All Life Is Problem Solving

President Obama, both in his campaign, and in his Administration, has emphasized the importance of transparency in Government. This very day, as I write, he’s running “a world wide” on-line town hall to give people a chance to answer questions, hear his unrehearsed replies, and understand at least some of the thinking behind his views and policies on various critical issues. One can’t imagine any recent President doing that with the possible exception of Bill Clinton, whose replies would certainly have been much more guarded than President Obama’s. Today’s event is part of a much more substantial, sophisticated, and almost “mentoring” pattern of open communication that we see from this Administration, which sets it apart from any other in recent American History.

Having said that, my work in Knowledge Management, over a period of many years, suggests that this Administration, like others, still likes to explain some of its choices in a non-transparent way that mis-characterizes its own reasoning processes. Let’s go back to the Bush 43 Administration for an example of the non-transparency I’m talking about, before we talk about a similar instance in the new Administration.

In the run-up to the Iraq War, the Bush Administration posed the alternatives under consideration, as intervening to remove the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), or working through a supposedly feckless and clueless United Nations to stop their deployment. The consequences of intervention were also posed very uni-dimensionally. If we intervene, we’ll get the WMDs and protect ourselves; if we rely on a process involving the UN we won’t, and we’ll risk an attack on the US using WMDs. That, for the most part was it, a stark choice was the order of the day. Every argument and piece of data in favor of intervention, and against the UN was mobilized to “justify” the Administration’s “knowledge” that we should intervene militarily in Iraq, and every argument against intervention and for using the UN was either criticized, ignored, or suppressed. Also, the choice of just leaving Iraq alone was never debated or evaluated in the course of Administration discussions of the subject, nor were there any alternatives discussed involving interventions of lesser or greater scale than the one the the Administration decided to implement. In short, the Administration acknowledged no obligation to really let people in on its thinking — to provide real “knowledge” in the sense of the contextual thinking surrounding the selection of its specific intervention alternative as the best choice for the United States in context.

By presenting its views in this way, the Administration failed to communicate its knowledge fully to the American Public, and the result was that our own problem solving processes about going to war to solve the problem represented by Iraq, as well as our “knowledge” and our consent, were manipulated by the Administration. Of course, by now this is all a well-known story, and I’m only recounting it again because I don’t think we recognize often enough how corrosive manipulation in spreading knowledge is to Democracy. Ours is an open society and a political system that works best when we know the thinking of our leaders and are able to evaluate it and decide for ourselves whether we agree or not. It’s a society that works best when there’s distributed problem solving. That requires that our leaders be transparent about their thinking and their knowledge. The Bush Administration, of course, never believed in open society and transparency. In policy after policy and action after action, they, in effect told us, that they believed in an authoritarian society in which a small unaccountable elite ran things behind closed doors.

The most marked contrast between the Bush Administration and the present one is both the promise and the greater practice of transparency, and the greater respect for the values of open society, responsibility, and accountability, we see now than existed in Washington a few short months ago. That is all to the good, but even this Administration sometimes exhibits a harmful tendency to constrain the discussion of alternatives, and to hide its thinking about very significant matters. In particular, some of our most well-known and highly-regarded economists, both conservative and liberal, have been calling for temporary nationalization of our insolvent banks and financial houses whose failure is likely to have massive effects on the economy. In fact, this policy, by all counts, may be the dominant current opinion among academic economists.

The Administration on the other hand has embraced the Geithner Plan which appears to incorporate greater risk for the taxpayer, a less friendly competitive environment for small banks, and less punishment for the executives and investors associated with the larger banks. So, why has the Administration selected the Geithner Plan? It has told us why it prefers it to doing nothing at all. But it keeps telling us that the choice is between the Geithner Plan and doing nothing, and it never includes the third way of temporary nationalization followed by restructuring and privatization when it explains why it likes the Geithner Plan. Yet we know that they’ve considered this third way. We know that the views of Stieglitz, Galbraith, Krugman, and many others have received consideration in this White House. So, why won’t they tell us what their thinking is about it? Why won’t they talk about their fair critical comparison among what appear to be the three major alternatives, and about what leads them to prefer Geithner’s alternative to the alternative posed by so many of our greatest economists?

Their refusal to confront the issue head-on and to characterize the differences between themselves and Paul Krugman by crying about “unfairness” or by making ad hominem comments is, of course, standard Washington practice. But, it is not “transparency.” It is not honest. It is not in accord with the values this Administration is trying to bring to American Politics. It is not “change we can believe in.” And, above all, it won’t help the American people decide for themselves which policy is the best for us all.

I suspect that President Obama neither knows nor cares about what good “Knowledge Management” might have to say about this sort of thing. But perhaps he ought to begin to know and care. Briefly, it says that if one wants to have a well-functioning Democracy for the 21st century, one badly needs transparent dialogue and exchange between citizens and their Government, and one needs to let the chips resulting from that kind of exchange fall where they may.