PERSPECTIVES ON TERRORISM Volume II, Issue 3 6 February 2008 Complex Systems Problems in the War of Ideas By Steven R. Corman To say that terrorism is a complex problem is a truism. Usually, someone who says this normally means that the problem is hard to understand and address. But to a natural or social scientist, “complex” has a special meaning that comes from complex systems theory. There are many definitions of complex systems, but I pre- fer this simple one: “we have taken a ‘complex system’ to be one whose properties are not fully explained by an understanding of its component parts.”[1] This means that we cannot understand terrorism through our usual method of breaking a problem into bits and studying them because the interaction between the bits has emer- gent properties that have important effects on the functioning of the system as a whole. For a couple of years now, my colleagues and I have been applying complex systems ideas to problems of U.S. strategic communication in the so-called “war of ideas”. This essay reviews two cuts on that issue involving assumptions about the communication process and principles for finding the right message(s). It concludes with two general recommendations for a more realistic and effective approach to strategic communication. View of Communication Complex systems ideas are relevant to the government’s overall conception of the communication process. They currently employ a linear view dating back to the 1950s, which assumes that communication is set of transformations that move a message from sender to receiver. It draws heavily on a model of telephone sys- tems developed by Bell Labs engineer Claude Shannon. [2] Shannon’s model has the following components: a source inputs a message (e.g. talks) into a transmitter (the telephone), which encodes a signal that is transmit- ted over a channel. The signal, which may be affected along the way by noise, makes its way to the receiver (the other telephone) where it is decoded into a message (e.g. heard) by the receiver or destination. A formal model of human-to-human communication based on Shannon’s ideas was developed in the late 1950s [3]. We call this the message influence model [4]. It has since become a basis for the conventional wisdom of political campaigns, business domains of public relations and marketing, and government/military domains of public diplomacy, public affairs, information operations, and international broadcasting. It assumes that com- munication is a one-way process consisting of transmission of a message through a modular system directly analogous to the telephone system described above. As long as fidelity is maintained—i.e. noise does not de- grade the message and the components don’t distort it or fail—the message will reach the destination exactly as it was intended by the source. Accordingly, controlled repetition (for reliability) and optimization of the indi- vidual system components are viewed as the key to success. It is easy to find evidence of this model in operation in the statements and language of government agencies and officials. It is common to hear high raking officials speak or sending “signals” or “messages” to foreign governments. In 2003, the Bush Administration created the White House Office of Global Communications with a mission to “ensure consistency in messages” by “disseminat[ing] accurate and timely information”. [5] The 9/11 Commission said the government “must do more to communicate its message”. [6] Former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, Karen Hughes, was well known for her insistence on “message disci- pline” and instituted a regular dispatch to U.S. embassies called The Echo Chamber that contained talking points for use in contacts with foreign publics and media. [7] The problem with the message influence model of communication is that it’s wrong. When we’re taking about human systems, rather than telephone systems, the transmitter and receiver are people, and the source and des- tination are their minds. Communication is not as simple as transferring my thoughts to your mind through my mouth and your ears. Complex processes of expression and interpretation mediate our interaction. They are affected not just by the traits and experiences of the people involved, but also by the contexts they find them- selves in at the time of communication. For example, “freedom” might mean one thing to an American (freedom to do things), but another to a Middle Easterner (freedom from corrupting influences). Much more to the point of complex systems, a critical flaw of the old message influence model is that it treats