Gospels of Failure

Here, then, was the world's only superpower being threatened by a fanatical, remote, bootstrapped organization. Forgive the analogy, but that sounds remarkably like the innovative startups we know from the business world. Think Napster and the recording industry, or Linux and Microsoft. The 9/11 Commission report may call this "cultural asymmetry"; it also sounds a lot like the concept of disruptive innovation.

Yet cultural asymmetry is just one of the commission's powerful ideas about the failure of imagination. Perhaps the most startling is the concept of "institutionalizing imagination": "It is therefore crucial," the commission writes, "to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination."

Bureaucratize imagination? Could this be the most oxymoronic statement ever made? Not really. "We don't mean, 'Okay, guys, let's all join hands and be more imaginative,' " says Gorelick, the former 9/11 Commissioner. "You don't really institutionalize imagination." Rather, she says, "you put in place systems that allow the imagination that's naturally occurring to actually break through."

The commission's report proposes a process for doing so. It sounds a lot like scenario planning, a common business process that provides a framework for imagining multiple potential futures. Although the intelligence community had analyzed possible surprise attacks for years, these methods were not used consistently. The Counterterrorist Center did not perform "red team" analyses from the enemy's perspective that likely would have predicted the use of airplanes in suicide attacks. Nor did it develop indicators for monitoring this kind of attack -- or potential defenses against it.

Even if your organization is already using scenario planning, leaders tend to focus on the probable rather than the disruptive. "Every president wants one scenario," says Peter Schwartz, whose firm, Global Business Network, has done scenario planning with everyone from Ford Motor Co. to, well, the CIA. "In every situation, it's tell me what will happen. When you ask that question, it forces the intelligence community to come up with one most likely scenario. And the most likely scenario in every situation is more of the same." To get top management to listen to more than one outcome, Schwartz psychologically tricks them by presenting the most credible outcome first. "If you don't give them that scenario first, then they will reject everything until they hear the scenario they already believe in," he says.

Trying to imagine future scenarios -- without the right framework or expertise -- can, of course, turn bewildering. A more manageable approach, says Karl Weick, a professor at the University of Michigan Business School and the author of Managing the Unexpected (Jossey-Bass, 2001), is to think backward from a potential outcome, which will surface the events that could create it. Weick suggests using the future perfect tense ("By next quarter, we will have lost our biggest customer") as a simple but disciplined way of imagining what could happen. "It anchors you in the future," he says.

That exercise is exactly what Clarke urged Rice, with eerie prescience, to do in his September 4 missive. "Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the [Counterterrorism Security Group] has not succeeded in stopping al Qida attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the U.S.," Clarke wrote. "What would those decision makers wish that they had done earlier?"

Culture

Disturbing the Perfect Place

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) spent the 1960s, quite literally, shooting for the moon. The seemingly impossible successes it achieved during the Apollo era made it a symbol of human accomplishment, establishing a remarkable "can do" culture. But even as the mission of NASA changed, and its goals shifted from man-on-the-moon triumphs to routine shuttle operations, the early glories held fast. NASA had become a "perfect place," wrote Yale professor Garry Brewer back in 1989. In such cultures, he wrote, the ability to listen to dissent requires "the shock of heavy cannon."

Somehow, even the Challenger disaster of 1986 was not heavy enough. Then, early on the morning of February 1, 2003, the Columbia shuttle exploded over the piney woods of East Texas. The physical cause for the accident may have been a piece of foam debris that struck the shuttle's left wing just seconds after launch, but that wasn't the only problem. "In our view," writes the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) in its report, "the NASA organizational culture had as much to do with this accident as the foam."