Grand Strategy Competition Update

As head judge of Wikistrat’s International Grand Strategy Competition, I wanted to highlight some of the takeaways that we’ve already gathered in the first week of the contest.  As you may already know, the competition brings together more than 30 teams comprised of PhD and masters students from elite international schools and world-renowned think tanks.  Those teams, evenly distributed over a dozen or so countries (so as to encourage intra-country as well as inter-country competition), are being challenged to come up with long-term grand strategies in relation to five issues:  global energy security, global economic “rebalancing,” Jihadist terrorism, the Sino-American relationship and nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.

By conducting this strategic planning exercise, Wikistrat seeks to create an instant-but-lasting community of several hundred young strategists from around the world in a sort of Facebook-meets-Wikipedia online environment populated with our unique wiki-based model of globalization.  Part of that effort involves creating expectations among participation that their future work will be both collaborative in execution and subject to intense – and peer-based – competitive pressures, but it also includes exposing participants to practical skill sets that they will use as future analysts/authors.  To further their avowed career goals, we’re also making the participants’ work available to government agencies and corporate firms interested in recruiting them as new hires.

Across the four-week competition, each team of 5-10 graduate political science students and interns will collaborate on the Wikistrat model to:

• Forecast their team’s national trajectory;
• Develop scenario pathways and national policy options for specific strategic issues;
• Articulate national grand strategies;
• Brainstorm future regional security environments (alternate futures); and
• Simulate plausible scenarios of geopolitical crises.

As head judge, I assign points to teams based on their activity throughout the week.  In this first week, teams were tasked with enunciating their country’s national interests across the five international issues cited above.  The teams generated roughly 150 wiki pages, whose combined “weight” of almost 200,000 words approximates the size of your average “weighty” policy tome.

Since this is a first-of-a-kind experiment that competitively harnesses the collaborative analytic power of the “millennial” generation, we at Wikistrat are eager to share these initial observations: 

“Collaborative competition” actually works

I know what you’re thinking:  Of course Wikistrat’s grand strategy competition “proves” collaborative competition.  But we were genuinely surprised at how easy it was to track the following:  the country-team groups that were the most competitive – and interactive – with each another clearly outperformed those country groups where it was apparent that each team went its own way (meaning their entries were far more idiosyncratic).   After all, doesn’t it make sense to hold off revealing your positions until the very last minute – i.e., maintaining secrecy?  Because if you don’t, then your best ideas can be copied by your competition, right?

Well, by seeing up-front what your immediate competition is putting out there, you’re challenged to cover that bet and raise the bar even higher – or at least put your countering spin on the issue raised.  Point being, you’re forced to defend your ideas more fully and that effort only adds analytic muscle to the product.  Yes, the resulting works were more similar in terms of the ground they covered, but that only made the comparative analysis (my grading) all the easier.  The same would hold in the real world for a decision-maker.  Yes, the truly competing visions emerged in the end; their advocates were just forced to explain their strategies more fully by referencing common touch points.  And because the teams were in immediate competition with one another, the usual groupthink dynamics were avoided.

In general, the best predictor of any team’s overall finish was the level of its “internal” competition (e.g., the two other India teams competing with it to be the “best India”).  The tougher the in-house opposition, the more comprehensively any team’s ideas were tested before being released into the international “wild.”  In the end, a country-team’s success depended less on the “real” competition of other states than its willingness to slug it out preemptively in a collaborative fashion – even if all any team did was “cheat” by looking at the “next student’s test paper.”

Then again, real life doesn’t unfold with all desks turned toward teacher.

The utility of thinking things through before committing to action

Our grad student teams were all so chomping at the bit that we had to remind them constantly that this was not a war-game, but rather a strategic planning competition. The first entries by, and earliest conversations among, participants got to punch lines too quickly – in effect, “Shouldn’t we bomb Country X now?”  The whole point of spending this first week thinking through and debating each nation’s interests – before any moves were made – was to encourage everybody to consider what really matters to their country-team.  Before you can accurately judge which risks to run and what is to be gained by running them, you need a clear sense of what can be lost in turn. The most sophisticated consequence management involves avoiding negative outcomes in the first place. 

The most impressive team entries explored all sorts of consequences (“If X happens, then the up/downside is . . . “), and in doing so they revealed the oft-unmentionable truth that national interests aren’t always as “fixed” as they’re made out to be.  That was a lesson we hoped participants might discover on their own during this first week:  in this fast-paced and complex world we call globalization, virtually nothing is carved in stone any more. “Survival” comes in many forms, and genuine strategic thinking often begins with the impertinent question, “Well, why should we assume that . . . ?”

The tyranny of interests

Something we noticed:  the longer the list of national interests presented, the less creative the strategic thinking.  Why?  Every declared interest pre-programs the foreign policy response, so the more interests your country accumulates, the more fenced-in you are as a policymaker.  One of the pleasant surprises of the first week grading process was how creative the North Korean teams were on certain issues, primarily because they kept things very simple regarding acceptable regime survival.

Now, that can sound counter-productive when you consider the “thinking through” goal cited above, but thinking through what matters most to your country doesn’t necessarily translate into a long list of core interests.  More to the point, just citing those core interests doesn’t end the conversation (as in, “China simply doesn’t go there”).  In this ever more connected world, trouble comes looking for you – not the other way around.  Core interests certainly preface all subsequent policy arguments, but they don’t obviate any.

What you see depends on where you sit

Here we saw some teams play their countries too well:  the Japanese teams tended to be a bit too careful, the European teams a bit too focused on defining the best rules, the Israeli teams a bit too dug in, the American teams a bit too self-confident, etc.  Where the subject matter touched upon more geographically immediate interests, teams naturally tended to be more creative.  But when the subjects seemed more distant (“What does North Korea care about Middle East extremism?”), creativity decidedly suffered.

In many ways, though, the exact opposite should be true.  When it comes to diplomacy, that first and final tool of grand strategy, ambitious nations should indulge their creativity most where interests are thinnest, because that’s where they have the most wiggle room.  Not having a “dog in the fight” can be a good thing, strategy-wise, so long as you don’t overstep your limited interests.  Plus, if you always wait until the problem reaches your shores, you may be out of attractive options at that point.

Look sideways to see deep into the future

Here we might say, “Know your own history – but not too well.”  The more teams used past history to explain their national interests, the less strategizing they applied to the subject – the “grievance list” quickly overwhelming any instinct for creative thought.  Conversely, the more teams cited issues adjacent to the subject at hand – or what we call “interdependencies,” the better able they were to think through possible scenarios toward desired outcomes. 

In a networked world, such interdependencies become the source material for policy workarounds – or the rewiring of strategies.  After all, one man’s cul-de-sac is another man’s turnaround.  A favorite example: one North Korean team, surveying the course of Asia’s economic integration with the world, decided that its impoverished population actually advantages the country as the last great untapped cheap-labor pool in East Asia! 

Point being, orienting oneself is not just a linear historical exercise (what’s behind us and what’s up ahead?).  Rather, it’s a networking function of the highest order.  “Shallow thinking,” as some might diagnose, isn’t necessarily the great bane of the upcoming generation.  You can’t disaggregate complexity until you can aggregate enough touch points to achieve sufficient situational awareness. 

When everything connects to everything else (one definition of globalization), the ability to process information laterally becomes increasingly valuable.  Indeed, Wikistrat’s raison d’etre is to develop that magnificent skill-set in the next generation of grand strategists.