No No Fly List

I couldn’t have been more disappointed.

Today, 7 January 2010, the president spoke to the American people. This President, unlike his predecessor, has an intellect and usually applies that intellect to the things that he says – snippets or speeches.

His predecessor lacked that sort of intellect, so there was nothing to apply to the things that he said – snippets or speeches. He was pretty good at speaking, it was just that what he said was what someone had told him to say. His pronouncements were always the words of a ventriloquist’s dummy, although he stood alone rather than sitting on the lap of the ventriloquist.

Today, at least from the viewpoint of the message delivered, the ventriloquist seems to have come back. Because the message was identical to what would have been expected from Bush; as such it was just plain wrong.

The President said that the system failed.

The system didn’t fail. The system doesn’t work. In fact that which the President says has failed isn’t even a system. There really isn’t any system. What there is is an organization. It is an organization that is set up like a corporation. It is not organized like a corporation such as one finds among the successful businesses of the 2000’s, it is a corporation such as one found at the turn of the nineteenth century. It has many levels of command control and information passes slowly through the semi-porous membranes that separate the various layers.

And worse yet, it isn’t just one multi-layered corporate-like structure. It is multiple such entities. They all sell the same product: useable intelligence information. But their manufacturing process is slow. And there really aren’t any standards as to what the finished product might need to look like. As a result, they aren’t really manufacturers at all; they are job shops producing infinite numbers of one-of-a-kinds that they think up to fill their time. And they never are really sure what these individual one-of-a-kinds ought to look like, or how they might be used, or who might want to buy them. In any event, even if they did know, many of the components that they would need to make something if they ever figured out what it was that they ought to be making are in the hands of their competitors, the other manufacturers.

In spite of these challenges, the manufacturers employ really talented, imaginative employees who are really skilled at their craft. They produce a lot of very useable product in spite of all the problems.

But the product doesn’t get distributed on a very broad basis.

That is because the distributor is small and has limited product expertise. It is called the no fly list and it only deals in absolutely known problems. Those problems – the product of the manufacturers – are few in number because no matter how skilled the employees of the manufacturers might be – they don’t know all the possible combinations of use that could be made of their product, so they only ship the product that their limited, albeit highly skilled, knowledge tells them has a market.

But the market is huge. And the customers in that market, in aggregate, know vastly more about all the combinational possibilities of use of the manufacturer’s product, a product that when viewed in this manner is really a monstrous tool kit of components that could be used with great success by that vast market of customers, if only those customers could get that tool kit. But they can’t. The distributor is too small and limited.

So the answer isn’t to try to make the existing multiple competing manufacturers more efficient and more accountable and bigger. The answer is to totally re-organize those manufacturers into a single level – get rid of the layers; look like a modern corporation - processing entity, taking the raw material and turning it as rapidly as possible into useable components, putting them in a gigantic tool kit and sending the kit on a constantly updated basis to all the customers who can use the components each in their own way, having completely eliminated the distributor.

There would be no no fly list. There would just be useable information real time, on line available at all times to those who need it to make the decisions that should have been made in relation to the crotch bomber.

This is a systems problem, not an organizational problem.

There is more on this, including a flow chart for the suggested system at “A Modest Proposal for an Intelligence System” and “Intelligence System”.