The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2015

38 JULY-AUGUST 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Office with dedicated rooms, including a library area within the King Charles Street headquarters, is vital to building up the long-term strength and effectiveness of the Foreign Office as an institution. It is at the heart of my vision of a Foreign Office that is an international center of ideas and expertise; that leads foreign policy thinking across government; that is recognized as the best diplomatic service in the world; and that is able to defend our country’s interests in an unpredictable and competi- tive international landscape for the long term.” I am sure that the more competitive among our State Department colleagues reading this might not welcome our aspiration to be the best diplomatic service in the world! But that is indeed the goal. And it is not just the goal of the political leadership of the Foreign Office in the person of William Hague or, now, Philip Hammond—though I was delighted to hear the new Foreign Secretary confirm his support of this aspiration in his first all-staff meeting after our recent general election. The senior officials leading the organization, with Permanent Under Secretary Sir Simon Fraser in the vanguard, have also championed the idea, both as part of an effort to improve how we learn and develop as individuals and as an organization, and also as an essential part of his Diplomatic Excellence Initiative. One of the key themes of that initiative is a strong and skilled workforce, alongside a strong global network, policy excellence and consular excellence—all underpinned by the initiative’s values: taking responsibility; encouraging innovation; working together. There are a couple of other key principles in how we are establishing the Academy. First, the institution should be a resource for all those working to advance British interests internationally. That means equal participation, as learners and as contributors, by both our locally employed staff overseas and our London-based staff (the equivalent of your Civil Service). It also means making what the Academy does as open as possible to all parts of the British government working for our interests internationally, whether in London or across the Foreign & Com- monwealth Office network of embassies and other missions. Both those aspirations involve challenges, from cost to location to information technology. But we believe that for the Academy to have the required impact, we need to be involving this whole cast of colleagues. One of the other fundamental principles is to make much better use of the knowledge, skills and expertise already avail- able in that huge cast of talented colleagues from across the FCO and the entire U.K. government. I am sure there is a similar situ- ation in the American system: vast reservoirs of untapped learn- ing. It’s not that people do not want to share what they know—on the contrary, they enjoy doing so. Nor is it that people sit around thinking they know it all already—there is a huge appetite to learn more and improve performance. But we have struggled to find a system to help make this learning sufficiently easy and structured that it becomes a habit. I hope that the Diplomatic Academy will help us do that. What the Academy Will Do So what will people learn and share through the Diplomatic Academy, and how? We decided early on that we needed a way to make sure that the learning in the Academy was aligned with what the For- eign Office and the British government more broadly actually needed. Drawing on the experience of private- and public-sector institutions, we opted for a faculty system. The 11 faculties cover We needed to ensure we could provide consistently strong learning across the whole range of what constitutes diplomacy. U.K. Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond opens the Diplomatic Academy in February. COURTESYOFTHEU.K.FOREIGN&COMMONWEALTHOFFICE