Episode 5: Phone some Experts

Part I of a conversation between fp21 founder and CEO Dan Spokojny and Victor Marsh, Ph.D.

Transcript

Dan Spokojny: [00:00:34]  

in today's episode of fp21 minutes, we're examining new legislation under consideration by Congress to reauthorize the Department of State, and taking a close look at provisions related to building a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive staff. 

Advocates for revitalizing diplomacy as the primary tool for U.S. Policy see the reauthorization of the State Department as a vital step forward. It's been almost two decades since the State Department's authorizing language has been updated. So long in fact, that the existing law refers to the State Department website as an internet website, but hopes are high that Congress and President Biden can get it done this year.

A big component of the legislation under consideration, and the topic of our conversation today, focuses on improving the personnel system at the Department. The global conversation about race, equity, and justice, sparked in large measure by the Black Lives Matter movement, has forced a reckoning with the State Department's poor record on diversity equity and inclusion issues.

Congress has taken notice and is trying to help the department move forward. An Op-Ed in the New York times by a former diplomat recently declared quote U.S. Diplomats today, inherit a racist system that was designed to keep African-Americans out. A government accountability study from early 2020, found that the department is actually less diverse today than it was in 2002 . 

This question of diversity and inclusion is core to fp21's mission. We know that a department that excludes talented women and minorities from positions of leadership is doing so at great cost to the quality of our foreign policy. Transforming foreign policy requires the right people, a diverse, inclusive, and highly skilled workforce that the American people can count on for generations to come. 

 With that intro today, I'm here with Victor Marsh, a former foreign service officer turned academic, studying organizational behavior, diversity, and inclusion. Vic is a senior advisor to fp21, and is our go-to guy and understanding how organizations can improve their performance by ensuring the diversity, equity, and inclusion of their workforce.

 Vic, I wonder if you can put this conversation about diplomacy and personnel in context for us in this historical moment.  Can you tell us more about the status of this discussion, as it relates to U.S. diplomacy.

Vic Marsh: [00:02:45] The State Department has a heck of a lot going on with respect to diversity inclusion right now. I would say the extent to which there are conversations now that weren't being had before is very important. As far as former colleagues, the tests, almost every bureau, every organizational unit has some sort of diversity council. These are people who have raised their hands to volunteer, to do some sort of problem-solving work, to do some sort of recommendation writing work. So there's just been a buzz of activity since 2020. So that's part of the process that's going on.

We've got the Biden Administration coming out with three significant diversity and inclusion actions. The first two are related to data transparency. The Biden administration has declared that more data has to be collected, and that data has to be desegregated by all of the categories of identity that the equal employment opportunity commission tracks. So every category that's in a U.S. Law, whether you're disabled, whether you are black, white, woman. All of those protected classes with a history of workplace discrimination are now required to be in our workforce data. 

Dan Spokojny: [00:04:07]  Is this across the U.S. Government? 

Vic Marsh: [00:04:09] This is an executive order that applies across the U.S. Government. It applies to both internal diversity issues and external program impact.

Of normal routine government programs that might have some disparate impact on gender or disparate impact on people of a certain race.  Let's say you're the Department of State or the Department of Agriculture. You've got some programs you're running, you're doing something in the world trying to make it a better place with your government funding.

The Biden administration has said, Hey, we are interested in what the results were. Desegregated by what your skin is, what's your gender, a parent gender is, and what your disability status is, we want to know what's going on in the end result.  Because we know that even though a program may have been carefully designed, maybe it was designed by one type of person who has a blind spot, just a normal human blind spot.  I can only imagine what all government programs would look like if I designed them like a African-American dude raised in Detroit might have just a different perspective from the entire country.  I could have some blind spots, in my design of a program that leads to results that have racial patterns or gender patterns or disability status patterns in the final outcomes for our citizens.

So the Biden administration says, yes, we care about our internal workforce. We want to know, are we hiring across all of America's meritorious talent, but we also want to know externally in this first executive order, what is the result. What are the practical results for every type of American person, every type of citizen.

The next executive order that I thought is very important related to just the promotion of scientific newness in government work. As a former State Department, foreign service officer generalists, I have been admitting meeting. I've been inside of many meetings. I have been part of group brainstorming sessions on topics that I do not know about.

And so what the Biden administration has said is that you have to ask some experts. You have to make policy decisions in a way that includes scientific evidence, real statistics, not just the quantitative work that's in the basics test in the foreign service written exam, beyond just noticing percentages, maybe run a regression or two and figure out what is the evidence basis of this policy. And I think for our friends, who have been long-suffering in the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Energy, and others, who had some particularly non-scientific political pressures placed upon them for several years, that this is a huge respite that the Biden administration has said, look, you have to phone some experts. You have to go with what's best available science. 

 Dan Spokojny: [00:07:16] Yeah, as I understand that memo from Biden was called revitalizing trust in U.S. government through evidence-based foreign policy and science-based foreign policy. So I think that trust piece there is resonant with those of us who care about these issues.

Vic Marsh: [00:07:31] Absolutely. And it's very fp21, right? Using evidence, not just in your argument phase. Not just while you're padding your citations, as you send your report to Congress, but using evidence while you're debating the alternative options for making policy is really important.  We've got to care about what the final results of our proposed policy are likely to be.

We've got to care about whether or not we are repeating some sort of mistake that's already been made. As a former director of the ops center used to say, she said, mistakes are normal and mistakes are great. You learn from mistakes, but by golly, we will not make the same mistake twice.

Dan Spokojny: [00:08:18] The first piece you mentioned was a new program to collect and be more transparent about diversity data within personnel. The second piece is this memo on revitalizing trust through evidence-based foreign policy and science-based policy. And what's the third piece? 

Vic Marsh: [00:08:34] This is the piece that's specific to the Department of State is that Secretary Blinken announced the creation of a new position in the chief diversity and inclusion officer, so CDIO. I imagine they had to de-conflict from a chief inclusion officer, which would be just like a chief information officer or a chief innovation officer.

So the chief diversity and inclusion officer, the secretary specified that this person would report directly to the secretary. So that's one piece of structure that will be in place, still remains to be seen what the software of this office will be. We understand where it sits in the organizational chart that I would consider that more of a hardware question.

Where is it in the structure? We need to know what the practical responsibilities are, what the team will look like. We need to know what behaviors are expected and what would a successful chief diversity officer do? 

 Dan Spokojny: [00:09:33] I wonder if I could ask you to dig in on that point at the top here.  What would you hope for this new office to be able to accomplish?

What would you want their authorities to be in order to make a real difference on these issues? Which of course have been long discussed.

Vic Marsh: [00:09:48] The level of independence of the chief diversity and inclusion officer is very important. And here's why,  everyone faces pressure inside the government, to help the government look good.

Absolutely everyone. We know that we have to honestly answer reports to Congress, but we often have seen people face the pressure off,  don't want to answer it in a way that makes us look incompetent. Don't want to answer in a way that admits that we had bad luck. Don't want to answer this in a way that admits that we've made a grievous mistake, right?

So the pressure in government work will be to put the best foot forward to try to take the piece of data that looks the most impressive and make that the loudest part of your reporting. And I think the independence of this office is very important because you're going to have to tell some sort of hard truths to the U.S. Congress, right?

 I think Congress should be interested if, I'm a senator from Nebraska, and there has never been a U.S. Ambassador to a major country for my state. I think I would have some questions about whether the State Department is drawing from all aspects of the country, and whether it's really just selecting from certain places, certain schools that are attractive to people who live in a certain region. I would ask those questions. If I was a member of one of the racial or ethnic identity caucuses,  head of the Hispanic Caucus of the Congress. I might have some questions about the decrease in Hispanic officers, rising through the ranks over time, and the sort of more sluggish numbers at various parts of the pipeline for that.

I think the independence piece is perhaps the most important because you'll need someone who has the trust of the secretary of state, who through that trust, is able to establish an informal level of independence inside the organization. Someone who's allowed to tell the whole story, and is not screened and overly edited into telling some partial set of half-truths.

And I just think that if you tell people half-truths, your solutions are going to be half measures, you can't have terrible inputs without full candor that lead your policy process. You've got to have some strong independence. And I think this is informally established.

It's informally established based on the quality of the relationship between the secretary of state, and the chief diversity and inclusion officer. So I think that's going to matter a lot. I also think practically, I'm so tired of panel discussions about diversity. If I never go to another diversity-relevant conference, it would be too soon.

I do not want a chief diversity and inclusion officer who is focused on external relations. We've got an entire Bureau of people who focus on the State Departments' image in foreign countries. The State Department's image on Capitol Hill has a separate Bureau for that. I think what we need the Department's chief diversity and inclusion officer to do is to really focus internally on the Department of State's workforce and to isolate and attack problems that arise with issues of discrimination, issues short of discrimination. We've also got lower-level things like implicit bias, this sort of leads to people liking who they like, and so they staff their embassy full of their buddies from their last fun assignment two assignments ago, right?

We've seen the replication of whole embassies. The political chief over there becomes a DCM someplace else, deputy chief of mission, and Kelsey Capris, the econ chief is someone they worked with, the GSO is someone that they worked with. We have all of these replications of prior experiences that you can probably trace in the data.

If you've got a chief diversity officer who's focused internally, not on PR work externally. So what does this internal work needs to be? It needs to be about focusing on where the heck are we losing the chance to tap diverse talent across this agency. And we know that people of color are exiting at a certain point, find out what that point is and really problem-solve, dig deep and work the building till you reach substantial progress.

So I want a chief diversity and inclusion officer that has independence, established informally from their close relationship with the secretary. I want people to know and to fear them a little bit, to know that, Hey,  we got to get this stuff together, and we got to be honest about where we are.

And I also want them to focus on the inside, not the external PR to really track what's going on level by level, rank by rank, Bureau by Bureau. To figure out how we can improve the caliber of our output for the American people. You can't get high caliber by, not tapping all the brainpower you have.

 Dan Spokojny: [00:15:06] To what extent do you think our government, and our country have fully digested the idea that race, diversity, gender equity, sexual identity, equity is about more than just an ethical issue. It's more than just making sure that everybody's included.

To what extent do you think people see this as an issue about performance and government effectiveness? this is one area where a lot of management academics get a bit frustrated because basically, I think a lot of people, accept the idea that diversity is related to fairness and justice, right?

Vic Marsh: [00:15:47] I saw a wonderful tweet a couple of weeks ago that talked about homogeneity hires, right?  They recounted how there's a department at their organization that just hired another Mike.

So people, when they're going over to that department, they don't call it the revenue department or whatever, they just call it, 'go ask the Mikes'. ' Just go over there to the Mikes'.  Mike hired another Mike. And so this person coined the term homogeneity hire, right?

Oh, they had another Mike. There's another homogeneity hire, similar to the state department, where you pick up and you bring all your buddies from your last tour and you give them jobs at your new embassy, you're going with the homogeneity of experience like I only trust the people who worked with me before, who already have the inside jokes that we've established.

To me, that is a core challenge to Teddy Roosevelt's vision of a meritorious civil and foreign service. So President Roosevelt,  Teddy Roosevelt, negotiated across three separate convenings of the U.S. Congress. To deliver the product that we have for the American people today.

The civil service is separate from this sort of network-based homeboys hookup system. And that's really the baseline that we are always trying to battle, and according to the GAO reports we've been losing frankly. The proof of whether or not you've got Teddy Roosevelt's merit system at work, one of the major elements of proof there, is whether or not whiteness and maleness is a strong predictor of your rising through the ranks, right? 

Whether similarity to the existing people in power on the superficial measures is predictive of your success. So Teddy Roosevelt would not approve of the sharp decreases in diversity that the state department has experienced in his leadership from 2002 to present-day as tracked by the GAO report last year, right? 

Diversity is about fairness and justice. Certainly, it is, but it's also about just matching the right brain to the right job on the basis of some actual skills that people have honed over the years.

And you cannot tell me that those skills depend on whiteness and maleness, but our numbers bare out this sort of identity basis instead of merit and skills basis of job matching. So we've got to match the right brains to the right job, and that's how you actually get better decisions in teams, in groups, and in bureaucracies.

So no management scholar would suggest that all you have to do is be inclusive at your, frat boy embassy. And so long as you're inclusive of people who already look like you'll have great results. No, like there are technical things you have to know. There are specific skills that are needed in the mix to get high-quality products, high-quality analysis to America's elected decision-makers. 

So if we're going to deliver high quality, we've got to have the right brains at the table. We've got to look very carefully at what types of brains are needed. And then we've got to make sure that we're not letting all of our weird kooky biases as human beings, get in the way of delivering for the people of the United States.