Wikistrat CTO on Wikistrat methodology at industry conference

Interesting presentation.

Wikistrat's disruptive entry into the consulting world

New slide Wikistrat uses to speak to its disruptive influence in the world of consulting.  Thumbnail below for greater clarity.

In truth, it's a more specific argument that the slide suggests.  Wikistrat isn't a full-spectrum consultancy but a specialized one that delivers a brutal efficiency on price in a space (simulations/exercises/wargames) that typically relies on 1099s (consultants) versus W2s (direct hires).  Firms simply cannot house all the talent necessary to pull off simulations, so they end up augmenting their own talent with lots of outside experts, usually sucking them into to traditional consulting engagements (write reports) that culminate with a F2F gathering that constitutes the exercise - just at far higher cost than what Wikistrat accomplishes with its on-call network working online.

Plus, the timelines with traditional consultancies are long - as in months.  Wikistrat, because it can amass so much talent so fast, can have them all working - simultaneously at their leisure and around-the-clock in a collective sense - to generate the same material in weeks.

That's cheaper and faster.  

The better part comes in our complete indifference to volume of ideas/scenarios/insights/concepts.  The F2F version of sims requires a drastic slimming down of possibilities.  Can't have all these high-priced and important experts (I've been contracted to do such drills many times) rummaging through all manner of scenarios.  So it's all reduced - pre-event - to just a few basic scenarios as dreamed up by the junior staff (their butts, the consultancy's seats).  

With Wikistrat, we can truly structure for unlimited exploration. Stage the simulation, yes, but then lets the dozens of participants go wild with their imaginations - black swan-hunting, as it were - for days upon days. Then, when all the spaghetti has been thrown on the wall, we have the analysts themselves (not our junior staff) collectively weed out the less informing scenarios from the greatly-informing ones (by votes).  And THEN we've got Master Narratives (numbers of scenarios linked across modeled stages) that are deep and wide and vetted and approved. And then we turn the same pool of analysts loose on exploring the downstream consequences and ginning up policy options.  

Hands down, that's just a more powerful model than having 95% of your blue-sky imagination short-circuited - pre-event - by junior staffers who are in-over-their-heads (drinking at the fire hose).  And that's where our "better" plays out: we don't fear exploring that volume of ideas (archiving all for the client in a completely transparent process) because we brute-muscle our way through it all with our numbers of brains (all storming).  With the traditional consultancy, much of that uncertainty and exploration has to be zeroed out beforehand - lest they waste the time of the assembled experts (half of whom are leaving early on the second day to catch planes).

Cheaper, faster, better.

Wikistrat hasn't reinvented the wheel.  It just created a bigger one that covers more ground faster - for far less cost.

How fast King Coal gets fracked

Fascinating to watch all the "they're trying to kill clean coal" commercials on TV that target some politician, the Obama administration or so on (evil regulators).  In truth, what's killing King Coal right now is the uber-cheap price of gas in the US.  

Citing a WSJ story, the millions BTU price of natural gas in the US is about half of what it was just a year ago, and that previous price was at least half of the average global price - which is rising in most places given the lack of LNG and the difficulty in buying it for most emerging market players.

So, amidst that crazy glut in the US, made all the more worse by the mild winter that did not much draw down US natural gas stocks, and we're seeing stunning drops in the US use of coal to generate electricity. It fell by almost one-fifth (!) in the fourth quarter of last year, and we're expecting first quarter news any day now.

But as I've noted before, the answer for coal is exports.  The energy value of our coal is significantly higher than that found just about anywhere else, so if new market export relationships can be built, we can displace a lot of less-valuable coal from other sources.

My prediction is that America becomes a huge and important coal source for both India and China.  Just give it enough market change.

What got me tuned in on all this?  Wikistrat's recent simulation on the "North American Energy Export Boom."

Wikistrat post @ CNN-GPS: The consequences of France shifting left

Editor’s Note: The following piece, exclusive to GPS, comes from Wikistrat, the world's first massively multiplayer online consultancy.  It leverages a global network of subject-matter experts via a crowd-sourcing methodology to provide unique insights.

The countdown has begun for France’s first-round presidential election on Sunday, and while socialist challenger François Hollande is expected to beat center-right incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy, there’s a decent chance that a second run-off election will be required for Hollande to crack the 50 percent of the vote mark. Either way, we’re likely on the verge of a major political shift for one of Europe’s pillars – right after the wobbly Eurozone had hoped to close the door on its threatened dissolution.

We know what you’re thinking:  socialists, lots of new government spending, the end of the “Merkozy” tight bond between France and Germany!

So what are we to make of this looming quake?  How high will it register on the political Richter scale?  Wikistrat asked its global community of experts to ponder this, and here are the 8 points they chose to highlight.

Read the entire post at CNN's GPS blog. 

Wikistrat post @ CNN-GPS: What should the government cut?

Editor’s Note: The following piece, exclusive to GPS, comes from Wikistrat, the world's first massively multiplayer online consultancy.  It leverages a global network of subject-matter experts via a crowd-sourcing methodology to provide unique insights.

America is in the midst of yet another long-term government deficit problem that we once thought we had licked in the go-go Nineties.  Remember when we were going to retire the federal debt?

Just like back then, political candidates now regularly foam at the mouth about which “redundant” federal agencies they’d whack the minute they set foot inside the Beltway. This begs the question: What activities are inherently federal?

According to the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution, the legitimate candidates should cover one of the following goals:

• Form a more perfect union
• Establish justice
• Ensure domestic tranquility
• Provide for the common defense
• Promote the general welfare, and
• Secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity...

Hmmm.  Not as clear as one might hope for.

Like most people, we spot a lot of wiggle room in that list, so this week’s Wikistrat exercise involves asking our global community of experts what should be kept and what should be ditched in the coming federal budget wars. The following is our list of lists!

Read the entire post at CNN's GPS blog.

Wikistrat post @ CNN-GPS: New global sources of demand

Editor’s Note: The following piece, exclusive to GPS, comes from Wikistrat, the world's first massively multiplayer online consultancy.  It leverages a global network of subject-matter experts via a crowd-sourcing methodology to provide unique insights.

When Americans are warned that the “era of cheap credit is over,” we’re really being told that the inherent advantage of owning the world’s reserve currency is coming to an end. No, it won’t happen overnight, because China’s renminbi is still far from becoming a serious rival.

But the end is coming all right, and it’ll make all that Thomas Friedman hyperbole about a “flat world” a whole lot more real. America simply won’t have the advantage of being able to float debt - of all kinds - as easily as we did in the past, which means we’ll need to compete more intensely on the price and quality of our goods.

The primary driver here is China’s need to shift from a super-saving economy to a super-consuming economy. It’s gone about as far as it can go with export-driven growth, and now it needs to turn on its domestic consumption big-time, but doing that means China’s willingness to finance the debts of others will decrease - thus the end of cheap credit.

So, accepting all that, what can America anticipate when it comes to new sources of demand in the global economy?  What are some of the hot goods and services of the coming years?  We asked Wikistrat's global community of strategists for some ideas, and here’s what they chose to highlight:

Read the entire post at CNN's GPS blog.

Wikistrat post @ CNN-GPS: Three visions for America

Editor’s Note: The following piece, exclusive to GPS, comes from Wikistrat, the world's first massively multiplayer online consultancy.  It leverages a global network of subject-matter experts via a crowd-sourcing methodology to provide unique insights.

The U.S. economy is most definitely in recovery mode, but it’s the sort of recovery one experiences after a scary heart attack.  There is little confidence in being able to go uptempo. Fears persist about slipping into a permanent sort of disability.

Worse, many are resigned to the fact that big structural problems such as health care, tax reform, the federal deficit and education remain unaddressed by a political system that remains fiercely divided.

So America finds itself in a funny position: Clearly getting better and doing better than most of the West but almost completely lacking in self-confidence.  If this is “morning in America,” then most citizens have hit their snooze button.

This week’s Wikistrat’s drill explores this ambivalence in the face of mounting good economic news, asking our global community of experts to present their arguments for the U.S. economy’s possible mid-term (3-5 year) paths ahead.  We’ll start with the optimism and then let the darker thoughts pile up - much like most Americans today.

Read the entire post at CNN's GPS blog.

Wikistrat post @ CNN-GPS: Myanmar's Opening

First op-ed by a Wiksitrat analyst at CNN's GPS site.

Editor’s Note: Teresita Cruz-del Rosario is Visiting Associate Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore and a Senior Analyst at the geopolitical consultancy Wikistrat.

Boothie is a photojournalist for The Myanmar Times, the only English newspaper in Burma.   Boothie used to be cautious when taking pictures to avoid being hauled in for questioning or arrest for projecting images of Myanmar’s “dark side” - a broad enough charge to cover anything.

These days however, Boothie travels openly with his camera.  No longer hidden beneath the folds of his longyi as he surreptitiously shoots photos of a country that until very recently preferred to remain invisible.  He brandishes his Canon camera much like Clint Eastwood flaunted his Magnum 44.

Read the entire column at CNN's GPS blog.

Interview about Wikistrat in Rod Beckstrom's Starfish Report

Rod Beckstrom is a friend I first met at the TED conference in 2005, just after I spoke.  He came up to me in the hallways outside and we struck up a conversation. It led to me giving him my speaking agent, Jennifer Gates, for he and Ori Branfman to get their Starfish and Spider book published.  Rod later went on to be the CIO of the Department of Homeland Security and then president of ICANN.

His monthly Starfish Report is worth signing up for.

The full interview:

Thomas Barnett on Wikistrat

Thomas Barnett, the Chief Analyst of Wikistrat shares this story about how his company applies starfish principles to strategic thinking and planning. Tom answered the following questions to explain what they do at Wikistrat:

Q: As Chief Analyst, can you provide a brief overview for our Starfish Report readers of what Wikistrat is, and how it works?

A: Wikistrat is the world’s first crowd-sourced consultancy. We leverage a global community of several hundred strategic thinkers to tackle simulations of likely international events and unfolding global trends, the war-gaming of future conflict or crisis scenarios, and strategic planning exercises – all for private- and public-sector clients. To make such an offering possible, Wikistrat has put in the time and effort to not only create and nurture our global community that welcomes talent from all regions and a diverse range of subject domains, we’ve built – and continue to expand with each simulation – an online model of globalization itself in a wiki-based, scenario-driven format. So we’re basically three things at once:

1) Facebook for strategists from around the world who are looking for a place to improve their skills, run with others of their own kind in a 21st-century guild environment, and come together for paying consulting engagements;

2) Wikipedia-like global intelligence exchange (our globalization model, or GLOMOD); and

3) Massively multiplayer online consultancy (MMOC) that offers clients a crowdsourcing alternative to the usual “butts-in-seats” consulting firms that can’t possibly match our price points when it comes to massed brainpower because our overhead costs are so minimal.

We’re convinced that this is the future of consulting in the globalization era because our approach allows clients a far more interactive engagement (e.g., they can participate in our simulations on a real-time basis), combined with a wisdom-of-the-crowd dynamic that effectively addresses today’s complexity and constantly morphing international landscape. Our simulations can run for hours, days or weeks – even months. They can be mounted at very short notice and generate actionable insights for clients from the minute we turn them on.

Q:  To what degree does Wikistrat embrace a decentralized “starfish” style of leadership? Is there a centralized leadership system that oversees and directs Wikistrat’s network of analysts?

A: Wikistrat is starfish-like on a number of levels. 

First, we assemble temporary teams for client engagements, just like a production company that is formed to make a movie and is then disbanded. So there’s no set pattern of who gets pulled into any one engagement. 

Once we establish the core group of senior experts needed for the task, we send out invitations across the community to fill out the remainder of the participant pool, aiming for the highest diversity possible by subject domain, region, and experience level, and then we see who takes up the offer and runs with that opportunity.

I can’t tell you what a typical Wikistrat team looks like, because we don’t know until it comes together in response to the client’s request. Our job is simply to keep the global “bench” deep and wide and accessible in a real-time fashion, understanding – of course – that we vet everybody before letting him or her into the community. We aim for a very particular “crowd.”

Second, our guild-like community self-organizes itself to an unusual degree. We’ve set up subject-matter and regional desks and assign analysts to those based on the interests they express in their applications and intake interviews.  But once inside the community, they’re pretty much free to pick and choose the bulk of their activities, which leads to a lot of pleasant surprises as people develop talents and display skills you wouldn’t expect, based on reading their resumes.

Over time, that’ll lead to new desks being formed in response to the self-initiated clustering of minds. We’ve also “gamified” the community for the younger, less-experienced analysts, which means we offer them a variety of pathways to earn points that elevate their network standing and consulting opportunities over time, while “sharpening the blade” – as it were.

So far, these younger analysts have gobbled up those activities and constantly push us to generate more (like the world’s first crowd-sourced strategy book), which is an awesome responsibility for Wikistrat, because we’re filling a gap in their professional training and thus empowering the next generation of grand strategists that this world desperately needs.

Third, the GLOMOD itself is self-organizing.  We like to say at Wikistrat that, “analysts don’t compete, they collaborate by making scenarios compete.” When analysts work on client engagements, or in one of our internal training simulations, or even just when they working the GLOMOD on their own – for their professional gratification, if they disagree with or can’t bear the analysis on some scenario page, they’re free to “take their fight outside,” as I like to say, by creating an alternative scenario page on the wiki.

That means the GLOMOD grows from the inside out, but in directions no one can predict. Ideas cluster on their own, creating new centers of analytic gravity within the GLOMOD.  My job as de facto chief architect is to make sure no branch grows so long that it’s unsustainable or unduly isolated in its reasoning, meaning we want other portions of the GLOMOD to reach out and establish analytic linkages – in both a figurative and literal (i.e., HTML) sense. Thus the GLOMOD is really a collective-but-distributed “brain” that grows according to the dictates of the community working in response to client requests.

Fourth, we have no set sales staff. Our analysts themselves are our primary sales force. Wherever they go and whatever they encounter in their various other professional endeavors, they’re empowered to market Wikistrat’s services – that crowd-sourced alternative they can’t deliver themselves. That means they can propose new offerings and solicit new clients on their own, which, once we accommodate them, lead to Wikistrat’s growth as a consultancy and company.

The same is true on recruiting, as our analysts are our primary recruiters. 

With offices in New York, Tel Aviv and Sidney, Wikistrat is effectively headquartered in the “cloud.” To date, our central staff remains quite small – as in, single digits. We’re going to try and keep it as small as possible going forward, but we’re facing a significant challenge in that regard, due to the growing demand for our services and the sheer fact that analysts are signing themselves into the community from around the world every day.  But these are good problems.

Q:  What happens during live multi-player simulations?

Typically analysts will spend about half of a simulation working out – meaning populating with rich detail – alternate scenario pathways, exploring them across what we call a Scenario Dynamics Grid, or a generic multi-stage breakdown of a scenario’s lifespan, however long that may be (i.e., anywhere from hours to decades, depending on the client’s time focus).

Then the analysts will vote on the most plausible and/or revealing – to the client, that is – master narratives, which are the sequencing of individual scenarios at various stages in however many combinations make the most sense. Once we have those in hand, participants will often analyze how these various master narratives impact the interests of the most relevant real-world actors – in effect assuming their personas. At that point, our crowd will start brainstorming and then competing various policy options for those same actors.

That’s a fairly generic client engagement that involves simulating some possible future event. But we can vary the structure of simulations by any number of variables, and clients can always follow up with requests for additional modules (e.g., inserting a “shock” into an unfolding scenario to test some policy option).

In this regard, one of our favorite schemes is having multiple groups of analysts play the same real-world actor – say a nation-state government (in truth, analysts often spontaneously organize themselves along these lines in simulations whether we tell them to or not). Another is to have actual citizens (analysts) play their own countries. Too many American exercises simply have Americans playing everybody, when what you really want is Chinese playing Chinese, Indians playing Indians, etc. That’s where our global community comes into play. That’s how you obtain truly new sets of eyes.

And that’s really the underlying principle we follow in all design – “collaborative competition” of descriptions, concepts, options, etc.  So we like to compare the work dynamic to additive manufacturing – aka, 3-D printing.  We’re not aiming for the destructive, subtractive dynamics of the blogosphere, where everyone spends way too much time tearing down each other’s ideas.  We want our analysis to be built, layer by layer, with as many hands shaping the intellectual product as possible but with everyone getting credit for every single keystroke – all of which is instantly archived for the client’s access. Wikistrat is completely transparent in that way, which we think is hugely important in terms of making the client smarter – not just the analysts working inside traditional consulting’s “black box.”

One final thing to note from the analysts’ perspective: the “crowd” we source on any simulation works – on an individual basis – according to their own schedules. Our simulations have to go 24-7 because we’re global from day one. So we don’t ask our crowd to assemble in one room somewhere on the planet, thus allowing us to tap their wisdom in whatever natural context they currently reside – wherever they reside.

That means we get analysts’ best work because they offer their time at their greatest convenience. That’s why we prefer longer-run simulations for maximum flexibility, but if the client wants things faster, we accommodate that desire simply by increasing the size of the “crowd” to ensure a critical mass is achieved in a tighter time space.

Q: The Wikistrat site states that, “Wikistrat uses its patent-pending, digitalized, war-gaming methodology for engaging clients…” Can you explain how war-gaming methodology is used to provide geopolitical strategic analysis?

A:  Besides the description I’ve already offered above, the key thing that differentiates Wikistrat is our simulations/war-games/etc. aren’t pre-scripted affairs that force analysts into either “fighting the scenario” (i.e., disputing its plausibility or fidelity to real life) or chaffing within its artificial confines. Because our whole methodology revolves around the wiki, our motto is, “Don’t fight the scenario, fracture it.”

Here’s what I mean: Wikipedia has one entry for me, and it’s so conflicted that the organization labels it “not up to standards.” The simple truth is, my thinking is controversial enough in several realms so that there’s no one set worldwide opinion as to its validity – go figure! In Wikipedia, that leads to a sub-optimal or less-informing outcome.

But in a Wikistrat simulation, we don’t try to contain analysts and their ideas within a single scenario. Again, if there’s a fight, we instruct the aggressor to “take it out” . . . on a new wiki page that thereupon competes with the “low fidelity” page that he or she cannot abide. So long as analysts are willing to put their money where their mouths are, and stand by the alternative scenarios they generate by providing accompanying policy options, then all we’ve done with that conflict is exploit it to the client’s benefit.

We can do all this because our exercises never commit themselves to paper or the responsibility – and cost – of massing several dozen experts in some resort hotel for X days, all of which creates massive organizational pressures on the game convener to go as scripted as possible so as to avoid wasting already sunken costs. Since we’re in the “cloud” from start to finish, the costs involved with accommodating out-of-the-box thinking is virtually zero. To me, that’s “starfish” because circumstances and creativity dictate form and function – not the other way around.

As for the “patent-pending” part, that’s our using the wiki in “competitive collaboration.”  Wikipedia doesn’t compete its entries but Wikistrat competes everything. Throughout our war-games, analysts will vote on darn near everything. Clients can too. So our sims are intellectually invasive (i.e., “engaging”), but tremendously cost- effective due to digitalization.

Great example: L ast June we held an International Grand Strategy Competition with three-dozen teams of grad students from top universities from all over the world.  We gamified it with a prize and had various teams assume the personas of various great powers.  But to make it truly competitive and collaborative at the same time, in most instances we were able to get three different schools playing the same country. What that meant was that the three teams playing Pakistan competed fiercely with each other to be the best Pakistan, but they also fed off each other’s creativity. So the harder they competed, the more they collaborated. And you know what? This collection of teams truly turned my head around on Pakistan, taking me places strategically that I hadn’t considered.

Frankly, that’s why we use next-generation strategists in every sim we run. They simply don’t know what questions they’re not supposed to ask, and that makes them dangerously creative in everything they do – again, to the client’s benefit. If you fear “black swans,” nobody hunts them down better than those fresh minds that haven’t already been “made up.”  Put some “young Turks” on a wiki burdened by too much conventional wisdom, and they’re like bulls in a china shop.

Q: As the author of three books based on your background as an analyst for the US military, you advocate for a new direction the military can take towards the globalization of peace. Do you think this can be accomplished within the military’s current top-down hierarchical leadership style? Do you think the military could/should engage civilian peace-oriented networks to achieve the goal of global peace?

My System Administrator “force,” or one focused on everything but big wars, was always based on the notion that it’s essentially a military-civilian interface function that tilts decidedly to the latter over the course of its operations. In effect, my SysAdmin force is a way for the military to transition – as quickly and as comprehensively as possible – the low-end policing, nation-building, frontier integrating, etc., to non-military actors (NGOs, PVOs, international bodies, private sector enterprises, local governmental entities, and so on).

It was designed to be “starfish” from the get-go; I just didn’t have that particular vernacular in my tool-kit at the time. Now, of course, thanks to Rod and Ori’s book, plus those various insurgencies since encountered, it all seems so obvious.

My SysAdmin concept is definitely about the multiplication or franchising of authority centers within on-the-ground operations (post-conflict, post-war, counter-insurgency) that the military historically prefers to run in a highly hierarchical manner.  But as we know, that can infantilize local capacity – destroy it, actually.

So, absolutely, the military has to embrace a certain “starfish” mentality for the hand-off dynamics to unfold successfully. That doesn’t mean I want the entire US military to go down that route, but the skill set must be developed among those particular forces that get stuck with these ops time and again, and that’s why I originally advocated a certain splitting of the force, between warriors who focus on big wars and those who manage the small conflicts, so the latter would develop and – more important – never discard those skills, which is what we did after Vietnam and are threatening to do again with this new obsession on China and the AirSea Battle Concept.

We’re living through an age of globalization’s globalization – if you will. For decades, the global economy was just the West, but now it’s north, south, east and west – truly global, meaning frontiers are being integrating all over the planet simultaneously. That’s a lot of political-military churn to go along with all that socio-economic change.

So if you want to continue exploiting globalization’s ultimate pacifying effect, you need to aggressively process these many frontiers, settling them down. That’s a huge international project where the US military can only succeed if it enlists as many new allies as possible, and that means going as “starfish” as possible across its relevant organizational edge. To me, that’s the Army, Marines and Special Forces – the core elements of my SysAdmin concept.

To learn more visit wikistrat.com.

Wikistrat post @ CNN-GPS: Predicting Iraq's future

Editor’s Note: The following piece, exclusive to GPS, comes from Wikistrat, the world's first massively multiplayer online consultancy.  It leverages a global network of subject-matter experts via a crowd-sourcing methodology to provide unique insights.

The U.S. invasion of Iraq began 9 years ago this week, triggering a conflict that cost the U.S. approximately 4,500 lives and a trillion dollars of taxpayers’ money. In honor of that anniversary, Wikistrat’s an alytic “crowd” debated: a) what America ultimately accomplished in Iraq, and b) where Iraq is likely headed in the years ahead. These are our six primary judgments.

Read the entire post at CNN's GPS blog.

There is no such thing as "Asian values," just pre-development ones

Really cool column by Patti Waldmeir on Asia (despite the weird lack of noun-verb agreement).  She is FT's Shanghai bureau chief.

Gist (well captured in title): "China's young workforce warm (sic) to west's work-life balance." [Online version of title cuts "workforce," so agreement works there.  Picky me, I know.]

Starts with recollection of asking founder of BYD battery/carmaker what he did in his free time.  He scoffed at the notion that such a thing existed, and then lectured her on why China would surpass the West because its people had no such conception.

True for the "rise"-initiating generation, but not true to the kids who follow:

But that was three years ago, and three years is a long time in China. Since then, the younger generation of Chinese workers have (sic) begun to discover the joys of sloth. Leisure - which has had a bad rap on the mainland - is making a comeback.

Why? Overwork, plus increasingly long commutes.

Upshot:  according to the head of GM in China, the post-80s generation is increasingly into the the whole life-work balance, creating all manner of HR challenges (none of them new to GM, please).

A headhunter says more and more of his applicants want to work at places that respect the weekend: "These overseas trends are coming into China now."

Of course, if you're trying to build up domestic consumption, you need to encourage this mindset.  Plus, in an economy that seeks to prioritize innovation, all work and no play make Jin a dull boy.

But the larger point, just explored in a great Master Narrative proposed by a Wikistrat analyst in our ongoing "China Hits the Great Wall" simulation, is that China may well confound us by getting to the point of wealth and then disappointing all the "realists" out there who imagine the country's only path to be maximizing "national power" (whatever that is). Especially when you factor in the rapid demographic aging, we are more likely to get a China that goes straight to a Nordic socialist-heavy, more admirable lifestyle package than mindlessly replicating the Kaiserian Germany push toward great-power war (crazy talk, I know, for a pol-mil analyst who wants to be taken "seriously" by Washington).

But there you have it: far faster than it appeared in Japan, we see the work-life balance monster rear its relaxed head.

Wikistrat post @ CNN-GPS: Millennials shaping foreign policy with Kony 2012?

Editor’s Note: The following piece, exclusive to GPS, comes from Wikistrat, the world's first massively multiplayer online consultancy.  It leverages a global network of subject-matter experts via a crowd-sourcing methodology to provide unique insights.

The Kony2012 Youtube sensation has triggered a secondary op-ed explosion, as “real experts” sound off - mostly negatively - about having their sacred analytic turf encroached upon by celebrity endorsers and ADHD-addled “slackivists” who’ve merely clicked a couple of buttons (Like! Donate!) before moving on to the next viral sensation.

There’s nothing more disturbing to the national security intelligentsia than having American foreign policy crowd-sourced, especially when those allegedly apathetic Millennials are preemptively arguing for aU.S.military intervention.

Doesn’t America’s biggest-ever generational cohort realize that the country is tired of performing global police work?

This week’s Wikistrat crowd-sourced drill looks at the Kony2012 video phenomenon, offering several reasons why it signals something new and important in U.S. foreign policy debates – and not.

Read the entire post at CNN's GPS blog.

The displacement effect of all that new US natural gas

See it already in how natural gas deals are proceeding internationally: the flow out of North America alters things, regionalizing flows more as Japan and Germany move off nukes and seek to ramp up their use of gas to generate electricity, and as emerging markets in general ramp up their gas use.

But another displacement raised in the recent Wikistrat crowd-sourced online simulation on the North American Energy Export Boom was the notion that the long-term abundance of cheap gas in NorthAm would encourage a crowding out of oil in transportation:

• Encouraging hybrids by making electricity cheaper long term;
• Enabling more direct natural gas fueling of vehicles (typically trucks); and 
• Pushing refiners to take NG, process it into syngas and then into gasoline.

WSJ story cited here:" "Natural gas to power pickups." US auto makers introducing trucks powered by NG "as they look to catch the growing wave of interest in the fuel as an alternative to gasoline." So here we're talking either pure compressed natural gas (CNG) or vehicles, like the one Chrysler is working, that will run on a combo of gasoline and CNG.

Exciting stuff.

North American energy boom attracting Chinese investment

Per the recent Wikistrat online crowdsourced simulation on the North American Energy Export Boom, one of the summary conclusions was that China should aggressively invest in the US fracking industry (tight oil, shale gas). While the US attracts only a tiny share of China's total global FDI (foreign direct investment), when you look just at investments in oil and gas, recently North America has become the biggest Chinese target ($20B or so since onset of global financial crisis).

The key to overcoming US political concerns:  keeping it to a minority investment.

Most estimates have Chinese shale gas reserves as equal to that of the US and Canada combined.  Canada is #7 in the world and the US is #2.

The quintessential deal in the works:

Chinese firms now are attempting to negotiate partnerships with FTS International, a Fort Worth, Texas, company that specializes in hydraulic fracturing, a process used to extract energy from shale, according to one person familiar with the matter. FTS, which is owned by Chesapeake [already in deals with Chinese firms] and a consortium of Asian investors, would use proceeds from any deals to expand internationally, this person says.

That is right out of the win-win scenario ("Cooking with Gas") from the Wikistrat sim: encourage Chinese investment so super-energy hungry China can dramatically upgrade its capabilities and tackle its own shale gas challenge, but do so in a way that accelerates the internationalization of the US fracking technology via US firms.

Wikistrat post @ CNN-GPS: What Putin 2.0 will mean

Editor’s Note: The following piece, exclusive to GPS, comes from Wikistrat, the world's first massively multiplayer online consultancy.  It leverages a global network of subject-matter experts via a crowd-sourcing methodology to provide unique insights.

In last year’s parliamentary (Duma) elections, current Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party had to stuff ballot boxes just to avoid falling too far below the 50 percent mark.  Now, as Putin presents himself to voters this Sunday as the once-and-future president, there’s clearly a bottom-up backlash brewing among the urban young and middle-class.  Will it prevent a Putin win?  Hardly.  The only uncertainty here is how far Putin’s United Russia party will have to go to ensure a respectable victory margin. Whether anyone - at home or abroad - will actually respect the process is another thing.

So, stipulating that Putin 2.0 is a given, here’s Wikistrat's weekly crowd-sourced examination of what all this may mean for Russia and the world at large.

Read the entire post at CNN's GPS blog.

Wikistrat post @ CNN-GPS: What happens to the eurozone after the second Greek bailout?

Editor’s Note: The following piece, exclusive to GPS, comes from Wikistrat, the world's first massively multiplayer online consultancy.  It leverages a global network of subject-matter experts via a crowd-sourcing methodology to provide unique insights.

The great Troika of the European Union, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund has engineered a second bailout of Greece, once again saving Western Civilization as we know it. But as anyone following this long-running melo-drachma may attest, it ain’t over ‘til Chancellor Merkel says so. This week’s Wikistrat drill looks at possible future pathways for the eurozone.

Read the entire post at CNN's GPS blog.

Had lunch with old classmate today in NYC

Easily my most famous old Harvard classmate - Fareed Zakaria

Beautiful restaurant (A Voce) at Time Warner blding overlooking Columbus Circle (I want to say I'm certain of that, but I'm not).

Was nice to see him again after a few years.  We started our PhDs in Harvard's Government department in the same year - 1986, along with Minxin Pei, Debra Spar, Andrew Sullivan and Allison Stanger.  Quite a year that was, and it's always been very cool to link up with individuals since (getting Allison to join Wikistrat's community of analysts today as well!).

Also spent good chunk of morning with Amar Bakshi, editor of his GPS site. It was very nice to finally meet him in person after working the GPS posts with him these past few weeks.  Always good to put face with voice.

Main topic of both meets was naturally Wikistrat.  Secondary topic was our planned crowdsourced book, which CEO Joel Zamel and I spent a lot of time discussing this morning with my - and now Wikistrat's - lit agent.

Carried out from Virgil's at Times Square tonight.  A personal tradition.

We head down to DC on train tomorrow morning for two days of meetings. Gonna have to pen GPS post on train. It will be on EZ after second Greece bailout. Not my favorite subject, but WS community did nice job with it, with our Euro contigent sounding off very robustly!

Wikistrat post @ CNN-GPS: Ten Roads to Israel-Iran War

Editor’s Note: The following piece, exclusive to GPS, comes from Wikistrat, the world's first massively multiplayer online consultancy.  It leverages a global network of subject-matter experts via a crowd-sourcing methodology to provide unique insights.

Either Israel and the United States are engaged in a brilliant psychological operations campaign against Iran or the two long-time allies really are talking past each other on the subject of Tehran’s reach for a nuclear bomb. Either way, all this Bibi Netanyahu said, Leon Panetta said chatter is producing some truly jangled nerves over in Iran on the subject of Israel’s allegedly imminent attack on that country’s nuclear program facilities.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu keeps publicly implying that his nation can’t wait on Iranian events for as long as the Obama administration – with its looming embargo of Iranian oil sales to the West – would like. Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta keeps tripping over his own tongue, saying one day that America is doing its best to keep Israel’s attack jets grounded and the next offhandedly remarking to reporters that Tel Aviv is inevitably going to pull that trigger sometime this spring.

Again, as psyop campaigns go, this is brilliant, because it not only keeps the Iranians nervous and guessing, it forces them out into the diplomatic open with all manner of implausible counter-threats that reveal their increasing desperation.

Stipulating all this brinkmanship - coordinated or not - this week’s Wikistrat crowd-sourced analysis exercise involves imagining the range of possible pathways to an Israel-Iran war.  We don’t offer odds here. We just try to cover a wide array of possible vectors toward the trigger-pulling point.

Read the entire post at CNN's GPS blog.

Nice PR for Wikistrat's North American Energy Export Boom simulation

Nice write up of master narratives that I, as chief analyst, constructed from the roughly two-dozen scenarios ginned up by Wikistrat analysts during the first week of the sim. Author is WS analyst himself, writing at the Foreign Policy Association's blog site.

That then gets picked up by the Natural Gas Americas website (find the permanent entry here).

Here's what it looked like on their front page for a while:

Got energy on the brain this week.  Yesterday I keynoted to about 800 directors of rural electrical co-ops from around the US.  Big conference was as Universal @ Orlando theme park.  After my talk I got in a quick quidditch match at the Harry Potter park.  Kicked some wizard ass, although I found out later it was just a bunch of retired California firemen attending a local conference.

Ben Shobert on Wikistrat's look at China-->Africa FDI dynamic

Find the post at Cross the Rubicon.

The bit I found interesting:

Dr. Barnett several years ago made a prediction that I imagine some rolled their eyes at, if for no other reason than it seemed outlandish at the time.  He suggested that as China’s presence in Africa grew, they would be greeted as a new colonial power, admittedly different in form and context, but none-the-less viewed as an outside power interested only in extracting resources from lowly Africa.  This would ultimately, as he saw it, create situations where African extremists would target Chinese operations in Africa, kidnap workers, etc.  It is worth noting this is precisely what has been happening, with a handful of other people asking the question, as Stan Abrams did earlier this week, what the world would think if China were to drop its equivalent of a Navy SEAL Team into Africa to get its people out.

If you want to participate in this business and do it well, your work will constantly be on the edge of outlandishness, otherwise you'll be trailing the pack and just picking up the conventional wisdom (like the increasingly regurgitated debate on state-capitalism-ruling-all versus America-in-decline-or-not?) as it's beaten to death.  

Spending my time, as I have for nearly a decade now, exploring the future reality of Chinese and US co-management of the world, puts me on the edge of most people's plausibility. After all, we got that "Chimerica" definition from Ferguson just as the global financial crisis killed the long-running model he was describing, so OF COURSE we now shift into a long-term rivalry between types of capitalism (strategic pivot et. al) and the "resumption of history" and so on.

But, of course, none of the larger structural dynamics in the world system have changed. We're just seeing the elite's perceptions begin to catch up, and when they do, they naturally package the undeniable reality into old boxes - like containment and superpower rivalry and AirSea Battle Concept (a painfully unimaginative retread from the 1980s with the Sovs).

However, for those of us who stick to their stories (scenarios), tomorrow's superpower interdependence will have less to do with the promise of shared death (MAD) than the promise of shared wealth - and the commensurate challenges of a world ruled from the middle for the first time in history.  That world, dominated by the C-I-A troika of China, India and America, is the subject of my next book, which I'll simultaneously crowd-source within the Wikistrat community over the next several months.