The Foreign Service Journal, October 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2019 13 50 Years Ago Communication and Controversy: The Future of Foreign Service Reporting D uring the past two years we have had at least three signifi- cant opportunities to evaluate the functions of the Foreign Service of the United States. … It may be time to make an inquiry into the very purpose and nature of Foreign Service reporting, to ask if the function itself is as vital as we have assumed it to be, and to ask if the traditional approach to reporting is relevant to our times. In the process, we have to face some questions about the nature of the Foreign Service. … There are a number of factors at work which may reduce the relevance of the “traditional” style of Foreign Service reporting. Most important is the information explosion and its associated effects. …Another factor is the changing milieu in which we live and operate. This is not the relatively static world of the assumed positions and hierarchial [ sic ] relationships of the colonial era, the cold war, or “Pax Americana.”…A closely related factor is the spread of controversy itself, of challenges to various establishments and ways of thinking. …The Foreign Service is now recruiting among a generation of young people who have grown up in this milieu of contro- versy. … It is a reasonable lesson of history that an organization confronted by changes of this magnitude should not resist them, but should exploit them to its own advantage. This will require a basic change of philosophy in the Foreign Service, particularly in its approach to reporting. The basis of this philosophy must be the recognition of the fact that Foreign Service reporting cannot be comprehensive, and that it need not be com- prehensive. … A corollary is that the Foreign Service must recog- nize that its primary duty is not simply to report information, but to make judgments and recommen- dations [emphasis in original]. … We must also break away from our fixation on the cleared written document in its never-changing formats. … Foreign Service officers are often exhorted to be daring, original, and aggressive, but the system contin- ues to discourage those who are. The only way we can have old, bold Foreign Service officers is to institute rewards for courage and perceptive- ness. … One approach is to upgrade the process of evaluating report- ing, and to link it to the personnel system. … The future of the Service depends on our staking out new purposes, in addition to the old, and focusing on the essential and discarding the unimportant. —FSO Michael A.G. Michaud, excerpted from his article by the same title in the October 1969 Foreign Service Journal . AFSPA afspa.org Clements Worldwide clements.com Chambers Theory ChambersTheory.com Hirshorn Foreign Service (BMT) foreignservice.bmtc.com Patriot’s Colony riversideonline.com/ patriotscolony Property Specialists, Inc. propertyspecialistsinc.com Richey Property Management richeypm.com WJD Management wjdpm.com