Cassandra was the Trojan priestess described in Homer's Iliad condemned to have prophecies that are never believed.

Dennis King, a veteran analyst with over 30 years of experience in the Humanitarian Information Unit of the US State Department, USAID, and OCHA, is in a sense a modern day Cassandra. Together with host Lars Peter Nissen, they unravel the transformation of information management in the humanitarian sector. They discuss the gains and losses brought by technological advances, what can be learned from the cultural contrasts between humanitarian and intelligence communities, and the new chaos paradigm. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in Cassandra’s predictions for the future of humanitarian analysis.

Dennis King, welcome to Trumanitarian.

Thank you, Lars Peter, welcome back to Washington, DC.

There's a lovely sunny day here in Washington and I have been looking forward to this conversation. Because you have more than 30 years’ experience in the humanitarian sector with information management and analysis. And those are, of course, topics that are really front and center in my mind and I look forward to picking your brain. You're recently retired so now you can speak your mind after 30 years, we expect you to spill the beans here. Then Dennis take us back to the beginning. How did you start your career in the humanitarian sector?

Back in the early 1990s, I was at the US Agency for International Development, Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance and I was an information management officer. So basically, I wrote sitreps about disasters and death and destruction. That was sort of my job, and I did a little bit of field work on their teams that went out to disaster-affected countries in the 1990s. At that point it was very much natural disaster oriented. It was before a lot of conflict emergencies that we're more experienced with now and so that was a good introductory experience. And then in 1996, the UN, with the State Department. came up with the idea of ReliefWeb, when the Internet was new, and I became interested in that project, and I was a U.S. government contribution to the design team of ReliefWeb in 1996.

Yeah. So almost 30 years ago, you were at the ground floor of information management, really the way we understand it today. ReliefWeb is still with us, of course, but technology and so many other things have changed since then, right? And so, if you look back over those 3 decades, what are the main things that have changed? What has really lifted the quality of the work and what is pretty much the same in spite of very different and more sophisticated technology.

Right, so before the Internet, if some of your listeners can remember back that far, documents were kept in things called file cabinets and libraries and documents were disseminated by things called fax machines. The Internet and technology really revolutionized the humanitarian profession, and you started getting Geographic Information Systems for making maps. Satellite imagery became available. Social media started years later, and all this changed the humanitarian profession, information that they didn’t have before was much more available.

And if you look at it operationally, right, because, OK, so the difference now is that if your boss wanted to get a hold of you back then, you could just pretend like the phone didn't work. But now you are available. You don't really have an excuse. Right? What have we gained operationally by this hyper connectedness?

Like I said, it has brought advantages, but it's also brought its share of problems.

So, let's take the top three advantages and the top three problems.

In terms of advantages, there's the access to information, it is much more available than we were dealing with paper and those types of documents and on a global basis, now we have access to information from sources all over the world, although most of it's still in English. The tools have improved, things like Geographic Information Systems to help visualize information that help provide analysis that could be customized. I think also the availability, that you're not stuck to a nine to five coming into the office, you can access information from your home computer. We're teleworking, like we did during COVID. It's 24-hour, whereas it used to be office hours, and if you had a disaster that occurred outside of the office hours back in the 1990s, you had to wait around.

So that makes sense to me. On one side, the information is much more accessible. We have more sophisticated tools and I think just mapping, I mean it's a revolution. And then the fact that geographically we're not tied down to being in the same location, we can collaborate seamlessly even though we're in different parts of the Earth. But what are the downsides?

So, with that increased access has brought information overload, and I mean the problem is, if you look at ReliefWeb or all the stuff that comes through on social media, you're getting information nonstop. And it's just too much for people to handle, especially decision makers, so the information overload is an accompanying problem and something that must be dealt with. Along with that is misinformation and disinformation with the overload of information you're getting. What is incorrect information, intentionally or unintentionally, disinformation that's sent out by tweets and social media, and that type of thing. And so that has worked its way into the system, into decision making, and into analysis. And then I think, technology has its share of cybersecurity threats or cyber-attacks, and just sort of down time - if our system is down temporarily, we panic.

So, when you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck, basically.

Right. And I think that we should just recognize those problems, I mean that's natural like you said. We shouldn't overpromote technology without acknowledging the limitations and the challenges and try to address those the best we can.

Now in the last part of your career, you were a senior Humanitarian Affairs analyst in the Humanitarian Information Unit in the State Department and that is part of the intelligence community in the US. It's part of the bureau called Intelligence and Research, INR.

Right.

Now, how was that shift for you? You have been among us humanitarians for a while. And then you join the intelligence community that must have been a different work environment.

Yeah, as we talked about it, there are different cultures. And I came from USAID and then UN OCHA. So, I was very familiar with the civilian humanitarian community, and it was much more acceptable to me. Transferring to the intelligence community was a new culture to adjust to.

Just unpack that for us. What? How is it different?

There is an automatic suspicion on both sides of each other. Whereas the humanitarians look at the intelligence community as non-neutral, as working for a political or a military policy or agenda. And so, it goes in the face of their humanitarian principles and their inclinations. And the intelligence community is very separated from interacting with the humanitarian community and other professionals, most of the other parts of the intelligence community don't really interact directly with the civilians and the NGO's and the UN. So, there is a built-in culture clash and suspicion of each other.

Yeah, but I would agree that we should be suspicious of each other.

Yes, we are US foreign policy. We're advancing the goals and objectives of US foreign policy. What I didn't get into was that we tend to look at both communities as monolithic and there is dissent and collaboration within the community before it gets sent up to the higher levels.

How do they look at us?

How do they look at humanitarians? They look at them as sources of information Number One. I still maintain that most of the information that I would use and write about would come from what we call open source and public domain information. That I think is the primary way that the intelligence community at large looks at the humanitarian community.

Now you're an interesting crossover because you used to be a humanitarian information manager and analyst. And now you performed the same function inside the State Department. From an analyst’s point of view, how is it different? What is the difference between being asked by the humanitarian coordinator to deliver a brief and to be asked by your boss at INR to, by this afternoon, have something on his desk?

My job was sort of divided into two different things - preparing documents of information that came from intelligence sources basically to give to the policymakers. But it was me knowing what that policymaker was interested in. The other part of my job was writing one- or two-page documents, never more, that had a judgement. We tried to not tell policymakers what they wanted to hear. I mean, that's what we should be doing and be objective. And I enjoyed that. Because in the governments, they regard their information and their sources as more important than open source and coming from civilian sources. So, giving them an alternative analysis, always backed up, very sourced with citations, but always making a judgement that might be that we have medium confidence that this will happen or high confidence.

I mean, hearing you talk, it doesn't sound that different from the way ACAPS analysts work. How heavy is the quality assurance process?

Very stringent. I mean it goes through the clearance process first in our unit and then within our Bureau. And they will challenge the judgment that's made or a source that you use. You know there's a lot of rewriting, believe me and a lot of compromise. Where this is something that I don't want to compromise on, but this is something I might have to just to get through the process. I think the other thing from our perspective is our direct access to government policymakers, more than the other sort of information manager. Like I said, they would come in three times a week for readings. I would interact with them. I got to know what they were interested in. I could tailor what I selected or what I wrote about on their interests and in terms of what I wrote. You know, I was trying to fill an information gap, not duplicate what was already out there in the vast information overload.

And how much freedom would you have to pick what you wanted?

To write about? a lot, I give them credit. I mean, there are a lot of taskings or specifics to address this problem, answer this question that would come down from On High. But it was often looking for what wasn’t being addressed, what wasn't being answered? What were the gaps? And then tailoring a product to that, not just repeating what others had said. You know, as I said, with the vast information overload. So, I had a lot of flexibility. I give them credit. For that also, humanitarian issues in the intelligence community are not a big part compared to great power competition and weapons of mass destruction and counterterrorism and those other types of issues.

So, you could sort of fly under the radar,

I would. I would say that intentionally I didn't want to be to be too out there. Now, we've got more into writing about conflict related disasters than natural disasters, which was what it primarily was when I started at USAID. Now there's more political and military issues that need to be addressed.

One of the things I find madding in the humanitarian sector is the disconnect between the evidence we produce, the analysis and the decision. Is that any better? Inside the US Government?

No, obviously that is still a problem. The thing that I've gotten into is complexity theory and recognition of uncertainty and complexity and uncontrollability and gaps that are inherent, and technology seen as a tool rather than a solution to uncertainty. And I think the evidence-based approach is very important, and we should try to make our decisions based on as much information as is available. But there's a lot of uncertainty. There's a lot of things we don't know. We can't get to certain areas, there's misinformation and disinformation. And so all of these, if you rely on a strictly data-driven, evidence-based approach to analysis, at least you need to recognize that there's still some uncertainty and there are still some gaps that we don't know.

I must be honest with you, Dennis. I'm disappointed here, right? There was a low hanging fruit. You're from the State department - Where are the known unknowns, the unknown unknowns, the known knowns that you could have used.

Yeah, there's a whole approach that talks about, of course, the Rumsfeld “Known unknowns and unknown unknowns” and those types of things. That's out-of-the-box thinking, although it's recognized, and I tried to do stuff that got into scenarios and alternative analysis and that type of thing. Still, it's mostly this very evidence-based thinking within the previous paradigm. But as I like to say, we moved into this new complexity paradigm of uncertainty and emergence, rather than cause and effect and linear thinking and we're still looking at things from that previous Newtonian paradigm as opposed to Einstein and relativity and uncertainty.

And it is very interesting that struggle, especially when you are in a big bureaucracy, between, on one side colleagues who work with reducing uncertainty and so trying to control the environment and really make sure that every time I push the button, the same thing happens. And then inside a framework that you must think about of unknown unknowns. How do you do that? How? What kind of culture do you put in place to safeguard that level of creativity; you need to be able to think.

Well, that's another criticism I have that the best way to approach it is through collaboration and exposure to alternative perspectives. Certainly, within the intelligence community, it's very siloed. It's very much relying on trusted sources of information without much exposure to alternative perspectives. I’m very much interested in new approaches, more collaborative approaches, things like simulation exercises and gaming and brainstorming. The job of the analyst is - you’re in front of your computer, you're writing, and you're stuck in your office, you know, 8 or 9 or 10 hours a day. And there's very little exposure to the field or outside external sources that might present an alternative.

And it's not like a culture of, oh, man, we need to send them out and touch some grass. Or something.

Little bit of that. We have our embassies, the State Department, of course has embassies all over the world and rely on them for reporting from that country and telling us what they do and it is classified or unclassified and other than when I was working for USAID, where I did have a little bit of field humanitarian response experience, there was going out to the field and interviewing the affected populations, understanding what their concerns were and their motivations. Or again, it was all using secondary sources.

And do you think that's OK, or do you think that hampers the quality of the analysis?

Well, I think we need it. Getting back to suspicion of the intelligence community. Of course, they're sent out to the field. they're having some exposure, and they're usually people guess about them anyway. USAID has more experience with how it's going in the field, and they're reporting on that. So, it's still secondary, but I do I say that in adjusting to this new complexity I encourage more field orientation and more collaboration between alternative sources.

Do you think it made you a worse analyst that you did not have more field experience?

I do. I couldn't speak to it directly. I had to rely on what I was hearing and talking to people about. So it was second hand and I think that having that field experience adds to your credibility as an analyst and even though it might be just storytelling, you could really tell the best stories by having a personal experience with a particular issue or problem or country. So, I do think I was relying on secondhand information and at least my credibility would have improved if I could say I saw this, I talked to these people, this is what they're concerned about and get that perspective.

Now you've just finished your career with the State Department. You retired this month, but before you left, you took a sabbatical year to do some studies and write up some of your experiences.

I was on an academic fellowship at the National Intelligence University and so under that I wrote some short papers. And now I'm completing a research monograph that I didn't get to finish during my 12 months there and it's titled Channeling Cassandra: Humanitarian intelligence and decision making in the age of Complexity. I want to thank you for helping suggest that title.

So why Cassandra?

Right. So, I talked about taking three cases from ancient Greek literature. So, the first one was Cassandra from Homer's Iliad, and that she, of course, was the Trojan priestess who was condemned to have prophecies that were never believed. And in Homer's Iliad, she predicted that the Greeks would take over Troy, and in fact, that is what happened, and nobody believed her. And when the Greeks took over Troy, she was captured and killed by the Greeks. The other two examples briefly were The Boy Who cried Wolf from Aesop's Fables as we know that's the story of the shepherd boy whose job it was to warn the villagers of another wolf attack. He made so many incorrect warnings that they stopped believing him, and then the wolves did attack, and they ate the sheep, and they ate the Shepherd Boy. And then the third example from Greek literature was Oedipus Rex, who was given a prophecy about his future, and he couldn't do anything to prevent it from happening, and that also ended up tragically.

So, it ends poorly for all of them, no matter whether they're right or wrong. Whether they believe it or not. It just ends poorly.

So, Channeling Cassandra is what I'd like to think of ourselves as what we do – creating scenarios and doing predictive types of analysis or anticipatory analysis and it gets fed into the reading material of the decision makers and we're making a judgment about the likelihood of this happening or the unintended consequences and that type of thing. But as we all know, they're not really acted upon and so to that degree, we're sort of Cassandra's that we were making predictions and the scenarios that aren't acted upon.

It is a bit depressing Dennis.

I'm sorry. You know, over 30 years it has gotten to me. Although I have been a cynic and a skeptic since kindergarten so it's my natural inclination. OK.

So, let's say we now take this cynic and skeptic. And let him back into a new career in the humanitarian sector, knowing everything you know now. What are the three prophecies that you are going to give us? What do you want to tell us?

So yeah, complexity theory makes a distinction between complicated and complex - complicated as an earlier stage and complex is even more complicated. I wrote a paper about how the paradigm shifted around 2015 with climate change and pandemic and various issues. And then the next stage is chaos. And as you may know, “humanitarian action takes place at the edge of chaos”.

I've heard that. Something you heard?

Yeah, I can't remember where. We very well might be crossing over into a chaos paradigm. I was doing a word cloud, and the word “chaos” is appearing more and more in relation to humanitarian crises.

So, the way I the way I think about the difference between something complicated and something complex is by thinking about what the opposite is. So, for me, the opposite of something complicated is something simple? But what is the opposite of something complex?

Right. So, I talked about in the paper that we were living under a complicated paradigm where refugees would cross the border and be housed in camps. That was happening in 2014 in the early years of Syria, for example, just moving into Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. When they start doing transcontinental migration, crossing multiple borders to get to Europe or get to the United States from Latin America and other places then it became a complex problem. Climate change was another thing that was recognized around 2015 as an issue. COVID and a global pandemic.

Yeah, so I agree that we are moving towards higher levels of complexity. And I think the key difference between a complicated and a complex system for me is that while a complicated system may not be obvious what the causal linkage is in that system, they exist and are quite well established. You just need to figure out what the problem is, and once you have, you push that button, and the right thing happens. But complex systems are loosely coupled. So, there's not a pre-established relationship determining how the system works, and you modify the system by engaging with it. And the causal relationships and how you can manipulate it emerges in the moment. I think that's the key difference. And then if we go to chaos as you speak about, there just are no causal relationships which makes your Cassandra, Boy who Cried Wolf and Oedipus Rex perfect because it doesn't matter.

Right. Yeah. It's going to happen anyway. And you know, you're not going to be able to control it, You use the word emergence that instead of looking for things with the cause and effect, things tend to emerge from a combination of conditions and drivers and triggers and that type of thing, and that's the state where we're still back to the paradigm of looking at things from cause and effect and that's another adaptation that we need to make, and not only in analysis, but in humanitarian decision making.

So, what's the advice then? You have 30 years’ experience. You've done this academic study; you have finished your career in the State Department. Come back to us as an advisor to the humanitarian community and tell us what Cassandra?

You're not going to believe it, no matter what I say, so recognizing the limitations and the uncontrollability of things. I would recommend that we change to a new adaptive way of thinking from cause and effect and linear thinking and those types of ways that we’re used to analyzing problems. Be more holistic synthesis. Look at things nonlinearly. Look at emergence rather than strict cause and effect. I think we need to do new approaches and ACAPS has done a lot of that in terms of like I'm saying collaborative types of methods. I think within the intelligence community they are ingrained in the old approaches. It's still very internal and very personal in terms of the writer of the document and that type of thing. So, things like crisis gaming where you have built in uncertainty and improbability, and which is a more accurate description of the new reality. So those are some of the things that I talk about in the monograph to adjust our way of thinking and adapt to this new paradigm.

Dennis King. I'd love to take another hour discussion with you, but we have technology issues here. We're almost out of battery. The recorder is just about to stop. So, thank you so much. For all of your work over the years, for your support, your guidance, and your creativity and your ideas. It's been great working with you, and I look forward to continuing the collaboration in the future.

Exactly. So, yeah, let's do it. I moved into a new paradigm and am open to new personal experiences and opportunities.