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Year 2000 International Security Dimension Project Report

Our Y2K Meta Model: Connecting the Dots

While we won't pretend that we always knew where we were going with this project, it recently dawned on us that, in pursuing our various models and scenarios across our four workshops, we actually created what could be described as a Meta Y2K Model, i.e., a model of models.  Slide 34 arrays our various models, grids, etc., in what we hope is a coherent pattern.
 
 

We explain the growth of this Meta Model as such:

• In October 1998 we developed our Onset Models (Tornados, Flood, Hurricanes, Ice Storm) to help us and others wrap their minds around the concept of what it would feel like when Y2K began to appear.
• In December 1998 we held our first workshop, the Scenario-Building Workshop, where our functional experts helped us populate a series of generic Outcome Models (Run of the "Mille"; Humans 1, Computers 0; Houston, We Have a Problem, Y2 KO!).  At that point, we felt we had a decent sense of some "going in" (Onset Models) and "coming out" (Outcome Models) scenarios, but very little sense of the dynamics in-between, i.e., the playing out of the Y2K Event itself.
• In January 1999 we held our second workshop, the Scenario-Dynamics Workshop, where our regional experts helped us populate a generic, composite, six-phase timeline Y2K Event scenario.  The resulting framework, which we dubbed our Scenario Dynamics Grid, become our Black Box Model for explaining the range of possible dynamics that could be in play, in various combinations at various phases in the timeline, during any one country's Y2K Event experience.
• In March 1999 we held our third workshop, the Consequent Management Workshop, where our political-military experts helped us explore potential CINC strategies for dealing with Y2K-induced and related crises within individual theaters of operations around the world.  In effect, we collectively examined how the U.S. Military could influence the playing out of the various scenario dynamics captured within our Black Box Y2K Model.
• In May 1999 we held our fourth and final workshop, the Economic Security Workshop, where our financial experts helped us explore how global markets would respond to and thus shape Y2K-induced or related economic crises around the world.  Here we likewise collectively examined how Wall Street and other global super-markets could influence the playing out of the various scenario dynamics captured within our Black Box Y2K Model.
• Finally, what we hope to do in the Fall of 1999 is hold one or more additional workshops with Pentagon officials to examine Y2K Legacy Models. Here we plan to explore low probability, high impact "wild cards" that may emerge from the Y2K Event. By doing this we hope to explore two key issues:
  • How much is Y2K worth to the U.S. Government in a long-term sense?
  • What is the next Y2K-like system-wide IT perturbation upon which we should next focus our attention?

This is also a substantial chance that we will recongregate a portion of the participants from our four previous Y2K workshops for a Post-Y2K Analysis Workshop sometime in the late Spring or Summer of 2000 (all things going as planned!).
 
 

The Miniature Meta Model: We Call It . . . Mini Me!

Now, while we're happy that we can actually array all our models in a manner that seems to make some sense to us, we thought it made even more sense to try and distill that complex arrangement into something a bit more elegant.  This Miniature Meta Model, or what we like to call our "Mini Me" Model, boils down to two simple questions (presented below in Slide 35):

• Hardware Question:  How distributed is your country?
• Software Question: How "New Economy" is your economy?

Those two questions yield four outcome boxes, which, harkening back to our original X-Y axis, allows us to string together a series of individual judgments from our various models and workshops:

• More New Economy + More Distributed = Best Case
• More New Economy + Less Distributed = Next Best Case
• Less New Economy + More Distributed = Next Worst Case
• Less New Economy + Less Distributed = Worst Case.

Which countries go where?  Well, we obviously see the U.S. and countries close to it in overall appearance and functioning to end up in the Best Case box.  On the far extreme of that, we'd expect mono-political, mono-economic, mono-cultural, centralized states like an Iran or North Korea to be potential Worst Case situations, remembering our constant admonitions about asking the "So What?" question.

The in-between cases, of course, present the most intriguing situations.

A country like Japan or France could well end up in the Next Worst Case box as countries that are fairly distributed in terms of their networks, economies, etc., but are not yet adept at the playing the "New Economy" game that stresses rapidly shifting business relationships.

Most difficult to select are examples of countries that exhibit a lot of New Economy potential or capacity, but still have fairly centralized or collective economies married to unitary political states.  These Next Best Case countries will inevitably be surprises, since they will be hit hard by Y2K, and yet seem to emerge stronger and more confident for the experience.  In this light, one thinks of possibly South Korea or even China.
 

Conclusion #1--How You Describe Y2K Depends on From When You View It

People who describe Y2K as "different in kind" from anything humanity has ever experienced, or something that is unique, tend to look at the event from the perspective of the past century.  But those who look at Y2K from the perspective of the coming century, exhibit the exact opposite tendencies: they tend to describe Y2K as only "different in degree" from the sort of system perturbations humanity will increasingly face as we become more interconnected and interdependent on a global scale.  In their minds, then, Y2K is a genuine harbinger of next definitions of international instabilities or uncertainty, in effect a new type of crisis that leaves us particularly uncomfortable with its lack of a clearly identifiable "enemy" or "threat" with associated motivations.

Our bottom line (paraphrasing Rick in Casablanca): We'll always have Y2K . . ..
 

Conclusion #2--Y2K Moves Us From Haves-vs-Have Nots to Competents-vs-Incompetents

Success at dealing with Y2K has a lot to do with resources, and anyone who believes otherwise is painfully naive. And yet, defeating the challenge of Y2K says as much or more about one's competency than it does about one's wealth.  The rich can survive Y2K just fine, but only the truly clever can thrive in Y2K, which IT competents tend to view as a sped-up market experience within the larger operational paradigm of the New Economy.  The rise of "virtual tigers" such as India's software industry, Ireland's high-tech manufacturing, or Israel's Wadi Valley, tell us that it doesn't necessarily take a wealthy country to succeed in the New Economy, just a very competent one.  Y2K may well serve as a microcosmic experience that drives this new reality home to many more around the planet: it's less about what you have than what you can do.  For in the end, Y2K is less about vulnerability and dependency, then dealing with vulnerability and dependency.  You can buy your way toward invulnerability and independency, but you can also work around vulnerabilities and dependency.

Our bottom line: Competents will thrive, while incompetents nosedive.
 

Conclusion #3--Y2K As A Glimpse Into the 21st Century: Divisions Become Less Vertical and More Horizontal

The 20th Century featured an unprecedented amount of human suffering and death stemming from wars, and these conflicts came to embody humanity's definition of strife--namely, state-on-state warfare.  The divisions that drove these conflicts can be described as "vertical," meaning peoples were separated--from top to bottom--by political and geographic boundaries, known as state borders.

If the 20th Century was the century of inter-state war, then the 21st is going to be the century of intra-state or civil strife.  Divisions of note will exist on a "horizontal" plane, or between layers of people that coexist within a single state's population.  These layers will be largely defined by wealth, as they have been throughout recorded history.  But increasingly, that wealth will depend on competency rather than possession of resources.

Y2K will help crystallize this coming reality by demonstrating, in one simultaneous global experience, who is good at dealing with the New Economy, globalization, the Information Revolution, etc., and who is not.  And these divisions will form more within countries than between them, as borders will become increasingly less relevant markers of where success begins and failure ends.  The coming century of conflict will revolve around these horizontal divisions.

Our bottom line:  We have met the enemy, and they is us.
 

Conclusion #4--Y2K Will Demonstrate the Price of Secrecy and the Promise of Transparency

Those who are more open and transparent and share information more freely will do better with Y2K than those who hoard information, throw up firewalls, and refuse outside help.  Secrecy will backfire in almost all instances, leading to misperceptions and harmful, stupidly self-fulfilling actions.  Governments must be as open with their populations as possible, or suffer serious political backlashes if and when Y2K proves more significant for their countries than they had previously let on.  People's fears about "invisible technology" will either be conquered or fed by how Y2K unfolds.  This is a pivotal moment in human history: the first time Information Technology has threatened to bite back in a systematic way.  In a very Nietzschean manner, Y2K will either "kill" us or make us stronger, and the balance of secrecy versus transparency will decide much, if not all, of that outcome.

Our bottom line: The future is transparency--get used to it!
 

Conclusion #5--Our Final Take on Y2K:  As It Becomes Less Frightening, It Becomes More Profound

The more you accept the notion that Y2K represents the future and not some accident of the past . . . the more you see it as different in degree than in kind from the challenges we will increasingly face . . . and the more you realize that it's part and parcel of the globalized, IT-driven New Economy than some exogenous one-time disaster, then the more profoundly will Y2K loom in your psyche even as it becomes less frightening with regard to the 010100-threshold.   Why?  Because the more it becomes associated with the broader reality of our increasingly interconnected and interdependent world, the more inescapable it becomes.  In short, you can sit out the Millennium Date Change Event and all the hoopla surrounding it, but there's no avoiding Y2K in the big-picture sense, because the skills it demands from humanity are those same skills needed for our not-so-collective advance into the brave new world of the 21st Century.

Our bottom line:  There's no escaping Y2K.