The Foreign Service Journal, March 2012

new ways to manage knowledge, by seeing phenomena as connections, patterns and trends, rather than as documents or pieces of information. It’s a movement from “I know what I’m looking for” to “I need to see what I should be looking for” — a rather different approach to problem-solving. In science and engineering, visual- izing has become a fundamental aid to asking the right questions, helping us to address the age-old problem that “we do not know what we do not know.” To quote Lewis Platt, former CEO of Hewlett Packard: “If HP knew what HP knows, it would be three times as profitable.” Exploration of the applications and mechanics of how State could use data visualization in practice is better left to another paper. But as the government invests in using such tools to enhance defense and intelligence missions, should we not consider what advan- tages we might gain from applying them to our diplomatic and develop- ment goals? And can we really afford to keep relying on documents and tex- tual narrative as our knowledge para- digm, rather than adopting new technologies to pursue our national in- terests? What Next? Here are three broad ways in which data visualization could benefit State: • Deriving more value from data in order to better formulate foreign policy; • Understanding data better in order to operate more efficiently and effectively; and • Supplementing public diplo- macy to communicate more effec- tively. S P E A K I N G O U T Today’s information environment is characterized by rapidly increasing pace, volume and complexity. M A R C H 2 0 1 2 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 15