Intangibles and Airplane Security
January 6, 2010 by Mary Adams
Last night on NPR, I listened to a report on the heightened security measures that are being put in place in airports around the world.
Listening to the report, I couldn’t help but think that our leaders are getting the balance between tangible and intangible efforts wrong.
There is a lot of emphasis on visible, tangible efforts to increase security. That’s why everyone from my mother to a small child are now stripped of many articles of clothing and patted down. The NPR report described very complete pat downs that squeezed breasts and went for the underwear (where the 12/25 terrorist had hidden some of his explosives).
Equipment makers are dashing to come up with the perfect hardware solution that can detect every possible threat.
The staffing and the hardware seem like logical responses. But they could end up bankrupting us in the process.
The number one lesson of this most recent incident has to be the admitted failure to “connect the dots” that President Obama addressed in his recent comments. Of course, this same statement was made post-9/11.
How do you connect the dots? Through visible, tangible shows of force and equipment? Absolutely not.
We continue to over-emphasize the tangible side of the war on terror: the armies and the equipment. And we under-emphasize the intangible capital side: Better information gathering and analysis (structural capital). Better information networks (relationship capital). Increased staffing of intelligence efforts (human capital).
The war on terror is matching a hierarchical bureaucracy against a distributed, flexible network. This isn’t that different from many companies that still try to use industrial-era management principles to compete in a knowledge-era, 2.0 economy.
You are not going to win by under-investing in intangibles. Not in the war on terror. Not in your own business. The future is already here. Get used to it and get smarter now.
Mary,
That’s a great observation that I wish our policy makers would pay greater attention to.
I believe that it’s a bias that’s rooted in a “Western” cultural paradigm to be thing-centric (techno-centric) rather than people-centric (socio-centric).
There’s also an element of “marketing” involved. The sort of systemic changes that would actually make a greater difference would never make the news, don’t tend to marketing or help people much at the next election.
Systemic changes like procedure and process changes that allow communication across agencies, take down isolated fiefdoms and streamline collaboration - changes that should not require billions to put in place…just the much harder work of changing bureaucratic culture in the government and intelligence community.
I’m going to be posting on this particular issue at the Innovate Africa network fairly soon, but these are some of the thoughts I’ll be addressing.
Thanks Gogo - I do see your point about the cultural bias. But if we cannot break out of it, then we are doomed. Intangibles are much more important to our future than tangibles!
Please share your thoughts from Innovate Africa when they are ready, Mary
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