Getting the Story Right - The Example of Arpanet

One of the great lessons of the Arpanet, the precursor of the Internet, is the proper way to tell managerial stories.  Story telling is one of the key elements of good management.  Managers tell stories to instruct, to guide, to warn, to inspire. They also tell these stories to multiple audiences and too easily can fall into the trap of inconsistency, of telling one story to employees and another to bosses.  Under the best of circumstances, inconsistent stories can lead to the charge of hypocrisy and a loss of authority.  At worst, such stories can cost managers their jobs.  

Technology managers might seem to have an easier problem than more general managers.  After all, they are dealing with a technology that grounds all discussions in a physical entity.  The Arpanet reveals the limitation of that idea.  For the Arpanet, physicality was no guarantor of truth.  The Arpanet was the direct precursor of the Internet.  It was built as a research activity of the U. S. Department of Defense between 1966 and 1972.  It was both conceived and constructed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), hence the name Arpanet.  

Since its inception, the Arpanet has been explained by two quite different stories. The first story claims that the network was built as part of the nation’s command and control system, that it was designed to survive a nuclear attack by being decentralized.  This story is commonly repeated in the public press and in recent books about ARPA, including The Pentagon’s Brain(Jacobson 2012) and Imagineers of War(Weinberger 2017).  

The second story claims that Arpanet was a pure research project, an effort to determine the best way of connecting computers.   This story is common within the computer science community, a group of people who wanted to believe that their work had a more benign application than merely supporting a war machine.  

It is possible to reconcile the two stories by claiming that two groups were involved in a single project and that each group had its own story about the work.  Such an approach is tempting but it puts a manager in an impossible spot.  The manager, in this case the director of research for ARPA, and would be vulnerable to that old charge of hypocrisy, of lying to the generals or to the professors or both.  You could claim that one group would be complicit in the lie but such a position would further undermine the managerial structure by forcing the manager to be an ally of the group that was building the project upon a falsehood.   

So how was Arpanet managed? How did the key director of research develop a story that satisfied both his bosses and his researchers?  The answer is a little surprising for it goes against our intuitions.  The obvious solution would be to narrow the story of the network to a single point on which bosses and workers, generals and researchers could agree.  Instead, the key manager, a psychologist named. J. C. R. Licklider, expanded the narrative and reduced the Arpanet to one small element.  

Licklider was the head of ARPA’s Information Processing and Technology Office (IPTO).  Beginning in 1960, Licklider began writing about how computers could work with people and support the human thought process.  He called this idea “Human-Computer Symbiosis.” He wrote five major articles about this idea between 1960 and 1965.  The Arpanet, or actually high-speed computer communications, was but one element of his idea.  Human Computer Symbiosis also included computer graphics, artificial intelligence, natural language recognition, interactive computing, and data repositories.  

Through the five papers, Licklider refined his ideas, explained how they would work, and presented the benefits Human-Computer Symbiosis could give to different kinds of endeavors.  He showed that research and education could benefit from this idea.  He did the same for business.  He also illustrated that his ideas applied to military command and control, and even general military operations.  He did more than just present his ideas.  He went to different offices in the Pentagon and in universities to learn what they needed and to fit their activities into his framework of Human-Computer Symbiosis.  

Through the five papers, Licklider refined his ideas, explained how they would work, and presented the benefits Human-Computer Symbiosis could give to different kinds of endeavors.  He showed that research and education could benefit from this idea.  He did the same for business.  He also illustrated that his ideas applied to business management, military command and control, and even general military operations.  He did more than just present his ideas.  He went to different offices in the Pentagon and in universities to learn what they needed and to fit their activities into his framework of Human-Computer Symbiosis.  

Licklider was an effective manager.  His influence was felt long after he finished his stint as director of IPTO.  He was effective because he never indulged the kind of stories that have since been told about his most visible project.  He told a single story, broad and inclusive, that guided all parties involved in the Arpanet.  It was a powerful example but one that was not always well understood. Posterity has been far too willing to accept a thin and superficial story about the origins of the Internet than to look for the way that a well-crafted story guided that origin.  

A new article on the origins of the Arpanet, written by David Alan Grier and Steve Crocker, can be found at:  https://technology.djaghe.com/?p=509