Climate security: Developing a community of partners, Part 1 of 3, Trust and Common Purpose (Post #12)
Adrian Wolfberg, Ph.D.
Organizational Scientist | Knowledge Transfer | Qualitative Research | Phenomenologist | Change Agent | National Security and Intelligence
Partnering: The IC is about having and providing knowledge for decision-making. No one entity possess all the known or relevant knowledge about a topic. As elucidated by Berger and Luckman, what we (the IC) knows is the perception of a reality that has to be shared in a social context with policymakers and decision-makers. Hence, for the IC, knowledge is inherently socially constructed and distributed, which provides a structural incentive for partnering. We must partner.
Trust: Partnerships require trust in the course of the interactions between individuals, groups, and organizations. Here, the distinction between collaboration, coordination, and cooperation—informed by Casta?er and Oliveira—is worth elaborating upon.
·????? Collaboration is usually the voluntary co-production goal that takes place during the life-cycle of the analytic production cycle: shared understanding of the customer; shared understanding of the problem; shared understanding of who does what in terms of data collection and data analysis; shared review of the assessment; shared final editing of the assessment; and shared organizational attribution on the disseminated product. Collaboration can be imposed upon multiple agencies in the pursuit of a common goal.
·????? Coordination, on the other hand, is a process step leading to a common goal in which the coordination activity begins after an agency or office produces a draft intelligence assessment, regardless of whether collaboration occurred or not. The authoring entity distributes the draft to IC entities who have a knowledge, mission, policy, or operational stake in the assessment. Those IC entities will submit their feedback and it is up to the authoring entity to be responsive, to the degree they choose or are required, to the feedback.
·????? Cooperation is the mindset or attitude that shapes the implementation of coordination and collaboration. The nature of cooperation is affected by the degree of trust between people. Jones and George describe the impact that conditional and unconditional trust have on cooperation. The absence of trust, i.e., distrust, can eliminate a cooperative attitude, and, as a result, sabotage coordination and collaboration. Conditional trust is the most type of trust in organizations. It is transactional-based and succeeds only if people behave in appropriate ways during an interaction. Conditional trust means an entity has more of a positive attitude than a negative attitude towards another entity. Unconditional trust, on the other hand, exists when parties have shared values and a consistent and shared history of appropriate interaction behaviors.
Common Purpose: Stone argues that the Intelligence Community is or attempts to be a high-performing organization as witnessed by each IC element having a sense of pride in its identity, its work, and its mission. Vaill states that purpose is an essential feature of a high-performing organization.
Developing a community of partners—within the IC and external to it—to support a topic requires a common purpose. Four types of purpose in the IC are commonly used: multi-agency co-produced assessment; single agency assessment; anticipatory prior to tasking; and exploratory for a new mission. Each type involves coordination and/or collaboration, and can be affected by the degree of a cooperative attitude. More details on each are outlined below.
Figure: Establishing a community of partners
Multi-agency co-produced assessment: This type of purpose is a task levied externally upon an IC element by policymakers, or internally by senior intelligence managers or executives. An IC National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) is an example of a type of purpose that requires an ad hoc partnership. However, usually well before such a purpose is levied by the top of a hierarchy, there are usually other less visible reasons to develop an informal and routine working level collaboration between IC agencies or offices. They do so because they have common interests that lead them to make some contribution, whether it’s data collection, data analysis, or both.
A single agency’s assessment on a topic is a second type of purpose. Even though it has the responsibility by virtue of its mission and expertise for producing an assessment, the leaders in that agency will want to know what other IC members think about the topic before that agency disseminates the assessment to policymakers. Having a surprise dispute between IC agencies is not good. Analysts know that their leaders will want such a coordination.
Anticipatory prior to tasking is a third type of purpose to develop IC partners. It occurs prior to the existence of any internal or external task to produce an assessment. It occurs between entities that have an existing knowledge relationship in support of an established shared mission. In this case, analysts or analytic managers may use their self-initiative to create such a community because they know their mission and capability usually does not have the resources to cover all aspects of the topic that are important. Similarly, the other entities in the IC may feel the same, and that by establishing relationships before a tasking exists, will help analysts get to know each other’s cooperative attitude, each other’s analytic strengths and limitations, and each other’s sensitivities in terms of organizational, unit, or personal assumptions, cultures, and their respective customer expectations.
Exploratory for a new mission is a fourth type of purpose. In this case, an agency or multiple agencies (or offices) have a new mission with a new knowledge area required. If no one else has the mission or, more importantly, the knowledge expertise in the IC, that IC entity with the mission having a new knowledge requirement will likely tap knowledge resources outside the IC for expediency sake. These external resources, whether analysis or collection or both, could be non-IC government agencies, academia, consultants, think tanks, and the literature produced by any of those entities just mentioned. Somehow, expertise has to be developed and the agency with the new mission has options to develop the expertise by themselves or seek external support or both, all of the options were discussed in a prior article, “Climate security: Ways of developing knowledge expertise for new requirements (Post #10).”
In Climate Security, as many observers have stated, the climate change national security threat requires a community approach beyond its traditional collaboration with peer elements within the IC. The unit of analysis is different, as well, with the IC typically focused at the government level as the unit of analysis, for climate change, the unit of analysis plays out mainly at sub-national levels within foreign countries. Developing partners will be required with NGOs, foreign academic institutions, foreign foundations, foreign think tanks, or even U.S. non-IC government, academic, and think tank institutions whose mission is focused on foreign activities. All four purposes discussed above may be desired to support the establishment of partnerships.
The challenge of knowledge boundary crossing is especially pronounced from both the need to integrate physical climate and social system relationships, as well as the need to resolve the dichotomy between the physical and social sciences. Ferguson dissects the resilience discourse with the climate security debate providing insight into the focus, actor, articulation, authority, level of attention, governance form, and governance rationality challenges of establishing and maintaining partnerships. He separates four levels of resilience discourse: strategic, neoliberal, social, and ecological. For example, the type of actors ranges from policy-makers, institutions, NGOs, and academics/scientists, respectively, the level of formal authority ranges from very high, high, moderate, to very low, respectively, and the type of governance form ranges from hierarchical with some networks, market with networks based on economic relations, networks based on citizen participation, to networks based on citizen participation mixed with a hierarchical global governance, respectively.
End of Article Question: With regard to climate security, what are the considerations in terms of establishing effective and fruitful partnerships between intelligence organizations and climate change scientists when different purposes and boundaries exist?
Previous Articles in this Series: The scheduled topics remaining in this series can be found in Post #1, below. The previous articles can be found in Posts #2-#11 linked below.
Post #1: Climate security: An introduction to the series https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/climate-security-introduction-series-post-1-adrian-wolfberg-ph-d--7pwne
Post #2: Climate security: A very different concept than “climate change”
Post #3: Climate security: Threats and risks are different concepts.
Post #4: Climate security: “Unintentional threats” and complexity.
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Post #5: Climate security: A framework to develop an analytic capacity.
Post #6: Climate security: Where is the demand signal for national security decision support coming from?
Post #7: Climate security: The imperative of policy prioritization and sustainability.
Post #8: Climate security: Structural and organizational challenges in the budget decision process. https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/climate-security-structural-organizational-challenges-adrian-y1ece/?published=t#:~:text=link%20to%20this-,article,-Dialog%20content%20end
Post #9: Climate security: The challenges in figuring out the knowledge producing responsibility when responding to a new knowledge requirement.
Post #10: Climate security: Ways of developing knowledge expertise for new requirements.
Post #11: Climate security: Collection and types of data collection strategies.
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Notes:
Berger, P. L., & Luckman, T. (1966). The social construction of reality. Anchor Books. https://www.deempathischeorganisatie.nl/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Berger-social-construction-of-reality-BOEK.pdf.
Casta?er, X., & Oliveira, N. (2020). Collaboration, coordination, and cooperation among organizations: Establishing the distinctive meanings of these terms through a systematic literature review. Journal of Management, 46(6), 965-1001. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206320901565.
Ferguson, P. (2019). Discourses of resilience in the climate security debate. Global Environmental Politics, 19(2), 104-126. https://doi.org/10.1162/glep_a_00500.
Jones, G. R., & George, J. M. (1998). The experience and evolution of trust: implications for cooperation and teamwork. Academy of Management Review, 23(3), 531-546. https://www.jstor.org/stable/259293.
Stone, C. R. (2021). Jack of all trades, master of none: Managin the Intelligence Community of the future. Journal of National Security Law & Policy, 12, 53-60. https://jnslp.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Jack-of-All-Trades-Master-of-None%E2%80%94Managing-the-Intelligence-Community-of-the-Future_2.pdf.
Vaill, P. B. (1982). The purposing of high-performing systems. Organizational Dynamics, 11(2), 23-39. https://doi.org/10.1016/0090-2616(82)90003-1.
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1 年Thank you for another thought-provoking post, Adrian Wolfberg, Ph.D. This first of the 3-part sub-series on partnerships clearly presents Climate Security's challenges to the IC. Indeed, partnering for knowledge creation is as unavoidable as it is socially constructed and distributed. Without achieving IC alignment across organizations and scientists, realizing fruitful knowledge creation for Climate Security will prove elusive. However, that should still allow for preliminary cross-boundary flow of data and establishing communication protocols across public and private nodes that could inform initial assessments. Such a formative and iterative period could begin to develop the needed trust to navigate the three C's and reach a consensus on a common purpose.