving people the opportunity to experiment, maybe also try different negotiation tactics or team management strategies that otherwise they wouldn't want to experiment with at their embassy, that's very useful. And some people have made use of that in a very effective way.
[Alex Bollfrass]
One possible concern is that by providing a realistic-feeling enough environment, that in the end is structurally very different from what a real-life diplomat would encounter out in the world. Is there danger in leading them astray with false conclusions?
[Arvid Bell]
From a design perspective, you want to think very intentionally about the learning objectives, the specific things that you want people to take away. It's not enough to just say something like Afghanistan is a very interesting conflict, so let's just do something about it. But you want to figure out okay, what do you want people to learn? Do you want them to learn something about, for example, the way ethnicity influences Afghan policymaking? Do you want them to learn something about the way the interests of foreign governments impact societal dynamics in the country? These would all be issues you could teach people. When we're talking about designing scenarios, I find it very beneficial to think very intentionally about at least one thing that relates to skills and structures, specific negotiation concepts, for example, multi-party negotiations, effective team building. The second one relates to the actual substance of conflict, but it could be okay, we want them to learn something about nuclear proliferation in Southeast Asia. There could be a very specific topic. If you have figured those two out, then you need to do your best to do the complexities on the ground justice. If one of your main objectives is, for example, to show people how difficult it is to organize consensus in interagency negotiations, you want to make sure you design it in a way that it is really difficult for them to do that. In our programs, like Red Horizon, for example, we built in a lot of traps that all connect to negotiating between organizational hierarchies, overcoming communication barriers between political and military representatives. And so it's usually very difficult for people to overcome all these barriers. If you want to deliver extremely immersive and highly realistic training environments that very experienced people can learn from, you cannot come up with something like that over the course of a weekend and just say “It would be fun to do this.” But these can be very extensive, resource-heavy research projects, where you analyze decision-making structures of different countries, of organizations, you turn them into simulation models, and then you load specific scenarios into the simulation architecture that you have designed. And then eventually you test it and only then do you have a product that is compelling and different, that people are looking for very advanced training on international issues, that they feel like “Okay, this is something that even I can still learn from.”
[Alex Bollfrass]
I wonder if you had any observations about a general openness towards information from academia, in governments, compared to that of the United States?
[Arvid Bell]
American academics, to the extent that you can generalize it, are overall much more intertwined with the foreign policy establishment in general, then is the case in, certainly some European countries, also other parts of the world. It is much more likely that the average American foreign policy scholar that you meet, be he or she, as brilliant and well-educated as she or he may be, that they don't really question some of the very fundamental assumptions that underpin the worldview of the people who make foreign policy.
[Alex Bollfrass]
For all the complaints from American policymakers about the uselessness of academic work, you’ve provided a reminder that they actually have it quite good, that there are well-trained, well-motivated people in American universities who wish policymakers well, who share their objectives.
[Arvid Bell]
There's a lot of value left on the table, in negotiation speak, because government officials don't ask around as much as they could. If anyone listens to this, and you are interested in hearing more about immersive statecraft education, security, negotiation analysis across Eurasia, simply google “Negotiation Task Force” and we're the first organization there. Find out more about our programs, about Red Horizon, about our Arms Control Negotiation Academy, and all the other stuff. We're also always looking for interesting and interested collaborators on all our various adventures, so please reach out.
[Alex Bollfrass]
The item from this week's newsletter that caught my attention was a quote from the Secretary of State in which he says that “The State Department will be releasing our first-ever data strategy to help us use data more effectively and more creatively for diplomacy. If Netflix can predict what TV show my wife and I might choose to watch next, I think data can also help us and help the department predict maybe the next civil conflict, the next famine, the next economic crisis, and how we can respond more effectively.” Obviously, this is just a preview of the data strategy that the Department of State intends to release. But in that short quote, I see two possible warning signs. The first is that there's a fundamental tension between prediction and explanation, you might have a very good explanation for why something happened. But that explanation doesn't really help you understand when that thing might happen again, or how it can be made not to happen again. In many cases, the informational needs you have to explain something in the past are fundamentally different from the kind of information you need to predict something in the future. At the same time, a good prediction doesn't mean you understand what happens. There are many clever ways of extrapolating the past and having a good sense of what might happen in the future. But that is fundamentally unreliable, and is also reflected in the deep division you have between classical statisticians and those who rely on machine learning. There's much to be said on that topic and I'd like to elaborate at some point. But one too often sees the idea of expertise dismissed because experts can't offer predictions. In some circumstances, of course, you can do both. But that's really hard. And that gets me to my second concern about Secretary Blinken's comments, when he mentions predicting the next civil conflict or famine or economic crisis. It sounds like the focus is on external data, data about what's happening out there in the world, irrespective of US policy and actions. That's fine in some cases. But for many of the difficult foreign policy questions we need to understand, if the US government does this, we expect that to happen out in the world. If we have to understand that interaction, we also have to include an understanding of ourselves. At the moment, the US government has a structural problem in creating policy on that kind of a basis. The intelligence community has the best understanding and analysis of what happens out in the world. But for all the right reasons, it is not tasked with analyzing the abilities of say, the State Department, or the Defense Department to carry out a policy and certainly not with predicting how policymakers will react to the response out in the world that their actions will receive. We at fp21 will of course be keeping an eye out for that once the State Department releases its strategy on that. But it's my hope that the strategy will focus just as much on internal data and internal coordination. With that said, it's really encouraging that the State Department is developing this kind of a strategy in the first place, and I can't wait to read it in full when it comes out. Here is fp21 CEO, Dan Spokojny.
[Dan Spokojny]
What's unfolding right now in Afghanistan has given me the opportunity to reflect on why I started this organization, fp21. Obviously, first, my thoughts turn to the people of Afghanistan who are going to be affected by this tragedy that's unfolding. I also have a lot of empathy for the people who have served in, or worked on, Afghanistan themselves and are feeling this profound sense of loss right now. We're all contending with the future of US foreign policy. And there's a tendency to think about that in broad ideological terms, should we be more hawkish or less hawkish? Those are important questions that should always be debated within a healthy democracy. I also think there's an important question about the structure of our intuitions and how to better those. I hope that among many other important questions today, there are some very smart people who are thinking about how to improve the institutions of US foreign policy and bring new decision making approaches to bear to make sure that we're more successful next time around in the next important endeavor this country undertakes. That's what fp21's here for and we look forward to working with you on that issue.