Revenge of the Nullities

I've noted before, both in the blog and in podcast interviews, that career foreign service officers tend to fall into three roughly equally sized groups: the poor ones nobody in their right mind would want to work with, who are best kept out of the loop; the mediocre ones who do what's required but no more; and the smart ones who are proficient and energetic and occasionally quite imaginative. Half the latter group tends to be especially excellent at diplomacy and they tend to fall in turn into two roughly equally sized groups of those who actually care about the public trust and those who are in the business entirely for their own gratification.

There's no doubt that the intake process could improve this situation, but the first step towards improving it requires some insight into why it operates the way it does. There don't seem to be any serious problems with the first screen of a written exam; indeed, requiring high level fluency in English plus general knowledge plus knowledge of some substantive area logically maps important skill sets for diplomatic work. It's the second screen of an oral exam that's iffy. Here, the examiners are the problem, not the exam itself. And the problem is that service as an examiner is not very likely to result in one's promotion. Instead, the ones promoted are charging around on the seventh floor, or putting out fires in trade talks, or on the frontlines abroad, coming up with innovative solutions. Examiners tend to be dullards or those with medical conditions which keep them stateside or perhaps those who just want a rest. And their strong tendency while serving on the examining board is to perpetuate themselves.

The advice about the oral exams I always give to aspirants is that if you begin to think (and you won't have much time to figure this out) you're smarter than the examiners and/or more socially adept, you'll have to game the exam process. You don't want to look smarter/more adept than they are but you must tap into their notions of what a foreign service officer should be. It isn't easy. And here's where the exam system succeeds in spite of itself: people who are truly gifted almost always trump the system. Once inside, the promotion process rewards exactly this ability, with a critical section in efficiency evaluations labeled (deceptively) "bureaucratic intelligence." It's not an oxymoron.

There's a second, lesser but nonetheless important flaw in the oral exam. It doesn't (though this may have changed) ask or allow to be asked a very simple question: Why do you want to be a diplomat? Too subjective.

Looking at both tails of the distribution of ability among officers, a reform of the examining board could go far in weeding out the bottom third and subduing the selfishness quotient of top applicants.

It wouldn't be difficult. If you really wanted top people—arguably this is not what senior management have wanted for many years—you would make the examining board an elite of elites, selected randomly as a forced assignment from among the top ranked candidates from promotion boards of two or three years prior. Make it a one year assignment with a guaranteed promotion following. This jumps those on the examining boards slightly ahead of their peers for promotions. And other incentives could be easily devised to force the boards into competition with each other. The result: better intake.

On the other hand, what the Department now proposes smacks of politicization and minority quotas. If it makes no difference whether US diplomats listen (or are capable of listening) to officials from other governments—let alone ordinary people—this is certainly appropriate, but reality sooner or later will catch up.

The only silver lining I can see is that the proposed 'reform' so neuters the Department that a needed, wholesale reorganization eventually becomes that much more likely. Take the top third, give them real work and responsibility; take the other two thirds and put them in the GSA or the INS (now USCIS) or somewhere else. They're not strictly necessary for policy. Ultimately, either diplomats are a highly elite service or they aren't. There's no viable middle ground.