{"id":2162,"date":"2010-08-09T16:33:14","date_gmt":"2010-08-09T16:33:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=2162"},"modified":"2010-08-09T16:33:14","modified_gmt":"2010-08-09T16:33:14","slug":"agonist-planning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2010\/08\/agonist-planning\/","title":{"rendered":"Agonistic planning"},"content":{"rendered":"

One key feature of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations identified by David Halberstam in his\u00a0superb account of the\u00a0development of US policy on Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest<\/em>, was groupthink:\u00a0 the failure of White House national security, foreign policy and defense staff to propose or even countenance alternatives to the prevailing\u00a0views on Vietnam, especially when these alternatives were in radical conflict with the prevailing wisdom.\u00a0\u00a0 Among the junior staffers working in those administrations was Richard Holbrooke, now the US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Obama administration.\u00a0 A New Yorker <\/em>profile of Holbrooke last year included this statement by him, about the need for policy planning processes to incorporate agonism:<\/p>\n

\n
“You have to test your hypothesis against other theories,\u201d Holbrooke said. \u201cCertainty in the face of complex situations is very dangerous.\u201d During Vietnam, he had seen officials such as McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy\u2019s and Johnson\u2019s national-security adviser, \u201ccut people to ribbons because the views they were getting weren\u2019t acceptable.\u201d Washington promotes tactical brilliance framed by strategic conformity\u2014the facility to outmaneuver one\u2019s counterpart in a discussion, without questioning fundamental assumptions. A more farsighted wisdom is often unwelcome. In 1975, with Bundy in mind, Holbrooke published an essay in Harper<\/em>\u2019s<\/em> in which he wrote, \u201cThe smartest man in the room is not always right.\u201d That was one of the lessons of Vietnam. Holbrooke described his method to me as \u201ca form of democratic centralism, where you want open airing of views and opinions and suggestions upward, but once the policy\u2019s decided you want rigorous, disciplined implementation of it. And very often in the government the exact opposite happens. People sit in a room, they don\u2019t air their real differences, a false and sloppy consensus papers over those underlying differences, and they go back to their offices and continue to work at cross-purposes, even actively undermining each other.\u201d\u00a0 (page 47)<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Of course, Holbrooke’s positing of policy development as distinct from policy implementation is itself a dangerous simplification of the reality for most complex policy, both private and public, where the relationship between the two is usually far messier. \u00a0\u00a0 The details of policy, for example, are often only decided, or even able to be decided, at implementation-time, not at policy design-time.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Do you sell your new hi-tech product via retail outlets, for instance?\u00a0 The answer may depend on whether there are outlets available to collaborate with you (not tied to competitors) and technically capable of selling it, and these facts may not be known until you approach the outlets.\u00a0 Moreover, if the stakeholders implementing (or constraining implementation) of a policy need to believe they have been adequately consulted in policy development for the policy to be executed effectively (as is the case with major military strategies in democracies, for example here)<\/a>, then a further complication to this reductive distinction exists.<\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/em><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n
UPDATE (2011-07-03):<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n
British MP Rory Stewart recounts another instance of Holbrooke’s agonist\u00a0approach to policy\u00a0in this post-mortem\u00a0tribute<\/a>: Holbrooke, although disagreeing with Stewart on policy toward Afghanistan, insisted that Stewart present his case directly to US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in a meeting that Holbrooke arranged.<\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/em><\/div>\n
References:<\/em><\/div>\n

David Halberstam [1972]:\u00a0 The Best and the Brightest<\/em>.\u00a0 New York, NY, USA: Random House.
\nGeorge Packer [2009]:\u00a0 The last mission: Richard Holbrooke’s plan to avoid the mistakes of Vietnam in Afghanistan<\/a>.\u00a0 The New Yorker<\/em>, 2009-09-28, pp. 38-55.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One key feature of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations identified by David Halberstam in his\u00a0superb account of the\u00a0development of US policy on Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest, was groupthink:\u00a0 the failure of White House national security, foreign policy and defense staff to propose or even countenance alternatives to the prevailing\u00a0views on Vietnam, especially when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,23,35,40,49,54,62,64,77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-argumentation","category-decision-theory","category-history","category-joint-action-society","category-marketing-strategy","category-military-strategy","category-planning","category-politics","category-team-working","p1","y2010","m08","d09","h16"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}