Imagine you’re the leader of the most successful organization, by many metrics in your field of play, at this moment, in the world. You’re practically greeted with parades and fanfare in almost every place you visit.
You’ve vanquished your biggest competitor, who wasn’t really playing fair.
You’ve even found ways to magnanimously put the folks you beat back to work so the world benefits from their ways of thinking and doing. After all there were plenty of good people in their ranks but they were co-opted by a frankly, evil, business model.
Life is good.
But then one day you hear this weird beeping sound coming out of the speaker at your desk. You turn off the broadcast you were listening to and walk out into the hallway and you hear the beeping coming from your other team mates’ offices as well. You’re not ashamed to admit you don’t know what’s going on.
They’re also confused and tell you they don’t know exactly what’s happening either. “Is it aliens?” One quips. Or more likely, someone else comments, “Did someone hack our network?”
You walk outside and everyone who has a radio can hear the same beeping. The news anchors are saying that EVERYONE, not only in your own country but everyone around the world, can hear the same incessant beeping.
It’s insistent, monotonous, maddening.
“We need to get to the bottom of this,” you tell your C-suite. It’s going to ruin your day and more importantly you’re worried that it’s something out of your control that might distract your entire enterprise from doing the good work you’re known for. You pull together your chiefs across all their focus areas and have a pow wow. You ask if any of them know what this is or knew it would happen. And, most importantly, is this a new competitor announcing their arrival? Is this the first salvo in a new kind of war? What is going on?
Welcome to being the President of the United States the day Sputnik flew overhead. Each leader you’ve asked, from the head of the military to the Secretary of State to the congressmen on the special committee to track competitive threats has said the same thing.
“Sir. No Sir. That? That was a complete surprise.”
That little satellite flying overhead announcing that Russia beat us into outer space took the world by surprise.
After all, after World War II you got all the German rocket scientists. Werner Von Braun was working feverishly in Huntsville on rockets. How had Russia beat us into putting up the first artificial satellite made by humankind?
You demand that a special department be made so we aren’t surprised again. Three months later the first The Department of Strategic Surprise is born.
Welcome to ARPA, the Advanced Research Program Agency. Today you’d call it DARPA (they added the D for Defense) and there are other variants like ARPA-H for Health, IARPA for Intelligence, etc.
“Clearly, the majority of failures to anticipate strategic surprise can be correlated with conceptual rigidity and a high incidence of perceptual continuity.”
– Michael Handel, Navy War College
They all share a common mission. To surprise ourselves before we are surprised by a threat from outside what we consider possible. To explore the nearly impossible. To see if we can move from impossible to improbable or not.
If it’s impossible it’s in the realm of magic and other forms of voodoo and we don’t need to worry about it (it could be fun for Hollywood or science fiction adventures but it’s not a threat to our Nation.)
But.
If what seems to be impossible can be moved to being improbable, it might become inevitable. They all play in what is called “Pasteur’s Quadrant.”
Curiously enough, while the “return on investment” on ARPA-like departments of Strategic Surprise has been significant, the ways of working, the culture, and the patterns that have been honed over decades, since that fateful day in the 1950s, are mostly unpracticed, unknown, or under-utilized in society as a whole.
Our mission is to uncover, pull back the curtains, document, and articulate the broad strokes and subtle nuances of building and running Departments of Strategic Surprise.
Often that comes from seeding, prototyping, and booting up Departments that, unlike ARPAs, are not focused on national security but global, business, and universal, existential realities.
