The October HBR has an interview with Rory Stewart, who has been involved in trying to do rebuilding in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is a remarkable person who has done amazing things, but I was struck by one part of the interview where he reveals what I think is a common weakness: the inability to be honest with ourselves and others about what we are willing or not willing to do. He was talking about working to improve conditions in a village in Afghanistan:
We’re very good at saying we want to create a gender-sensitive, multiethnic centralized government based on human rights, policy, and law. But we’re very bad at deciding at what cost and in what time frame. Are we prepared to empower a provincial warlord to keep security for five years while we get our act together? Are we prepared to allow drug cultivation to continue because we’re focused on counterterrorism? Are we prepared to say that what matters most in the early stages is economic development, not democracy, and so we might tolerate a more dictatorial system that will create economic stability? Well, we’re not prepared to do any of those things–we want it all now. And, as a result, we generally end up getting none of it.
I am not attempting to open up a debate about how best to do "nation-building." The point for me is in what we are "prepared to say." I think he is describing a large swath of "middle-level" thinking that we in organizations avoid like the plague. We talk about following a clear vision, but if you make it too high level, it doesn’t help guide your decision making on the important issues he is pointing to. And I think we avoid this middle level because there is often (as in the examples he points to) some harsh truth in there that we don’t want to face. I think the days when we had the luxury to avoid the truth are passed us.