Monitor 360 values ideas. Here is a selection of some of our recent publications. Please contact us to access additional ideas and publications.

 

Visual media is playing an increasingly critical role in framing the geopolitical issues, debates, and narratives that most deeply stir and affect public opinion. The Abu Ghraib photographs arguably undermined the U.S. cause in Iraq more than any defeat on the battlefield, and the cell phone video of the death of Neda Agha-Soltan brought into question the legitimacy of the Iranian regime in a way that no op-ed could have ever done. In a world where visual media can cause deep and enduring impacts on audiences, it is imperative for strategic communicators, analysts, and policy makers to stay ahead of the curve. This Parameters article provides new ways to dissect persuasive visual media, understand the human terrain of foreign audiences, and assess which messages resonate and why.  Armed with these new insights, strategic communicators will be able to craft more effective messages, analysts will be able to dissect the strategy and tactics of propaganda, and policy makers will gain new insight into the art and science of geopolitical persuasion.

Emerging issues matter because they can constitute those surprises that catch organizations off guard: the threats and opportunities that distinguish between forward-looking organizations and those unaware of the issues that may affect them most. Even leading organizations can be caught off guard by emerging issues that seemingly come from nowhere. Why does this happen? As explained in this Monitor 360 whitepaper, emerging issues are extremely complex, often pose a demand for a response, and lead to denial. Organizations can overcome these challenges by implementing an innovative, comprehensive and systematic approach to understanding emerging issues. This report outlines a three-step process for surfacing the emerging issues that matter most as well as the tools and capabilities needed to make those insights actionable.

Policy makers, military leaders and congressional leaders have limited time to sort through raw intelligence—undigested information from human, signals, imagery, and open sources. Instead they rely on intelligence analysis to make sense a wealth of incomplete, fragmented often contradictory information. Even the strongest defenders of U.S. intelligence analysis readily admit that the record of the past decade has been uneven. The American people should feel confident that their intelligence services are “covering their backs” against the full array of 21st century threats. This Monitor 360 whitepaper outline five practical and straightforward steps that the intelligence community could take – none requiring large infusions of funds or fundamental changes in structure – that would provide immediate payoffs in analytic insights and expanded perspective.

Computer hacking has undergone a remarkable evolution over the last decade, emerging as a major transnational security threat. Most hackers are no longer adolescent nerds or "lone-gunmen" but rather operate in functionally differentiated, professionally-organized cross-border teams that inflict tens of billions of dollars a year in economic damage. But it's not just an economic threat: the same botnets that are being used for criminal purposes are also increasingly being deployed against nation-states in cyberwars, presenting a new form of asymmetric paramilitary threat.

 

Why do organizations get blindsided by market transformations that could have been anticipated? It may not be because their planning methods are flawed, but rather that they undertake strategic planning processes like scenario development without seeing them as a unique opportunity for learning about and exploring the future.

To help planners avoid strategic surprise, Monitor 360 has created a five-step strategic planning process that has been tested in interactions with leaders in the military, intelligence community, and corporations. This paper guides you through a systematic process for incorporating plausible but challenging future scenarios into your organization’s learning processes, to help mitigate risk and decrease the likelihood of being unprepared for discontinuities.

 

For most of the second half of the 20th century, five Big Ideas shaped world politics:

1) Peace is better than war.
2) Hegemony, at least the benign sort, is better than a balance of power.
3) Capitalism is better than socialism.
4) Democracy is better than dictatorship.
5) Western culture is better than all the rest.

Today, the rules have changed, and even these most basic questions of world politics are open for debate once again. In this article, Steve Weber and Bruce Jentleson outline a new age of ideological competition between global powers, and argues that the U.S. must think seriously about how it can compete in the marketplace of ideas. This article urges us all to recognize that the game has changed, and to think about how to best take advantage of the new playing field.

 

 

We live in a world of surprises. When they happen, the typical response is, “Who would have thought…?” Yet, even the most devastating surprises are often inevitable. Why is the inevitable often so surprising? Many people blame a “failure of imagination.” But imagining things is often the easy part. What is hard is imagining future scenarios that are sufficiently believable to spur one on to act in advance and find ways to persuade others to act.

Instead of trying to react to all events and future scenarios equally, the challenge for leadership is to know which ones to act on.  Monitor 360 helps their clients filter through the noise and focus their long-term positioning to avoid what we call “strategic surprises.”  In this chapter from Francis Fukuyama’s book “Blindside,” Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall help you learn how to identify, and then how to avoid these pitfalls.

 

Taught by Monitor 360 Practitioners Jesse Goldhammer and Nils Gilman, in coordination with Monitor 360 Advisory Board member Steve Weber at UC Berkeley, this course examines the various covert uses of the overt processes and systems of globalization. The course considers aspects of transnational integration that mainstream discussions of economic and cultural globalization rarely address – topics such as the international organ trade, the global sex industry, pandemics, smuggling networks, transnational gangs, and failed states. Monitor 360 frequently develops customized training and capability development programs for its clients, focused on crafting interactive and creative learning platforms that have lasting effects.  The course instructors are currently working on a book on deviant globalization and its effects.

 

Climate change poses unique challenges to U.S. national security and interests, and provides an excellent example of the kinds of complex and highly unstructured issues that Monitor 360 helps its clients tackle. Yet current approaches and methods for understanding climate change and its impacts fall short in their efforts to help analysts and others anticipate and prepare for these eventualities. This paper explores several of the possible impacts of continued, relatively unrestrained greenhouse gas emissions over the next half-century through the examination of already stressed systems that are vulnerable to being driven over the edge or past a tipping point by either radical or gradual shifts in climate. This report offers analysts and policymakers an alternative analytic approach to understanding and anticipating climate change disruptions.

 

In corporate and government strategic planning meetings it’s common to hear a manager say, authoritatively, “That will never work,” or “That will never happen.” Leaders of organizations are missing opportunities because they refuse to try to imagine their business, market, or industry evolving differently than their current expectations or the conventional wisdom suggest.  And, if they won’t consider alternative and radically different scenarios, then they won’t prepare their company for the risks that await the unimaginative or the opportunities that flow from being prepared for drastic change.  Monitor 360 helps organizations to develop rigorous and imaginative scenarios for the future – this whitepaper describes how leaders can use scenario thinking to help their organizations prepare for strategic opportunities and threats in the future.

 

There is substantial evidence to indicate that significant global warming will occur during the 21st century. In this report, as an alternative to the scenarios of gradual climatic warming that are so common, we outline an abrupt climate change scenario patterned after the 100- year event that occurred about 8,200 years ago. This abrupt change scenario is characterized by changes in annual average temperatures, leading to drought and intensified weather events in key farming and population centers. An abrupt change in climate could have drastic effects on global geo-political stability, and this report explores how such a scenario could potentially lead to skirmishes, battles, and even war due to resource constraints, including food, water, and energy shortages.

 

Unlike traditional risk management tools, which are usually based around tangible and quantifiable issues, scenario thinking encourages executives to step into the unknown and imagine a range of possible futures. The new mindset for risk management requires a set of approaches that fully embraces complexity and ambiguity, and that allows for a more balanced view of both the risks and opportunities in the business environment. Scenario thinking is a key part of this toolkit. This paper illustrates how you can use scenario thinking to explore and exploit the unknown, and to help enable you to take action in the face of uncertainty.

 

The world we live in today is more volatile than ever. At times it seems that the only constant we can rely on is change itself—and what the future will bring appears to be anybody's guess. But Peter Schwartz, one of the most visionary scenario planners of our time, believes the future is taking shape around us now, and that by taking a closer look at the changes in action today, we can predict what the world of tomorrow will be like.

With Inevitable Surprises, Peter offers a provocative look at the forces that are dramatically reshaping our world—and shows what we can do to plan ahead for our society, our businesses, and ourselves. Ultimately, Peter offers three overarching scenarios that are possible directions for world history in the coming years, and outlines the implications for each. By challenging your thinking about the future, this book can help you to envision how to set your organization up for success going forward.

 

Peter Schwartz explains the process of scenario planning, which enables managers to develop and consider multiple plausible futures so that they can make sound strategic decisions for any plausible future. In his words, “No matter what future takes place, you are much more likely to be ready for it -- and influential in it -- if you have thought seriously about scenarios."

Leaders of organizations are already aware of constant change within their competitive marketplace, but are often faced with day-to-day decisions that require immediate decisions. As a result, those leaders find it very difficult to see "the larger picture", to maintain a long-term perspective. This book is meant to help you learn to think scenarically about the future, so that your organization is ready to take action no matter what the future holds.