Condi Rice, Richard Clarke, Cardinal Law & Corporate Failure

“Hindsight”, according to an old Virginia proverb, “is better than foresight by a darn-sight”. Richard Clarke, Condelezza Rice, and the entire intelligence community, would agree. Old hands may recall the fictional story of a British warnings officer who retired in 1950. His last task was to train a young, still wet-behind-the -ears-analyst. “Son,” he said, “when I was young and inexperienced, I often received messages saying that the Germans were ready to attack and I should awaken the Prime Minister. Every time, I examined the reports, found them unconvincing, and did not pass the warning to him. I’m proud to say that I was only wrong twice.” Warning officers soon learn Fiedler’s second law of forecasting: "those who live by the crystal ball soon learn to eat ground glass.”

Of necessity, warnings are always based on incomplete evidence. To be successful, a warning must meet the following conditions:
• The officer must be convinced that the warning is valid.
• The officer must be convincing in manner and substance when delivering the warning.
• The warning must be timely
• The Chief Executive must be convinced that the warning is valid.
If these four conditions had been met, either the Clinton or Bush administration could have prevented 9/11.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to list cases in which a warning should have reached the Chief Executive and resulted in corrective action. Historians point to Pearl Harbor as a prime example. There are others. In 1985 Father Thomas Doyle warned Cardinal Law, and the American Catholic Bishops, of the scope of the sexual abuse scandal. In 2004, the Bishops would do well to meditate on the old Virginia proverb. FBI agent John O’Neil was close to correctly predicting the 9/11 attack by Al Qaeda. Unable to convince the FBI, he retired. He then took a position as chief of security at the World Trade Center, where he died on 9/11.

Failure to perceive and act on warning is not confined to government or the church. In his book, Why Smart Executives Fail, Business professor Sidney Finkelstein examined forty cases of business failure. The executives, he suggests, failed not because they were stupid, dishonest, or lazy but because:

• of a flawed mindset that distorted a company’s perception of reality
• delusional attitudes that kept this inaccurate reality in place
• breakdowns in communications systems developed to handle potentially urgent information.
• leadership qualities that kept a company’s executives from correcting their course.

Before 9/11, the mindset of both the Clinton and Bush administrations conceived of national security threats along more familiar lines. Those who attempted to change this mindset failed due to a combination of incomplete evidence and institutional barriers.

Dr. Rice correctly testified that institutions rarely reform until after a major tragedy. It took the experience of Vietnam and the 1983 bombing of a Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon to generate the Goldwater Nichols Defense Reform act of 1986. The 9/11 commission hearings run the risk of allowing political debate over “who is to blame” to overwhelm the need for focus on long needed institutional reforms in our national security establishment.

Comments

[Henning Leidecker]

Dear Herb,

Very professional! Both in content and in design.

I extracted the four items about causes of business failures, and forwarded these to a colleague.

Hen

[Domenico Bettinelli Jr.]

Herb,

Interesting analysis,although I was left wanting more. I think a lot more could be made of the connections between the pre-9/11 failures and the Scandal.