by Marco Alberti, Ambassador of Italy to Albania
Digitalization is reshaping the Public Administration in both policy-making and service delivery. Data revolution helps governments meet public expectations and become more efficient and resilient, improving their performance. Yet, while accelerating the innovation of public sector, the deployment of digital technologies brings another key-challenge: speed.
Speed is the new currency
Speed has become a strategic factor, because it is linked to innovation, which is the driving force of digital society. Ensuring speed and agility leads to superior performance. “Speed is the new currency,” says Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce. Sycamore, Google’s quantum processor, takes a few minutes to process as many as calculations that a common laptop would do in 10,000 years. In the international relations domain, the ability to respond quickly to volatile, unpredictable circumstances has become a critical factor for defining the new balance of power, and perhaps for defining the same concepts of influence and power.
Unlike in the past, diplomacy and international affairs can no longer afford to slowly adapt to changes, as their pace demands almost business-like agility to stay abreast and relevant. Data technologies, and especially generative AI, are changing the mechanisms that regulate international relations, bringing continuous innovation and growing speed. Consequently, they will affect all diplomatic activities: from geopolitical analysis to negotiation; from support to export and internationalization of companies to consular services. The need to adopt data-driven models in order to manage political, institutional and economic pressures raises the bar and stretches diplomacy. On one hand, technology is expanding the sphere of diplomatic competence, with multiple and diverse calls for action; on the other hand, increasingly shorter action/reaction time is requested to face circumstances and perform well. In such digitized context, the main challenge for diplomacy consists in combining two kinds of “intelligence”: the contextual one, i.e. the ability to understand the context, leveraging on-the-ground presence and powerful multi-stakeholder networks of diplomats, with the artificial one, i.e. the ability to exploit and optimize the increasing power of data and algorithms.
Key factors to be fast: throughput and latency
The primary objective for diplomacy is to unlock public value through greater efficiency and improved performance. In digital contexts, reaching out to such goals mostly depends on speed, which, in turn, is the result of multiple variables. Two of them, similarly to what happens in IT systems, are essential to work faster and increase productivity: throughput and latency.
Throughput
The throughput indicates the maximum capacity of a system to support the workload in a due unit of time. In information technology, this variable is measured in queries or bytes per second. By analogy, the throughput of diplomacy consists of the ability of central and peripheral structures to absorb the requests received, and carry out the various tasks, in a given time. Speed includes the ability to deliver new or highly appropriate content, with no delay. When a system is overloaded, that is, it receives more “queries” than it can handle, it becomes slow and loses efficiency. If it is not possible, to reduce loads or, alternatively, to increase resources, a viable solution to restore speed is a load balancing among servers. The same concept applies to organizations. Overloading people or teams, even if they can handle it, reduces efficiency and is detrimental to the organization outcome. Dividing tasks maximizes skills and knowledge of each individual, with positive impact on the working capacity (and speed) of the whole organization. Another solution is diversifying peoples’ professional experience. Being skilled to do something, helps do it better and faster. Innovation communities and cross-functional teams, as well as “off-career” job experiences, make the diplomats’ expertise multidisciplinary, and diversify the spectrum of their skills, with positive effects on workload capacity, executive speed and quality of performance.
Latency
Latency indicates how quickly a system responds to stimuli. More precisely, in the IT field, latency measures the interval between the moment the input is sent and the moment the output is available. When a server is so much loaded that its latency exceeds the so-called “user timeout”, i.e. the maximum time the user is willing to wait before reacting, requests begin to fail, with negative impact on efficiency and reputation. According to a recent survey, 47% of online consumers demand that a web page replies in less than 4 seconds before abandoning it[1]. In computer systems, latency is improved by increasing the bandwidth, i.e. the support infrastructure. To provide quality services, the bandwidth must be broad, which means able to allow transmission and reception of data at a connection speed faster than 2Mbit/s. The same for diplomacy. The widespread presence of embassies and consulates throughout the world grants public diplomacy the geographical proximity essential to collect, transmit and manage big data, minimizing the action/reaction time of its structures. However, to be efficient, diplomacy 5.0 must have its “broadband”, which consists of technological architecture and human resources skilled enough to manage digitalized processes, leveraging on data to design and execute strategies. The challenge posed by data-driven models, hence, does not only concern updating certain tools and infrastructures, but also (and maybe above all) designing advanced skilling, upskilling and re-skilling processes.
The correlation between speed and leadership
Speed is the combination of doing things fast and right. Effective leaders are able to plan and execute with speed, because they are quick without being sloppy. A study carried out by Zenger and Folkman finds that in 95% of cases the quality of leadership refers to the speed shown by leaders in spotting problems, learning, anticipating scenarios, pro-acting or re-acting to circumstances[2]. Digitalization, and especially AI, can empower people, but only if leaders take a broad view of their capabilities and deeply consider the implications of applying technologies to the organization. To promote innovation in public and private organizations (including diplomacy) is a foremost accountability of leaders; it should push them to reflect not only on the potential factors that make innovation work, but also on the organizational and contextual factors that prevent innovation from achieving its outcomes. In such perspective, the correlation between (transformational) leadership and speed relies on three main nexus. The first nexus is speed/style of leadership. A rigid pyramid-like top-down management attitude is too slow to keep the quick pace of digitalization, while a shift to an open, more flexible leadership style can bring performance from average to excellence. Today, rather than control, leaders should provide ability of designing and redesigning creative and collaborative relationships within teams, useful for creating value. The second nexus is speed/competence. As skills grow and improve in quality, the speed of planning and executing strategies increases, while mistakes and inefficiencies reduce. The answer to an increasingly complex, multidisciplinary and dynamic international environment, therefore, relies on an increasingly agile, fast and competent leadership. This rule applies to every kind of profession, and diplomacy is no exception. The last nexus refers to trust. Within an organization, be it public or private, low levels of trust inevitably slow down processes and generate high operating costs. Conversely, a work environment based on mutual trust encourages the devolution of power and accountability, speeding up processes and reducing costs. Building trust is functional to creating value, and, therefore, it is a leadership imperative.
Big vision, small steps: speeding-up a data-driven diplomacy
Digital and data technologies accelerate the shift towards a data-driven paradigm. Even foreign policy strategies depend every day more on the (systematic) collection and (analytical) reading of massive amounts of data. While digital diplomacy is how diplomats use some digital tools to perform their activity, data-driven diplomacy refers to “turning bytes into insights”, which means understanding how data is challenging (and changing) the traditional way to conduct diplomacy. The UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, for example, created the FCDO Labs, to develop the skills required for consolidating data-driven models in foreign policy. The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs established internal “Big Data Units”, made up of professionals specialized in the analysis and systematization of data, to make it accessible to diplomats and policy-makers. The U.S. Department of State launched the first-ever Enterprise Data Strategy (EDS), to empower its global workforce with the tools and skills to use data as a critical instrument of diplomacy.
McKinsey latest research estimates that generative AI has the potential to create value equivalent to $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion in global corporate profits annually[3]. Almost every Government, large company and organization in the world is working to outline an AI strategy, because it enables to harness the power of data and to unlock new possibilities. In just a short time, indeed, the focus has shifted from digital technologies to data and from data to the technologies capable of creating and processing it, i.e. generative artificial intelligence. Such automated systems help simulate scenarios and predict the evolution of trends, but, in so doing, they also contribute to accelerate the operational speed. In the first round of Iranian nuclear negotiations, the US Department of Energy used AI applications to build the replica of an Iranian nuclear site, foreseeing evolutions of uranium enrichment. According to trustworthy sources[4], within five years the AI systems will be able to manage 100 trillion parameters, with deep transformative impacts on any domain of human action.
To keep the pace and stay relevant, diplomacy should integrate the value-laden judgment of diplomats with data-driven insights, combining contextual and artificial intelligence. The former allows diplomats to acquire deeper knowledge and tacit wisdom, which often remain beyond the reach of algorithms, and adapt that knowledge to real world scenarios. The latter augments the output of diplomacy, including ability to predict, pro-act or re-act in real time to various circumstances. Excessive faith in data would lead diplomacy to serious mistakes, but keeping diplomacy completely away from data would risk to limit, or even to disrupt, it.
Adapting a data-driven model, built for flexibility and high speed, to public diplomacy is a complex process. Some steps to mitigate it are the following: a) defining a data-driven vision for diplomacy, based on a measurable, target-oriented and time-bound action plan; b) outlining a tech-forward strategy, which consists not simply of updating some software and tools, but building a strong foundational “digital core” for diplomacy, able to integrate data, AI and other technologies. Such evolution would allow creating large-scale information systems and interoperability both among diplomatic structures and between them and other Ministries or Institutions. For example, between Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Ministries of Defense, that are quickly progressing in the application of AI to the national security and the warfare, or even between public and private sector; c) breaking the “big vision into small steps”[5]. If conceived in a bigger vision, realistic shorter-term goals and manageable subtasks help build momentum, overcome procrastination and get faster to the desired goal.
Conclusions
For Milan Kundera, speed is the ecstasy offered to human kind by the technological revolution. Human inclination is to go faster and faster. This fact has boosted progress, but it has also generated concerns. Besides ethical questions, for example, the rise of generative AI has a deep (and still partially unknown) impact on security, on both physical and cyber sides. Furthermore, speed overstresses the structural weaknesses of people, organizations and even of national States, enhancing social paradoxes and environmental costs. The ICT sector, for example, already generates the same quantity of CO2 emissions as aviation. Continuing on this way, by 2025 it will constitute 5.5% of global emissions[6].
Key insight #1: Combine conventional approaches with a data-driven model. Humans assisted by AI could outperform both human-alone and AI-alone. In a tech-driven, faster-paced international environment, diplomacy could rely on a tech-forward strategy to augment its professional output and its value generation. Endowing the Ministries of Foreign Affairs with scalable IT architectures, and with competent data analysts, is key to provide diplomats, as well as policy makers, with qualified information and future-proof knowledge.
Key insight #2: Embrace technology to close up the “tech-fluency” gap. Technology is exponentially increasing the number of hard choices, and simultaneously reducing the time available to make decisions. Data-driven models improve the throughput of diplomacy and reduce its latency time, with positive impact on its operational speed and efficiency. Yet, such models require massive investments to support infrastructures and workers, as they need new skills. Lifelong learning and practice in adapting to change are increasingly more important. From this point of view, a public-private cooperation is key for both parties.
Key insight #3: Incorporate AI as an enabler to scale value. Artificial intelligence is pervasive; it will change everything, including the mechanisms that regulate international relations and how diplomacy creates value. As AI grows more sophisticated and widespread, it offers diplomacy unprecedented opportunities to accelerate strategy cycle times and be more responsive. On the other hand, AI will subject diplomacy to (stronger) pressures, (unpredictable) risks and (relevant) concerns. Rethinking diplomacy in a data-driven fashion implies to modernize its operational code, while preventing it from downsides.
The question is not “if” we need diplomacy, but “what” diplomacy we need to face the digital transformation. Even though big data and technologies boost tremendous advancements in diplomacy, the human factor will remain fundamental. No matter how powerful technology becomes, diplomats are here to stay, as their contextual intelligence will continue to bring a unique set of skills and perspectives to the table. Speed is inextricably linked with digital innovation and becomes a critical factor of success for diplomacy too. Yet, instead of rushing into new technologies and processes, a progressive and methodical approach can ultimately accelerate the adoption of data-driven models. Focusing on the core capabilities and the organizational enablers that support those capabilities can build a strong foundation for sustainable innovation and tech modernization of diplomacy. The key is staying committed to a long-term vision, while remaining flexible and adaptable to the frequent changes in the digital landscape. Big vision and small steps is the best way to get there.
The opinions are expressed in a personal capacity and are not attributable to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.
[1]https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/your-website-design-should-load-in-4-seconds/#:~:text=following%20key%20findings%3A-,47%20percent%20of%20consumers%20expect%20a%20web%20page%20to%20load,render%20before%20abandoning%20the%20site.
[2] https://www.leadershipnow.com/leadershop/9781259837388.html
[3] https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/overview/in-the-news/ai-could-increase-corporate-profits-by-4-trillion-a-year-according-to-new-research
[4] Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, quoted by Amb. Stefano Ronca in: “Lettera diplomatica n. 1360”, Rome, 20.09.23
[5]https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/small-steps-big-vision-scaling-a-purpose-driven-business-at-coachhub
[6] https://www.climatechangenews.com/2017/12/11/tsunami-data-consume-one-fifth-global-electricity-2025/
