The Foreign Service Journal, January 2007

the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Toward the end of each seminar the members might develop a new exercise, with the subject selected to fill a gap in the exercises they experienced. The domestic roots of foreign policy. Much less time might be spent on travel than took place under the original Senior Seminar; two or three domestic trips should suffice to allow participants to interact with a wide variety of domestic interests. For many groups and interests a more efficient approach would be to invite leaders to meet with the semi- nar in Washington. Congress. The seminar should address techniques for maximizing the utility of overseas congressional visits, preparing and giving testimony, and handling correspondence from the Hill. The Office of Management & Budget should explain its role in managing the interface between the executive and legislature. The Gov- ernment Accountability Office should describe its role, and detail how legis- lation is developed. The above elements need not be discrete segments with the focus on one and then another, but rather should be covered throughout the nine-month program in mutually reinforcing ways. For example, it is logical to focus on policy and the agency-by-agency orientation early in the program as the basis for roleplay- ing exercises. The interactions among seminar members are as important as the pre- sentations by speakers. One tech- nique to promote the effectiveness of the seminar might be to assign a task group of three to five members to lead the questioning of each presen- ter or each agency visited. Members would research the matters to pre- pare probing questions and to ensure that questions about interagency coordination and best practices are addressed. Criteria for Selection of FSOs Limiting candidates to those pro- moted into the Senior Foreign Ser- vice significantly more rapidly than their peers puts most of the selection burden on the established and gener- ally well-regarded promotion system based on annual performance evalua- tions. Generally, those promoted most rapidly have more years avail- able before optional or mandatory retirement. However, the separation of FSO promotion decisions from assignment decisions means many just-promoted senior officers will have two or more years remaining in their current assignments. Complicating FSO seminar assign- ments further, many officers consider attendance at the National War Col- lege the primary marker for promo- tion into the Senior Foreign Service. Thus, the appeal a few years later of senior education may be limited. However, once the seminar is well established, many high-performance officers may opt for the seminar instead of the NWC. In the mean- time, there are officers available who 16 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 7 S P E A K I N G O U T Leadership for the proposed new interagency seminar might come from a private institution with strong international education interests, such as a university.