The Foreign Service Journal, March 2023

28 MARCH 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL along the way about what it took to be a great diplomat left me skeptical. Effective diplomacy was (and still is) consistently described in highly ambiguous terms —as more an art than a science, requiring innate talent and gut instincts. But is the field of diplomacy really that subjective? I think not. Even art requires mastery of the fundamentals. Let’s face it. Merit does not thrive in an environment that lacks clear standards of success. Unclear standards may help explain why presidents continue to stuff Foggy Bottom full of outsiders despite the Foreign Service’s insistence that careerists are best suited for the job. The solutions are straightforward but far from simple. The State Department must propagate a new vision of expertise grounded in evidence. A New Culture of Decision-Making Reforming the State Department and building a more modern policymaking process will take small but meaningful interven- tions at every stage of the decision process. Let’s examine four stages: knowledge management, analysis and decision-making, tools for learning, and curriculum for vital skills. Knowledge Management . First, knowledge for foreign policy needs to be made more explicit. Explicit knowledge is captured and written down, in contrast to tacit knowledge, which is more like “street smarts” and “common sense.” In today’s State Depart- ment, tacit knowledge reigns supreme. State’s overreliance on tacit knowledge explains the absence of handover procedures for its constantly rotating officials, the lack of prescribed doctrine to delineate best practices, and meager investment in research or training. Our current system of cables and policy memos does not cut it: Contributing to the flood of information, they are ephemeral, flashing bright before disappearing into the archives. Too much of the extraordinary knowledge gathered in our for- eign missions is never used by policymakers. An improved system of knowledge management would continually fortify a foundation of shareable, widely accessible knowledge for policymakers. It would allow knowledge to be easily organized, trained, evaluated, and replicated. It is the infrastructure on which policy success will be constructed. Analysis and Decision-Making . Second, we can improve the analytical and decision-making prowess of the department. The methods policymakers use today to conduct analysis are ad hoc and sub- jective. Decades of research on decision science and cognitive psychology offer opportunities to greatly improve the effectiveness of our decision- making. The U.S. intel- ligence commu- nity has standards for good analysis that are codified and trained, while the State Department has none. Improved analytical standards and rigorous training at State will help distinguish today’s diplomat from the arm-chair prognosticator. Some of this is already taking root at State, especially in the Center for Analytics, though its placement within the Office of the Under Secretary for Manage- ment rather than Political Affairs was an unfortunate choice. It suggests analysis is a service provided to decision-makers rather than a fundamental part of the policy process. State should also implement a new clearance process that rewards analysis with the strongest evidentiary basis. Policy debates must be won not merely by the force of one’s conviction or one’s position in the hierarchy, but by the quality of one’s evi- dence. An updated decision-making system can be an antidote to turf battles and risk aversion, and it can arrest the slide into politicization of the bureaucracy. Research conducted on forecasting tournaments offers one exciting and research-backed approach for surfacing the people and methods with the best analytical accuracy. In a four-year study hosted in collaboration with the Director of National Intel- ligence, a team of trained forecasters outperformed professional intelligence analysts by 25 to 30 percent and beat the control group by 60 percent. Decisions in foreign policy are often built on assumptions about the future, and formalizing these forecasts may help test these assumptions and learn from the outcomes. Tools for Learning . Third, diplomats need to design new sys- tems for learning. Uncertainty is unavoidable, and one can never In today’s State Department, tacit knowledge reigns supreme.