Scientific Networks and Policy Creation

From Energy-Experts

Lessons from the Second World War.

It is arguable that lessons learnt from WW2 have application to our present difficulties over energy policies. For example:

(Note - the term "policies" here can apply to the policies of corporations and entire industries as well as government policies)

It is well known that radar made a major contribution to winning the war against Germany. But in fact in many respects the Germans had technically much better radar than the British. Britain’s superiority was in being able to use it to identify targets and get fighters to intercept rapidly, (which was in fact no easy matter) and the British achieved this to an extent which the Germans found inconceivable.

The clever bit was not only the rapid and integrated development of the technology, in line with the operational need of the pilots, but also all the associated administration – where you would put the radar stations, who would tell the fighters where to go, the organisation of the ground controllers, the charts, the tables the maps etc.

This was achieved in part, by close, non bureaucratic lateral – (ie non hierarchic) communication at all levels across the different pyramids of power, and often short circuiting the conventional chain of command.

A well known and often quoted example of one of the ways this happened is the famous “Sunday Soviets”- informal meetings which involved Air Marshall’s down to humble radar technicians (who were expected to tell the Air Marshall when he was talking nonsense):

“Whilst at Worth, Dorset, in 1940, he (AP Rowe – the head of Radar Research) conceived the idea of inviting senior military personnel, {fighter pilots}, etc to visit the Research Labs on Sundays to meet with the rest of the research engineers and scientists working in the team. These gatherings were very informal and even the most junior staff were encouraged, (indeed expected, - Ed.) to contribute their ideas. If an idea was put forward that had merit, it could be adopted there and then (my emphasis -Ed.) because all the main decision-makers would be there. Such informality (and trust) at such a powerful level was unprecedented”. [1]

(You will find the above kind of description in any book on the development of radar)

In Germany there was no such co operation – boffins just designed the stuff as to what they thought was needed and handed it over to the users.

Similarly, if one looks at the memoirs of say Dr RV Jones – Scientific Advisor- to the Air Ministry “Most Secret War” it is littered with examples of him ringing up one of his chums from Public School or Oxford in the Air Ministry or some Top Secret research lab, and maybe borrowing an aircraft, (quite unauthorised) to do some vital experiment such as studying the German night bombing system (and then defeating it).

Or he might get a call from another chum suggesting he comes to look at “something rather interesting that Fred has just brought in".

The Leigh Light, a key technology in the defeat of U boats was secretly developed by an RAF Personnel Officer, who amazingly “borrowed” a Wellington Bomber for his early trials. This again was completely unauthorised, and when an Air Vice Marshal saw it, and how good it was, (much better than the official attempt) merely said “How soon can it be in production?”.

In contrast, Germany’s war machine was highly centralised and bureaucratic. Hitler in fact banned all research that could not be completed within a couple of years of the war starting. There seems to have been no centralised hierarchy of research boffins, uniting all the different arms, all able to chat laterally to each other. Anyone attempting to do what Leigh had done would have been whipped off to the nearest concentration camp.

The Sunday Soviets would be out of the question in Germany - it was pointed out by a lower ranking officer in 1935 in pre-war trials that the U boats could easily be defeated by radar and ASDIC / SONAR (which is what happened of course), but this advice was brushed aside by the hierarchy - (U Boat Warfare - Jak P Mallman Showell, Ian and Allen page 11)

Hitler was well known for fomenting rivalries between the various sectors – Luftwaffe, the Army, SS, Krieg’s Marine and so on. This kind of bureaucratic infighting prevented for example the fitting of long range fuel tanks to German fighters which would have had a major and perhaps decisive effect on the outcome of the Battle of Britain (German fighters could only spend about 20 minutes over UK before having to nip back for more petrol – long range drop tanks, which had been designed, but not fitted, would have given them over an hour over England)

Hence, I would argue, (and I accept that this is only anecdotal, and that life is not a laboratory, so we can’t go back and re run the experiment) that a key factor in the UK’s success was the massive, spontaneous and self organising, lateral communication networks, that could link all necessary professionals, enabling fruitful dialogues to occur and decision to be made, without a complex bureaucratic process, these informal decisions being adopted later on by the hierarchy and formalised into policy. (Of course it didn’t always work)

I think this also applies to free markets market models, where the players are in theory competing rivals. But this is not entirely true. For a start, there is a constant shuffling of staff from one organization to another, and secondly there are widespread social networks wherein people from nominally competing organisations routinely discuss technical matters. For example I set up (with Alan Burgess, Denys Clarke and Bob Carne) the UK Water Energy Managers Forum, which is in fact a co operation group / Lateral Access Network for people in competing Water organisations.

The main purpose in setting up the Claverton Energy Network was to facilitate the extension of these types of existing informal networks, to enable a sensible, complete and logical understanding of energy issues. I also believe, that in the same way that at AP Rowe’s Sunday Soviets “…….If an idea was put forward that had merit, it could be adopted there and then because all the main decision-makers would be there……..” since many people in the Claverton network are in or closely related to government, some of the insights that this network generates can (hopefully) be picked up and used either by governments or industries.

I think this visualisation of an informal decision aiding advice network spanning all the different bits of government, the energy industries and academia, which is what we appear to have, is quite different from the policy formulation model the government uses – that of consultations – which are highly cumbersome, time consuming, bureaucratic, and involve Civil Servants, trying to distill down, thousands of probably conflicting views which they probably don't have the technical background or training to fully understand, and as a result simply can’t reflect the technical, political, historical, complexity of what we are faced with, and can’t be understood by any one person, whereas a very large network can reflect, map and understand the complexity.

Its also different to the standard model of isolated commercial organisations competing in a market guided only by the signals of commercial success or failure – in both these contrasting contexts that I believe networks like Claverton have something to offer.

Our network, I hope / believe can carry on helping to resolve these issues and come up with integrated solutions, which can by "osmosis" seep into not only governments, but industry and the big players as well. We won’t necessarily come up with explicit solutions, but by teasing out the issues, and providing some of the missing information and thinking, we can help others more highly placed to make the correct decisions.

(Of course that completely ignores the effects of lobbying by the big players which can secure what they want at government level, irrespective of how sensible or otherwise it is – but at least we can present (hopefully) a reasoned view.

I hope this does not sound too over blown, pompous and hubristic but it is one of the ways I see this group contributing – its certainly part of what we do I think.

I think initiatives like the Claverton Consensus, the Claverton Book are also very useful for galvanising thought, and exposing differences, but in addition it is the numerous individual dialogs, and what individuals take away back to their organisations that are what will produce a useful outcome.

Interlock Research

I think what happened in WW2 amongst the boffins, the civil servants, the people who ran the defence organisations and so on, as described above ( no doubt imperfectly) could be described as carrying out Interlock Research – but without it being formalised as such - it is what happened whether or not they were aware of it, and was the spontaneous construction of networks.

Interlock research is based on the idea that no individual or policy department of a large organisation can ever completely understand a complex problem. Its mental model of the problem will be limited by the individual's ability to understand it. But if the problem is broken down into small sub models, each understood by an individual expert and they are in communication, along the lines of interactions of their sub models, then collectively they can understand it. Furthermore, if some of the participants are involved in actual policy formation any insights and overall models, can be fed into policy formulation, (like the Sunday Soviets) and this applies whether it is policy of governments or corporations.

Note: The term Model here is being used in a completely different sense to that of Energy Modellers, who are using computer models to simulate reality. The models being discussed here are people's internal mental models of the situation which often are tacit ie non explicit - quite different from the specialist computer models run by people such as Mark Barrett - but it is these mental models which guide them as to how model physical reality as they see it. They need to be as close to reality as possible and in many cases they simply aren't.

For how this might apply to Energy Policy is set out in the item Energy Policy Interlock Diagram at Wikipedia