Learning From the Octopus

by Rafe Sagarin

  But Hurricane Katrina also stripped bare the more subtle and less appreciated ways in which we fail to capitalize on free security strategies from nature. Much of the trauma to New Orleans residents occurred after the storm passed, when it became clear that the emergency response systems we had been obsessively developing and reorganizing after 9/11 were not working at all. One of the most repeated questions in the aftermath of Katrina was “Where was FEMA?” referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which was ostensibly in charge of disaster relief efforts. Because it is a bureaucracy, the best way to find FEMA is by looking at the “org” chart of its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security (see Figure 2, page 70).

  When you finally find FEMA (Hint: it is the box with the dashed outline) you can see that it is literally buried in a huge stack of blocks, all representing their own enormous bureaucracies—such as the Coast Guard and TSA—all required to run decisions up the chain of command to the Secretary of Homeland Security, and, consequently, all vying for the secretary’s attention.

  An organization like this might work fine in carrying out a planned set of tasks that continue routinely day after day. It’s like an early circuit board with a finite number of pathways through which the energy of decision-making can pass. But as I’ve argued, security problems are security problems precisely because they are not routine—they are highly variable and unpredictable. If one of the organizations inside one of those boxes needs to do something completely different than normal—as FEMA needed to after Katrina—it has little recourse to do so.

  That’s not to say that some organizations didn’t demonstrate some amazing responses to Katrina. The U.S. Maritime Administration, a branch of the Department of Transportation that maintains a fleet of ships as well as contracts with multiple vessel owners to make vessels available during wars and national emergencies, quickly set up shipboard spaces that the various security agencies used as command centers.8 And, of course, many individuals within all of the agencies, as well as individual citizens, improvised all sorts of effective responses to the hurricane. These were exceptional cases, and like the adaptable soldiers in Iraq and the passengers on United Flight 93, they learned quickly to do the best they could with the resources they had. What we would like to know is, how were they able to adapt so quickly, and is their adaptability something we can replicate without having to wait for the next disaster to bring it out?

  Figure 2: Organizational chart of the Department of Homeland Security

  Source: Compiled by US Senate Budget Committee Staff, Friday, November 15, 2002

  PIONEERS OF DECENTRALIZED ORGANIZATION

  It is often assumed that the stack of boxes leading to one central controller is the natural and inevitable way an organization develops. And people working within such an organization often assume that there is no way to change that system of organization without destroying the entire organization itself. The first assumption is, in fact, completely false, as proven by most successful biological organizations on Earth. And challenging the second assumption, which is beginning to happen in societal organizations throughout the world, is the key to turning nonadaptable organizations like the DHS, as well as the Department of Defense, discussed in the prologue, into adaptive organisms that learn from changes in the environment, react quickly to them, and ultimately keep us safer. Fortunately, pioneering individuals and organizations around the world are providing us living proof of how adaptable we can be, even in a world of stacked boxes and organizational charts.

  Captain Douglas Cullins, a straight-talking U.S. Marine who from an outside perspective would appear to be some kind of new hybrid fighting organism—combining the stock-straight posture, reverence for tradition, and win-at-all-costs attitude of a good marine with an obsessive desire to continually adapt to whatever is thrown his way on the battlefield—recently briefed a group of academic scientists and military analysts on what he and his marines did to adapt to a combat environment in Ramadi, Iraq, that was far different than what any marine had seen before.

  Cullins and his marines didn’t adapt immediately, but over the course of several tours that saw every kind of fighting and vacillated from infuriatingly quiet to shockingly violent, they realized that they were fighting a war they hadn’t been perfectly trained for. While they knew that their “kinetic” (now termed lethal) fighting ability—the firepower and combat training they all possessed—was their best asset, it became clear that Iraq called for something completely different: electricity, water infrastructure, schools, road projects, and safe places for government meetings. Becoming a marine company that provided these things was especially hard for eighteen- and nineteen-year-old warfighters who may have just seen their best buddy killed by a roadside bomb to accept, so Captain Cullins laid out their options in terms they could clearly understand. “You’ve got to understand that marines, more than anything, want to win,” Cullins says, “so I let my marines know that if we were going to win this kind of battle, we had to adapt.”9 Part of this adaptation was simple posture—walking through town in a relaxed way, with guns shouldered and impact glasses down so people could see the eyes of the Americans. Most adaptations undertaken by Cullins’s company had little to do with fighting and everything to do with learning about and understanding a different culture’s modes of communication and specific needs. Cullins completely reorganized his company’s structure and modified its mission to suit the environment. His heavy weapons platoons and sniper teams were given tasks that, in addition to providing security and hunting down insurgents, included a deliberate mapping of Ramadi’s essential services infrastructure. Blown power transformers, clogged sewers, and empty fuel storage sites quickly became critical information. His lieutenants and senior enlisted were given great latitude in identifying problems and implementing solutions. Beg, borrow, “acquire,” or leverage, his marines were given the mission to get the city up and running. The results came quickly once the marines made the shift in mindset. They quickly “leveraged” the local populace’s expertise and spent countless hours repairing the damage caused by years of brutal fighting. Most civilians did so willingly; the few holdouts were subjected to a low-level “shame and humiliation campaign” designed to let the local populace know which of their leaders were refusing to fix the problems, with a picture and home address of the holdout posted on street corners. Cullins quickly learned that rival or peer pressure was often the most effective approach when trying to make a point with this population. I asked Captain Cullins if he inquired above his rank for permission to breach military protocol in this way. He chuckled slightly and conspiratorially admitted, “No, we kind of learned not to ask for permission until after a good idea worked out.” He continued, “The trick was modifying the marines’ mindset while retaining a simple rule that they could appreciate: be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”

  Before Hollywood gets any ideas, I should note that Cullins wasn’t some renegade commander, brashly defying orders to triumph in his small corner of the war. U.S. Marines are trained to operate with mission-type orders and given an end-state, termed the Commander’s Intent; how subordinates accomplish the mission is up to them. Indeed, most marine companies in Iraq were adapting in similar ways—using the observational skills of their marines to determine that the battlefield was much different than the one they were told would exist, trying out a wide variety of solutions, and sharing their stories of success and failure with other companies via satellite calls and e-mail. They didn’t wait for the next edition of the Department of Defense counter-insurgency manual to be revised, printed, and handed out; they just adapted. Captain Cullins, who was promoted to the rank of major soon after the conference, is currently serving as a faculty advisor at the Marine Corps Expeditionary Warfare School. There he has the opportunity to teach future company commanders his particular form of operational adaptation.

  But can the actions of a few clever individuals scale up to the le
vel of the organization itself? As a biologist who has witnessed the nested quality of adaptable biological systems, I am convinced that such scaling up is the natural inclination of organizations. Practically every living organism is a scaled-up version of an early working prototype molecule that was driven to reproduce itself. We ourselves are also scaled-up success stories, whose every cell contains a copy of that early four-letter narrative form known as DNA.

  Although I’ve highlighted failures to scale-up adaptability in our institutions, there are in fact many emerging examples of successful, decentralized models of organization. Small bottom-up organizations around the world are rapidly becoming far more effective at promoting environment protection and social justice than the huge centralized and much better funded nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and governments.10 Businessman and social activist Paul Hawken likens this growing network of local organizations to an immune system, in that it is widely distributed yet connected, and grows larger not for its own sake but through the process of local populations seeing additional needs and replicating their successful efforts.11

  Decentralized organizations reveal how truly adaptable they are when pitted against an organization still tenaciously holding on to the old model of central control. In their business book The Starfish and the Spider, Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom chronicle the struggles of traditional centralized business models in competing with new distributed networks of competitors. For example, highly decentralized music file sharing networks—typically run by college students on hundreds or thousands of independent machines that are constantly changing—have been shockingly successful at eluding the copyright protection efforts of the much better funded and highly centralized Recording Industry Association of America.12

  Infectious disease is a security problem ripe for decentralized solutions. Emerging diseases often strike first far from medical facilities and far from large centralized aid organizations. They tend to hit poor communities with few monetary or medical resources. They also tend to mutate rapidly, meaning that solutions need to be custom tailored to the disease and the environmental conditions in which it arises. Early detection of emerging infectious diseases is essential. But it can’t be done from the Centers for Disease Control headquarters in Atlanta or the UN headquarters in New York. These diseases turn deadly to humans when a virus from a not distantly related mammal mutates so that it can infect people. The first point of contact between the newly mutated disease and humans is often in places where people still hunt daily for a living. The close contact with the freshly killed animal provides ample opportunity for a still-living virus to leap into its newly available human host. This is why Nathan Wolfe’s plan for stopping the spread of new infectious diseases doesn’t involve a team of doctors mapping outbreaks from afar. By the time new diseases are visible to most health programs, and they marshal the resources to respond, it’s too late. Rather, through Wolfe’s Global Viral Forecasting Initiative he turns the hunters into their own disease monitors, having them collect blood samples in the field and report outbreaks to the forecasting network.13 Other networks of disease spotters are emerging using online wiki tools that allow users to add sites of disease outbreaks to online maps. Even those without an Internet connection can report to disease networks with cell phones, which are increasingly common even in poor and remote locations.14

  These strategies don’t just apply to raggedy bands of activists or altruistic health practitioners. Internet giant Google has thrived on a decentralized model in which even low-level managers are given a high degree of autonomy to develop new ideas15 and billions of users on the Internet are incorporated as selective agents to test the ideas. Google’s products themselves reflect the value of independent sensors. For years now, Google has been quietly testing Google Flu Trends, an application that tracks users’ “Googling” words associated with the flu, such as “flu symptoms,” “flu remedies,” “flu vaccines,” and so forth. These billions of users show clear patterns of search that are well correlated with actual flu outbreaks. By looking retrospectively over the past four years, Google analysts found that Google Flu perfectly matched the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) official flu tracking, which is based on doctor and hospital survey data returned to the CDC, with one major difference. The decentralized Google Flu provided data on outbreaks two weeks faster than the centralized CDC data.16 When it comes to the rapidly mutating flu virus, two weeks’ advance notice could easily be the difference between a mild nuisance and a global pandemic. And should a pandemic occur, it’s worth noting that most of the 40–100 million deaths from the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic occurred in a sixteen-week period, with up to a million deaths per week worldwide and 10,000 deaths per week within individual U.S. cities17—every week counts.

  FEAR OF A DECENTRALIZED PLANET

  The successes of octopuses and coral reefs, law-breaking music file sharers, and business giants like Google can all be replicated at every level of security analysis, planning, and practice in society. When discussing this radical idea of decentralized organization with people ensconced in highly centralized organizations, I try to reassure them with the dictum “Have an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out.”18 That is to say, I’m not advocating a completely independent set of decision makers randomly going around doing different things. For all its decentralized camouflage and shape shifting, an octopus is still an octopus. An immune system still serves a body that is identifiable as a given species. And Google is still a company with a corporate image and a goal to make profits.

  To be more blunt, before we rip up our org charts and depose all our leaders, all those highly distributed sensors and rapid responders do pretty poorly when left completely to their own devices. Decentralized agents will provide a lot of what is needed, but three critical ingredients must be added to a completely independent network to make it an adaptable organization. First, it must be built around a challenge. In natural systems, that challenge is simply to survive and reproduce. There are likely to be sub-challenges beneath that, such as to live through a long cold winter, or to find water during a drought. The challenge takes all the varied energy of the independent agents and provides direction. Imagine a centipede where each individual leg just went wherever it wanted, whenever it wanted—it would be pretty comical, but not very well adapted. Second, it needs resources that are made available to the decentralized units to solve the problem. In animals, this could be a body to safely house all those nerve cells, or a mouth to feed them, or an alpha pack leader among social animals that organizes their hunting. For human groups, money is always nice, but sometimes the necessary resource is recognition, publicity, prestige, or career advancement. Sometimes it is a trusted place, like a well-respected foundation or well-known organization, that will attract and store resources that can be then distributed to the most adaptable and successful agents. Third, there needs to be some filter on all the information that comes back from many independent sensors. Even a fabulous array of astute sensors may bring back a lot of information that isn’t very relevant to our needs and end up wasting just as many resources as a stodgy, completely centrally controlled bureaucracy. Scientists have recently discovered immune system molecules, unexpectedly, in the delicate neural architecture of mammalian brains. Elsewhere in the body, these “search and destroy” molecules run around freely to identify and neutralize invaders. In the brain, however, these molecules apparently serve as regulators to prevent too many neural connections from being made, which would overwhelm our sensory systems.19 Lack of these regulators may explain the sensory overload experienced by those with schizophrenia and autism. So, in all systems some selective mechanism is needed—a way to rate and prioritize information coming in; this is best done when it relates directly to the central challenge.

  After 9/11, al-Qaeda, though widely the object of hatred, was also respected for its organizational structure. Security analysts noted how it functioned as a semi-autonomous network of cells
that could quickly shed units without compromising the whole organization. All of the 9/11 hijackers, for example, had very little contact with one another, although they shared a common mission and received resources from the central organization.20

  More recently, however, al-Qaeda has lost its effectiveness. Marc Sageman, who has studied terrorist networks from the ground up, carefully mapping their components, relationships, and changes, has shown that swinging or being pushed too far toward a decentralized system can greatly reduce the influence of an organization. He has found that within the past few years, with key al-Qaeda leaders killed, captured, or pursued into hiding, the movement has evolved into what he calls a “leaderless jihad,” still wildly popular with disaffected Islamic youth looking to fight a heroic battle with the West, but far less capable of carrying out terrorist actions. As Sageman notes:Without the possibility of a physical presence or ability to negotiate with its enemies, the social movement is condemned to stay a leaderless jihad, an aspiration, but not a physical reality. Finally, al Qaeda has not been able to forge any state allies that might protect it against Western aggression. Without a viable and effective sanctuary, it cannot fully regroup and consolidate into a physical power capable of capturing some territory in order to establish its utopia.21