The Victorian Age was one of confident certainty, not least for British foreign policy. Said Lord Palmerston, addressing Parliament in 1848:
We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.
This sense that important things were just obvious came out likewise in the famous pronouncement by Lord Justice Bowen in the case of Edgington v Fitzmaurice in 1885, where the point at issue of contract law turned on deliberately misleading pre-contractual representations:
The state of a man’s mind is as much a fact as the state of his digestion.
Times have changed. National interests and the foreign policies needed to pursue them are no longer believed to be self-evident phenomena waiting to be proclaimed to a grateful general public by noble leaders. Instead a new paradigm has emerged, at least in the United Kingdom: Management by Measurement.
The idea that government should learn from the private business sector how to run things efficiently first came to prominence when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. 20 years later, the Blair/Brown Labour government pushed this proposition far beyond sensible limits. The very language of foreign policy and policies disappeared in a jargon snowstorm: targets, strategies, objectives, road-maps, priorities and so on.
There are in fact three deep philosophical problems with the very idea of ‘management by measurement’ in any activity, let alone foreign policy.
- First, that idea presupposes a coherent theory of cause and effect – assurance that certain policy decisions are more likely than not to create specific desired real-life outcomes
- Second, there is no way even in theory to decide whether it is ‘better’ to strive towards short-term, reasonably likely, modest successes as opposed to longer-term, less certain, larger successes
- And third, the most important aspects of what diplomats do in fact can not be measured at all. Patiently building goodwill and trust is a crucial part of any diplomat’s work, but its immediate value in the wider policy context can not be calibrated. Thus preoccupation with measurement of what can be measured at the expense of the immeasurable leads to perverse real-life outcomes.
All modern organisations, private and public sectors alike, take measurement especially seriously in one key respect, namely staff appraisals. Employees are expected to hit certain performance targets and meet core standards of behaviour and attitude, otherwise known as ‘competences’. The FCO used to grade its senior staff according to various competences, including Adaptability and Creativity, Communication (Written and Oral), Relating to Others and, above all, Analysis and Judgement.
The greatest of all these competences is Analysis and Judgement. It pulls together all the other fine qualities.
Why? Because in foreign policy things are complicated. Big v. Small. Certain v. uncertain. Risky option v. safe option. Principle v. Politics v. Practical v. Possible. Look at the current turbulence in the Middle East for myriad examples, or the former Yugoslavia and the way the international community struggled for years to find a principled way to deal with Slobodan Milosevic.
In a democracy (maybe in a dictatorship too), Ministers need skilled officials to help them steer through these operational and philosophical complexities. 'Judgement' is the best word for all that. Without Judgement a civil servant (like a Minister, and indeed like a senior corporate executive) is likely to do more harm than good. It made it all the more extraordinary when the FCO dropped Analysis and Judgement from its appraisal processes for senior diplomats in favour of more mundane expectations:
- Leadership
- Getting the best from staff
- Delivering results
- Strategic thinking
- Personal impact
- Learning and development
It appears to have been assumed anyone in the Senior Management Structure of the FCO ipso facto already had Analysis and Judgement aplenty, so there was no need to rate the quality. On the contrary, it is at the highest level that the need to keep a close eye on Analysis and Judgement is most crucial, where the true damage to national interests can come – top officials duly making an impact and showing leadership, but delivering results which turn out to be ruinous.
History never runs short of examples of such damage. See the UK’s successive Iraq enquiries where Judgement (and lack thereof) on the part of top officials and elected politicians has been pored over to grisly effect.
Or for a spectacular corporate example take the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico: the BP top leadership mobilized astonishing technical resources to tackle the problem, but gave a dismal performance in public precisely because they could not convincingly display Analysis or Judgement.
In our new WikiLeaks world, networked masses of people unexpectedly come together on the Web - or on the streets - to challenge long-established assumptions and structures. The psychological and normative framework for honest leadership in the public and private sectors alike is ever more uncertain, and the need for powerful Analysis and good Judgement has never been greater.
The era of ‘management by measurement’ is over, even if its malign bureaucratic legacy effects will carry on twitching for a long time to come. The central leadership problem now in government and business alike is not managing the measurable and predictable, it is coping with the disruptive and unexpected.
Where does this leave ‘corporate diplomacy’, the idea that senior executives need to learn and deploy the skills of professional diplomats in tackling business problems in a globalised marketplace?
Judgement is not something diplomats or anyone else can teach corporate leaders. It is intangible, elusive. Some key people at all levels of any organisation seem to have it – many others just don’t. And those who have it are likely to be too busy (and too important) to have time to join training courses and try to share with lesser mortals the secrets of their insight.
Maybe the point simply is you know Judgment when you see it – and you also know when you’re getting something far below it. Any organisation, public or private, needs to realise that Analysis and Judgement are vital to success and so include them in their leadership programmes, constantly looking hard at examples of success and failure.
In the end, as the BP debacle shows it’s not enough for a corporate leader to be active, clever and convincing. That leader needs to be wise too.
Charles Crawford CMG is a founding member of ADRg Ambassadors and was previously HM Ambassador in Sarajevo, Belgrade, and Warsaw.
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Corporate Diplomacy: The Elusive Role of Judgement
March 6, 2011
The Victorian Age was one of confident certainty, not least for British foreign policy. Said Lord Palmerston, addressing Parliament in 1848:
We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.
This sense that important things were just obvious came out likewise in the famous pronouncement by Lord Justice Bowen in the case of Edgington v Fitzmaurice in 1885, where the point at issue of contract law turned on deliberately misleading pre-contractual representations:
The state of a man’s mind is as much a fact as the state of his digestion.
Times have changed. National interests and the foreign policies needed to pursue them are no longer believed to be self-evident phenomena waiting to be proclaimed to a grateful general public by noble leaders. Instead a new paradigm has emerged, at least in the United Kingdom: Management by Measurement.
The idea that government should learn from the private business sector how to run things efficiently first came to prominence when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. 20 years later, the Blair/Brown Labour government pushed this proposition far beyond sensible limits. The very language of foreign policy and policies disappeared in a jargon snowstorm: targets, strategies, objectives, road-maps, priorities and so on.
There are in fact three deep philosophical problems with the very idea of ‘management by measurement’ in any activity, let alone foreign policy.
- First, that idea presupposes a coherent theory of cause and effect – assurance that certain policy decisions are more likely than not to create specific desired real-life outcomes
- Second, there is no way even in theory to decide whether it is ‘better’ to strive towards short-term, reasonably likely, modest successes as opposed to longer-term, less certain, larger successes
- And third, the most important aspects of what diplomats do in fact can not be measured at all. Patiently building goodwill and trust is a crucial part of any diplomat’s work, but its immediate value in the wider policy context can not be calibrated. Thus preoccupation with measurement of what can be measured at the expense of the immeasurable leads to perverse real-life outcomes.
All modern organisations, private and public sectors alike, take measurement especially seriously in one key respect, namely staff appraisals. Employees are expected to hit certain performance targets and meet core standards of behaviour and attitude, otherwise known as ‘competences’. The FCO used to grade its senior staff according to various competences, including Adaptability and Creativity, Communication (Written and Oral), Relating to Others and, above all, Analysis and Judgement.
The greatest of all these competences is Analysis and Judgement. It pulls together all the other fine qualities.
Why? Because in foreign policy things are complicated. Big v. Small. Certain v. uncertain. Risky option v. safe option. Principle v. Politics v. Practical v. Possible. Look at the current turbulence in the Middle East for myriad examples, or the former Yugoslavia and the way the international community struggled for years to find a principled way to deal with Slobodan Milosevic.
In a democracy (maybe in a dictatorship too), Ministers need skilled officials to help them steer through these operational and philosophical complexities. 'Judgement' is the best word for all that. Without Judgement a civil servant (like a Minister, and indeed like a senior corporate executive) is likely to do more harm than good. It made it all the more extraordinary when the FCO dropped Analysis and Judgement from its appraisal processes for senior diplomats in favour of more mundane expectations:
- Leadership
- Getting the best from staff
- Delivering results
- Strategic thinking
- Personal impact
- Learning and development
It appears to have been assumed anyone in the Senior Management Structure of the FCO ipso facto already had Analysis and Judgement aplenty, so there was no need to rate the quality. On the contrary, it is at the highest level that the need to keep a close eye on Analysis and Judgement is most crucial, where the true damage to national interests can come – top officials duly making an impact and showing leadership, but delivering results which turn out to be ruinous.
History never runs short of examples of such damage. See the UK’s successive Iraq enquiries where Judgement (and lack thereof) on the part of top officials and elected politicians has been pored over to grisly effect.
Or for a spectacular corporate example take the BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico: the BP top leadership mobilized astonishing technical resources to tackle the problem, but gave a dismal performance in public precisely because they could not convincingly display Analysis or Judgement.
In our new WikiLeaks world, networked masses of people unexpectedly come together on the Web - or on the streets - to challenge long-established assumptions and structures. The psychological and normative framework for honest leadership in the public and private sectors alike is ever more uncertain, and the need for powerful Analysis and good Judgement has never been greater.
The era of ‘management by measurement’ is over, even if its malign bureaucratic legacy effects will carry on twitching for a long time to come. The central leadership problem now in government and business alike is not managing the measurable and predictable, it is coping with the disruptive and unexpected.
Where does this leave ‘corporate diplomacy’, the idea that senior executives need to learn and deploy the skills of professional diplomats in tackling business problems in a globalised marketplace?
Judgement is not something diplomats or anyone else can teach corporate leaders. It is intangible, elusive. Some key people at all levels of any organisation seem to have it – many others just don’t. And those who have it are likely to be too busy (and too important) to have time to join training courses and try to share with lesser mortals the secrets of their insight.
Maybe the point simply is you know Judgment when you see it – and you also know when you’re getting something far below it. Any organisation, public or private, needs to realise that Analysis and Judgement are vital to success and so include them in their leadership programmes, constantly looking hard at examples of success and failure.
In the end, as the BP debacle shows it’s not enough for a corporate leader to be active, clever and convincing. That leader needs to be wise too.
Charles Crawford CMG is a founding member of ADRg Ambassadors and was previously HM Ambassador in Sarajevo, Belgrade, and Warsaw.
