Optics vs. Impact

"You want it to be one way ... but its the other way” 

- Marlo Stanfield

In the last entry to my blog I explained that HBO’s TV show "The Wire" is a great show for development professionals to watch because the kinds of complex challenges that play out on the show are strikingly similar to the challenges that we confront these days working on USAID’s development programs. Today I’m going to explore one of these challenges; the challenge of Optics vs. Impact (OvI).

OvI is the key theme behind the first season’s principal story arc which involves the Baltimore Police Department's (BPD) efforts to take down the Barksdale family operation, the city's largest drug trafficking empire. In order to explore OvI in the context of the the BPD’s investigation/pursuit of Barksdale we need to start by defining Optics and Impact. Here’s how I define them:

Optics is defined by the extent to which the activities undertaken, and decisions made, by the BPD convince the citizens of Baltimore that the BPD is waging an effective war on drugs and violent crime, thereby perpetuating public support for the BPD and the city’s broader political administration. 

Impact is defined by the extent to which the activities undertaken, and decisions made, by the BPD enable it to actually put the highest levels of Barksdale in prison, thereby de-capacitating its drug trafficking operations and all of the associated violence.

OK. Here’s where you say, "wait ... aren’t these the same thing?" Isn’t the best way for the BPD to secure public support to shut down the drug gangs and put violent criminals behind bars?

Unfortunately they aren’t the same thing and this is one of the key messages that David Simon is trying to get across with The Wire. One of the main tools that Simon uses to portray contrast between Optics and Impact is character development of two of the BPD’s biggest egos; Detective Jimmy McNulty and Major William Rawls. Two guys that couldn’t be more different from one another.

Jimmy McNulty

McNulty (played by Dominic West) is the show's tragic hero. He is arguably the most skilled detective in the entire BPD. He’s also the most committed within the Department to doing the kind of real police work that needs to be done to put the criminals behind all of the violence in Baltimore behind bars. McNulty’s problem is that he’s so consumed with the mission of putting murderers behind bars that he’s got no respect for the ‘chain of command’ and very little patience for the politics of law enforcement.

In the context of this analysis McNulty personifies an impact-driven approach to law enforcement. He recognizes that putting kingpins behind bars requires slow and steady investigative techniques, the use of wire taps and surveillance, and a commitment to stealthy progress (i.e. the idea that key milestones in an investigation should not be public celebrations because too much publicity can undermine the longer run objectives.)

William Rawls

Rawls (played by John Doman) is the total opposite. He’s a devout bureaucrat that knows how to play the game. His M.O. is “Dope on the Table” which is shorthand for lazy investigating. i.e. make some quick arrests, seize some drugs and maybe some guns, toss them on a table, and hold a press conference.  Rawls’ problem is that he’s so wrapped up in managing his career that he’s unable to recognize or support the real police work that is going on in the Department.

Rawls personifies the optics-driven approach to law enforcement. He recognizes that it is much easier to cultivate a perception among the public that his police department is diligently fighting crime than it is to actually buckle down and fight it. The idea of a stealthy investigation makes absolutely no sense to Rawls; he would never miss an opportunity to persuade his audience that important work is being done even if the PR undermined the prospects of making a real dent in crime.

Confrontation between Rawls and McNulty is one of the main storylines in the first season of The Wire.  It starts with a frustrated McNulty going outside the BPD chain of command to a city judge to complain that nobody inside the BPD is serious about investigating the Barksdale operation, which includes most of the city's drug trade and a lot of its unsolved murders. The city judge then takes McNulty’s private complaint back to senior BPD officials, and the BPD is compelled to launch a real investigation into Barksdale.

Its clear from the beginning that BPD leadership has no appetite for the kind of sustained effort and sophisticated investigative approach that is necessary to bring down Barksdale. BPD leadership, which is exemplified by Rawls, spends the entire first season of the show looking for opportunities to make quick arrests of low-level figures in the Barksdale organization, hold press conferences, and get out. McNulty, however, continues to find creative ways of pushing back so that his unit can pursue the investigation of Barksdale to its conclusion.

Largely through the valiant - and arguably insubordinate - efforts of McNulty the Barksdale investigation is able to maintain enough of an impact-oriented focus to ultimately put the organization’s leader, Avon Barksdale, behind bars at the end of the first season. However, rather than being a celebration of investigative success, the message that Simon focuses on in wrapping up the first season is how their different approaches affect McNulty and Rawls in terms of their careers. McNulty, because of his blind, passionate focus on impact, ends up getting professionally sidelined out of Homocide and into a dead end job with the Marine Unit. Rawls, because of his obsessive focus on optics and the "chain of command” ends up getting promoted to Colonel.

What’s the parallel to USAID-funded development programs?

To answer that question we need to start the same way ... by defining optics and impact in the appropriate context. I'll define them in the context of a typical private sector development initiative:

Optics is defined by the extent to which activities undertaken, and decisions made, by USAID and/or its implementing partners convince the US Congress - and the American People - that the Agency is extending a useful helping hand to the developing world, thereby perpetuating public support for both the Agency and the broader political administration.   

Impact is defined by the extent to which activities undertaken, and decisions made, by USAID and/or its implementing partners actually enable or effect a sustainable increase in sales, employment, investment and/or exports, thereby positively influencing a country's trajectory of economic growth and its standard of living. 

As in the case of Baltimore law enforcement, these are unfortunately not the same thing for highly politicized international development activities ... at least not as often as we’d like.

I’m sure everyone can recall experiences where the conflict between optics and impact has manifest in your development work. And I’ll bet that in most of those cases there were folks like Rawls that pushed for a focus on optics, and in some of them there were folks like McNulty that pushed for a focus on impact. And I bet most of the time the folks like Rawls have fared better than the folks like McNulty.

I have a lot of great examples from my own experience that I would love to write about in order to advance our industry’s collective capacity to recognize and deal effectively with the OvI challenge in the context of international development programs. The problem is that our industry is in a situation where we really can’t write about a lot of our experiences, regardless of how constructive our intentions may be.  Our industry is under so much scrutiny these days that any effort to write about our experiences with the objective of learning and sharing knowledge can end up being counterproductive. In this kind of environment even the most well intentioned efforts to reflect and learn get turned into cannon fodder for the folks that want to cut AID funding.  So, in terms of really learning and growing as an industry, we’ve often got our hands tied behind our backs ... we’ve got to be creative.

One of the ways that I’ve tried to deal with this in past blog posts is by abstracting some of my real experiences into hypothetical situations. And in fact two of my previous hypothetical examples were focused largely on how I’ve experienced the challenge of OvI in the private sector development context. In the post Get Naked I wrote about it in the context of a hypothetical rehabilitation grant program for farmers in Africa that gets pressured to unwisely accelerate spending in order to get the optics right. And, in the post Unplug The Blender I wrote about it in the context of a hypothetical value chain R&D activity that succumbs to pressure to scale up too quickly in order to get the optics right.  One of the key points in both of these hypothetical scenarios was to show how development impact can suffer when we’re too focused on the optics.

If anyone hasn’t realized this already, I’ve got a lot more in common with McNulty than Rawls.  That is one of the main reasons that I started writing this blog ... trying to figure out how we as practitioners can get more latitude and support to focus on real development impact. There have been more occasions in my career than I care to remember where my approach has been so blindly impact-oriented that I've ended up in situations like those that McNulty experiences on The Wire. In fact, my friends have joked that a lot of the wisdom that I’ve managed to extract from The Wire was enabled by my own experience as the Jimmy McNulty of International Development.

So what wisdom do I have to share with you?  Stay tuned.

- DS

All in the Game, Yo

I’m still amazed when I meet people that have never watched HBO’s “The Wire.” After all, this is the show that critics claim is the best drama in the history of television ... a show that has actually been cited as a literary masterpiece meriting comparison with the works of Dickens and Dostoevsky.

Actually, I think the best endorsement of the show that I ever read was from an anonymous person posting to the iTunes Store who wrote: "If I was a high school civics teacher I would make every student I could watch every hour of this show. To the ‘infotainment’ generation, it could be a wonderful tool to make young people learn to take a second look around and not confuse the perception of functionality with what actually works.”

The fact is, anyone that knows me well knows that I’m a huge fan of “The Wire”.  Why do I feel so strongly about it? Because The Wire provides us with an unparalleled portrayal of all the complex challenges that we confront working on USAID-funded development programs these days.

In this new blog series that I’m kicking off today I’ll be exploring some of these complex challenges, describing how I’ve watched them manifest in USAID's development programs, and reflecting on some of the most important lessons that I think we can take away from the show ... and apply to our work as the Agency’s implementing partners.

But before I dive in to the specifics I’d like to explain why I believe the challenges we all face doing USAID funded-development work today are so similar to the challenges that Baltimore law enforcement officials were confronting in The Wire.

One of the things that television critics often laud about The Wire is the intimacy involved in the show’s portrayal of the inner workings of Baltimore law enforcement. Whenever David Simon, the show’s producer, is asked about this he attributes it to the fact that he worked for The Baltimore Sun newspaper as city reporter for over ten years and spent the majority of his time at the paper covering the crime beat.  He further explains that his tenure on the crime beat at the Baltimore Sun happened to overlap with two significant changes that he believes tore the soul out of the Baltimore Police Department.

Significant Change #1

The first important change Simon witnessed while working at the Sun was a dramatic reduction in the capacity of the Baltimore Police Department, something Simon traces back to the War on Drugs. He argues that federal sentencing reforms in the mid 1980s, and a series of subsequent local measures, caused a radical change in the incentive system driving police behavior in Baltimore. Specifically, according to Simon, it created a new environment “where good investigation went unrewarded and where rounding up bodies for street dealing, drug possession, and loitering – the easiest and most self-evident arrests a cop can make – became the path to enlightenment, promotion and additional pay.”

While Simon spent a fair amount of screen time in The Wire depicting the immediate consequences of the drug war era’s new incentive system, his real objective was to illustrate the longer-term consequence ... the fact that the Baltimore Police Department essentially stopped teaching its police how to do real police work. As Simon later explained “so you fail to reward the cop who actually does police work ... who do you think gets made sergeant? And then who trains the next generation of cops in how not to do police work?” As The Wire shows us over and over, there is a real skill set involved in doing good investigative police work. Unfortunately, because the Baltimore Police Department spent a decade promoting people into leadership roles without those skills, eventually the skills largely disappeared within the Department.

Significant Change #2

The second important change that Simon witnessed was a sharp increase in expectations of the Baltimore Police Department. Simon attributes the dramatic shift in expectations to Martin O’Malley (Baltimore’s mayor from 1999 to 2007) and his grandiose political aspirations.

Given the state of the Baltimore Police Department when O’Malley became mayor, the kinds of crime reductions he needed to become a credible gubernatorial candidate were virtually impossible. Immediately after he became Baltimore’s mayor O'Malley realized that he had to come up with a different approach to get the kinds of crime numbers he needed to become Governor. As Simon later recounted, "and so there were people from City Hall who walked over to {the police commissioner} and made it clear to the district commanders that crime was going to fall by some astonishing rates. Eventually, {they} got fed up with the interference from City Hall and walked, and then more malleable police commissioners followed, until indeed, the crime rate fell dramatically. On paper."

I have gone through a lot of what Simon has written and said about The Wire and Baltimore politics. One thing that has become clear is that neither of the two significant changes, by themselves, could have caused what happened. What happened in Baltimore was a result of both changes happening - in the order they occurred. Remember that the dramatic reduction in the Baltimore Police Department’s law enforcement capacity started in the mid 1980s; by the late 1990s the department had essentially been gutted. Mayor O’Malley started setting unrealistic expectations when he took office in 1999 ... and the first season of The Wire aired three years later in 2002.

Here’s the takeaway. Every form of public service is vulnerable to the kinds of challenges that are depicted in The Wire. To some degree the challenges are universal. Under certain circumstances, however, there is a real threat that the challenges start getting out of control. The specific circumstances that we need to watch out for are (1) A dramatic decline in workforce capacity, followed by (2) A sharp increase in expectations.

Where else have we seen a one-two punch like this happen?

Consider this Foreign Policy article from 2015 that asked a poignant question: "Why is the United States letting its best foreign aid tool fall apart?" In that article the authors argued that "USAID’s capacity is on the cusp of crisis: Its staff is divided between veterans who are aging out and greenhorns, with too few in the middle. From the standpoint of national capacity, America has a development donut.” A closer look at the data is pretty sobering. According to the article 50% of USAID’s workforce is now past retirement age, and 35% have less than 5 years of experience. And this “cavity” in USAID’s workforce isn’t getting any better. The Foreign Policy article claims that the cavity is actually growing larger every year because a lot of the most promising, younger leaders in USAID's workforce are opting not to stay.

In 2010 the Obama Administration issued a policy directive on global development (PPD #6). It  got a lot of people’s attention because it was the first time that International Development had ever been the subject of a Presidential Policy Directive. Secretary of State Clinton followed PPD #6 with the first ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR). And then USAID Administrator Rajeev Shah turned the expectations needle up another several dozen clicks with the announcement of a planned transformation of the Agency based on a new operating model and absolute demand for results. It’s hard to imagine a sharper increase in expectations than what we’ve watched since 2010.

In short, we had a dramatic decline in the capacity of USAID's workforce, followed by a sharp increase in expectations. So it should be no surprise that embarrasing things like this started popping up in the news:

At a 2011 congressional hearing, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform national security subcommittee, listed some of the USAID's success claims on Iraq: “262,482 individuals reportedly benefited from medical supplies that were purchased to treat only 100 victims of a specific attack; 22 individuals attended a 5-day mental health course, yet 1.5 million were reported as beneficiaries; 123,000 were reported as benefiting from water and well activities that did not produce potable water; and 280,000 were reported as benefiting from $14,246 spent to rehabilitate a morgue.”

and this ...

A 2013 Congressional Research Service report lamented that many AID staffers are “defensive … concerned that evaluations identifying poor program results may have personal career implications, such as loss of control over a project, damage to professional reputation, budget cuts, or other potential career repercussions.”

and this ...

The Agency for International Development (AID), the largest foreign-aid bureaucracy, was caught last week {September 2014} massively suppressing audit reports revealing waste, fraud and abuse. More than 400 negative findings were deleted from a sample of 12 draft audit reports, The Washington Post reported. In one case, more than 90 percent of the negative findings were expunged before the report was publicly released. Acting Inspector General Michael Carroll buried the embarrassing audit findings because he “did not want to create controversy as he awaited Senate confirmation to become the permanent inspector general”

We don’t talk about it very much in the open, but behind closed doors nobody in our industry denies that we have a problem. Of course there are still some really good projects being implemented that we’re all familiar with, but the collective level of frustration is palpable and it’s building; the situation is not sustainable.

I don't think it's too late to reverse course. It is going to require a new generation of leadership with genuine interest in - and unwavering commitment to - doing real development; with enough patience to persevere. I think what we need is already out there. Based on what I've seen the last few years I believe the millennials can bring new life to the Agency. In them, I see light at the end of the tunnel.   

It is going to take time, but I am convinced there is a new spirit emerging that we can all harness to turn this situation around. We just need to acknowledge the problems and commit ourselves to address them. And The Wire can help us do it ... because its all in the game, yo! 

- DS

Next Up .... Optics vs. Impact