Change in Iraq -- An SDi Critique

Today I watching Charlie Rose (last night's episode), and he was talking about Iraq with some group of former generals. It occurred to me that it might be interesting to look at the Iraq mess within the framework of the Spiral Dynamics model.

Every once in while, Bush and his people decide they are going to change things in Iraq. But have they? What kinds of change have they tried to employ, and how effective have they been? I don't have the time to go into detail here and find all the needed links to news stories about Bush's process in Iraq, but recent events are fairly well-documented.

Please also keep in mind that these are preliminary observations, and not a well thought out essay.

A while back I posted a series of entries on change. In Eight Variations on Change, I outline the Spiral Dynamics Integral model of change. In The Six Conditions Needed for Change, we look at whether or not change is even possible. Let's start there.

The most important characteristic needed for change is an open system, meaning that new information is taken in, there is a capacity for integrating that information, and there are the necessary skills for change to occur. Clearly, this is not the situation at the White House.

Failing an open system, there either an arrested system or a closed system. For the first several years of the war, Bush and his people were in a closed system. No new information was allowed in, no new strategies were employed, and in essence, they had circled the wagons and would not tolerate any dissent.

More recently, forced by events to question their situation (the Beta stage in the change model -- see The Ritual Structure of Change, or the diagram above), Bush's people have become an arrested system -- one that seeks change, but still has some barriers that block change from happening.

They've tried fine-tuning, which to them passes as real change, but really amounts to very little. They've tired reforming with a seemingly endless parade of generals and the replacement -- finally -- of Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Nothing has really changed. Finally, they've also tried various upgrades, which mostly amount to redefining the situation in Iraq or redefining the enemy. All of these are versions of Horizontal change, the lowest and simplest variety. Still no real change.

Bush and his people seemed to have moved in recent months -- no doubt as a result of the election losses in November -- from the Beta stage of change into the more desperate Gamma stage. Here is how I have described Gamma:

If things get bad enough (full differentiation occurs), the individual moves from Beta to Gamma. This is a stage of anger, hopelessness, and attempted revolution. At this stage, any barriers to resolving the situation feel overwhelming. There is now a clear sense of how bad things really are, which can produce awareness of what went wrong and why.

There may be desperate attempts to try something “new” to break out of the morass. The old ways are no longer viable and the new ways are not yet visible. The feeling in this stage is of despair, suffocation, and chaos. When the individual feels his/her “back against the wall,” Gamma produces an assault on the barriers, in whatever form they may come. Some of these barriers are real and some are imagined -- it doesn’t matter at this point – better to fight than do nothing.

Bush and his people feel their backs against the wall right now. If you listen closely to their allies in the media, they keep talking about one last chance, one last push, one last assault. They want to throw 20,000 new troops into the mix in the (futile) attempt to fix things. This is a classic example of "more of the same" approach you often see in Beta, but because the system is arrested, it is all they have access to.

It seems they haven't yet reached that stage of doing something completely new and novel which get them out of the Gamma trap long enough to find real solutions. Along with the additional troops, there are reports of more rebuilding programs to be created using Iraqis. A good idea that is three years too late, and a fine example of fine tuning, but it is again the result of an arrested system not able to consider alternative information.

So, what we have is a Bush administration that is an arrested system and stuck in the Gamma trap of change, unable to see the forest for the trees. They are trying various forms of Horizontal change (fine tuning, reforming, and upgrading), but they are completely unable to mount any real assault on the barriers that keep them stuck in the current situation.

What Do They Need to Really Change?

There are six conditions needed for change.

They have some of the elements of change in place: they have dissonance (discomfort with how things are now); they have identified some barriers, but only in the exterior quadrants -- they have yet to look at how their beliefs and thought processes are preventing them from seeing other options; I think they are capable of insight, but they will have to confront interior barriers to benefit from that option.

What they lack is an open system willing to consider new information; they also lack the necessary solutions to allow change to occur (because they are an arrested system, they have been isolated from any real solutions); and they lack the consolidation (the supportive conditions needed to make change happen and be successful) to implement any real plan that might be developed if the other five conditions were met. This is the tough reality -- no matter what Bush proposes, even if it might succeed, the Democrats will oppose him and reject the plan simply because it comes from him.

The first thing that needs to happen -- in my dream world -- is that Bush and his people will honestly open themselves for a real discussion among experts to look at the reality of the situation. They need to become an open system capable of looking at the hard reality on the ground, all of the available information, and as many points of view as possible.

If they can do that, and if they can honestly examine their interior systems in a way that would eliminate their belief systems as a barrier to change, there would be a real hope for legitimate solutions in Iraq. Failing that, I have no hope that Iraq will be anything other than the foreign policy nightmare it has been -- and will continue to be far into the future.

Tags: Iraq War, Bush administration, Spiral Dynamics, change, The Structure of Change, The Six Conditions Needed for Change, Eight Variations on Change