We now have the full Pentagon nation-building plan for Afghanistan that led up to the slide featured in an earlier post . (hat tip to Chris Coyne). The slides are credited to PA Consulting Group, a leading London-based firm whose motto is “Questions. Answered.” A possibly relevant line in their self-description is that they “supported the delivery of multibillion-dollar defence projects.”
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My favourite will have to be slide 9 – “Popular support”, which has the tiniest graph of all.. quite telling of where the Pentagon’s – or is it PA Consulting’s? – priorities are.
Concept Mapping: You’re doing it wrong.
Can’t we apply some transaction cost analysis here? At what point do the benefits of having information in a visual form get outweighed by the total lack of clarity?
I guess this is useful when done in a participatory manner. It doesn’t look very useful for anybody that haven’t been involved in the construction process of the model. In the other hand, it should be possible to chooses some control and evaluation variables and make some simulations. For such a complicated model you’ll need a wizard. Is some kind of turk chess machine.
No where in this flow chart soup do I see anything about incentives. Hasn’t the pentagon learned anything from previous aid efforts gone awry?
‘coin strategy’. the most excellent title. And so much closer to the rather less than complex practice. They must have noted that, surely.
haha – this is very funny! Their motto should be “Questions. Answered. Kinda. Sometimes. Actually, Don’t Count On It…..What was the point of this mapping again…………?”
They could use this to enliven meetings by adding a ‘where’s waldo’ type person and give a prize to the first to spot it (if they ever do).
This is so good have fwd’d this link to friends who work in mapping/GIS..
Ooooooh! So pretty! Actually – this is an absolutely brilliant explanation of our progress (lack of) in Afghanistan. It looks like a tsunami of incompetence.
Anyone remember “Spyrograph”? The challenge with these mapping digrams comes with discerning anything meaningful from them without being intimately involved in the development. An hour into these, my head hurt so bad I had to leave early from work, and the logic was still questionable.
The good news is that this is apparently just a consulting effort produced for the staff, not something driving the effort on the ground. But it’s also a reflection of just how challenging the road ahead is for all of us, and the incredible number of factors influencing the outcome. And if anyone thinks that this would be made better by cutting our losses and pulling out, the rest of the world is just as complex.
Welcome to the 21st century.
A more positive take on this particular exercise in conceptual mapping is here.
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by bill_easterly: Where was the person in the room who laughed out loud? Nation building by Powerpoint #Afghanistan http://bit.ly/73JCV9...
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