Jeremi Suri

As I look around the world, I see a series of challenges that require an extraordinary combination of political skill and scholarly insight. Take the debt woes in Greece, Portugal, and perhaps Spain. These are countries that are living beyond their means. How can we move them, and the European Union as a whole, to recalibrate their societies to maintain social-market humanism in affordable and sustainable ways? To even begin to answer this question, one needs access to deep research on economy, sociology, and history. One also needs the political instincts of a Bismarck, a Metternich, or a Talleyrand to sell a viable new solution across an anxious European landscape.

Similar things could be said about nuclear proliferation and environmental degradation. To get a handle on both issues and understand root problems, one requires deep knowledge of physics, biology, political science, and game theory. Political negotiations surrounding arms control and climate change are tortuous, complex, and unpredictable. Here again, the successful strategist will need intellectual insight and political prudence.

In theory, modern bureaucracies are designed to bring all of these specializations and skills together. In practice, they do nothing of the sort. Every large bureauracy that I have studied (from the EU and the United States to modern corporations and world-class universities) produces fragmentation, specialization, and cross-area rivalry. In particular, the knowledge producers are rarely connected to the policy actors. The people who research understand very little about how big policy decisions are made. The people who make policy decisions understand very little about the research behind their decisions. Think, for example, of the paltry interchange between those who set education policy and those who actually educate in our societies. Or, even more startling, look at the gap between those who make war and those who actually fight war.

The time has come to reinvent bureauracy and the organization of knowledge for policy purposes. Here are three hypotheses to ponder:

1. We need to create more cross-field literacy and less specialization in our best educated young people. The most effective leaders need to know how to ask the right questions, and whom to ask.

2. We need more small institutions, not fewer big institutions. Size is often a disadvantage. It creates more complex lines of communication, more fragmentation, more separation. Cooperation requires sustained conversation. That occurs best in small communities.

3. We need to stop our search for simple answers with quick solutions. Nothing worth doing is accomplished in a short time frame. We need more patience. We need more willingness to invest in the long-term. We need to make more short-term sacrifices in the present for the future.

Our contemporary challenges are great, but so are the collective capabilities of the most advanced societies. The problem is not brains or money or strength. The problem is organization. The problem is that we are not doing enough to bring knowledge into the service of policy. Producers of knowledge and makers of policy must devise new ways to work together.

This post originally appeared on http://globalbrief.ca