US must invest in science of dot-connecting

Testimony before the 9/11 commission has emphasized that intelligence reports prior to the attacks lacked specific information about "an imminent attack, a specific threat, or actionable intelligence." This emphasis on fully formed plots reflects a paradox to overcome - the desire for certainty and predictability in a world characterized by uncertainty and risk. Policymakers and analysts need a new way of thinking, and new models for analysis and reporting that reflect the complex, nonlinear, and dynamic realities of the world in which we live.

The US spends billions annually on technology, simulations, multiagency exercises, and yes, reports designed to help us think, and thus anticipate, the unthinkable. Most are based on insights from complex adaptive systems research. Such systems - traffic, for example, or the weather, the Web, society, or the globalizing economy - have many interacting factors, and each evolves in relation to the larger environment. In recent years, scientists have learned a great deal about how they work and how to influence them.

The science of complex systems has provided new concepts, tools, and a set of questions that can help make sense of messy situations, emerging events, and rapidly changing circumstances. Questions such as: What are the attractors in the system - the connections, relationships, and patterns of interaction creating the structure beneath the visible activity? What's happening in the larger context that might influence the system? Where are the sensitivities, and how are they evolving? What's perking on the horizon that could dramatically influence the future?

Complexity science is moving us from a linear, mechanistic view of the world to one based on nonlinear dynamics, evolutionary development, and systems thinking. Yet this kind of thinking rarely bubbles up to those who need it most: policymakers and the analysts on whom they depend.

"We need to be thinking this way, but we don't understand it," a senior National Security Council staff member told me in December. He asked to meet with me because one of his biggest concerns was that many in the intelligence community still use a linear framework to analyze evolving threats against our country.

The challenge for the 9/11 commission is to lay out a blueprint that will propel the US out of its old 20th-century ways of analyzing problems.

Until we're willing to develop new ways of thinking, we will continue to shuffle the boxes, place a premium on analysts' ability to prepare wellwritten reports, and leave ourselves open to attack from those who see that the world's most powerful country is still mired in old-world ways.

• T. Irene Sanders, executive director of the Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy, is author of 'Strategic Thinking and the New Science: Planning in the Midst of Chaos, Complexity and Change.'

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