Empirical Knowing

A recent book by Patrick Kelley explores how empires know. Entitled "Imperial Secrets: Remapping The Mind of Empire", it's a fascinating and non-traditional exploration of the challenges and limitations empires face in translating data into action.

Although most organizations are not empires, many dominate a specific context in ways that create the same kind of challenges in knowing. So, it's worth at least a look if you're a student of organizational behavior.

Kelley focuses on three empires facing challenges in knowing: Rome in the first and second century AD, Ottoman Turkey, and Britain in India. He draws lessons from specific narratives, including:

• As an empire comes to dominate its time and place, it struggles to detect signals that are weak or don't fit the frames that made the empire successful. An additional complication is that an empire's dominant presence warps the information space it inhabits.


• Informal networks are often critical and unrecognized in filling in an empire's blind spots.


• Empires are occasionally surprised when actions it perceives as being ordinary provoke an extraordinary response.

Although much of this will be familiar to students of epistemological approaches to organizational sensemaking (e.g., Karl Weick), the narratives provide a framework for a nuanced explication of the concepts. And, Kelley is a thoughtful analyst. Here's a few excerpts I liked:

• "I wish to contest the unidirectional read of how 'knowing' works; i.e., that an observing subject gains ever more knowledge of some given object and consequently, power over the latter accrues to the former."
• "I propose that the Panopticon actually operates in reverse in the imperial context....empires will nearly always operate at an information deficit in relation to their subjects....The overseer is there for everyone to observe—what the empire believes, does, wants, and will do is laid out in imperial media, legal codes and judicial decisions, the conduct of its agents, and the architectural and scientific 'performances' of power—all in contrast to the 'inscrutable oriental' who resists observation physically, linguistically, and epistemologically in his capacity rather than inability to 'imagine that....' "
• "...imperial policy makers faced the problems of 'slippery' knowledge—data points collected, analyzed and presented in a context different from where they originally resided by virtue of imperial process."
• "Empire consists of a certain set of patterns that characterize the meaning and function of physical reality—Empire is information, which may almost sound like a definition, but my intent is rhetorical emphasis. Consequently, the management of information—disseminating the preferred patterns, and identifying competing patterns for elimination—becomes the core function of imperial administration."
• "The risk of drawing virtual lines and imposing order on the grand confusion of reality is not simply that our lines may be imperfect, our approximation inexact. Rather, these virtual creations can become so comfortable and accessible that we come to inhabit them as real, producing 'knowledge' about things and places that don’t actually exist. Reality as such then enters into the 'species of alterity'; it literally becomes something foreign and other—opaque, if not irrelevant, to our attempts to understand it."
• "... the strategic information most fundamental to a successful imperial order—information about beliefs, identity, authority and allegiance—does not appear as some 'golden nugget' at the end of an operational or tactical tasking order. Rather, it circulates along networks of exchange, akin to an economy in which information serves as currency."
• "The unique intelligence problem of empire, in contrast, is precisely that such distinctions [foreign-domestic] do not exist—or rather that they exist in over-abundance, with inside/outside fractures splintering and overlapping ad infinitum within and between spaces, communities and individuals under the imperial umbrella."
• "If absolute power corrupts absolutely, it also tends to isolate completely—twin tendencies any executive authority risks as it ascends to the heights of imperial power. Bureaucracies rise in tandem with that isolation, providing the intellectual equivalent of walls and gates; but subverting that intellectual structure by act of will can prove nearly as impossible as escaping from the physical walls for reasons of either status or security. "
• "Modern strategic discourse is full of discussions about decision cycles and getting inside an opponent’s OODA loop (Orient, Observe, Decide, Act). Less well explored is how to get inside or engage another’s time, as such, which may be moving at a different rate and in a different direction."
• "A key aspect of the British performance, and an enduring problem of imperial intelligence, I suggest, is not to correctly 'know' foreign minds, but to read backward, and accurately perceive how those foreign minds come to understand the apparently familiar and domestic."
• "As I have argued throughout this text, imperial intelligence is less a problem of determining the truth or falsehood of specific facts, and more an issue of negotiating how truth is constituted and what 'knowing' means. These issues leap to the fore in the contest over education, which is fundamentally a fight to frame how meaning can and will be constituted in both the past and future."
• "None of these [narrative] products would suitably respond to any conceivable state information request, and certainly would not fit into the almost infinitely replicated 'intelligence cycle' model, but they might well answer information requirements. The rhizomatic nature of information, particularly in an imperial environment, indicates that there will nearly always be connections and contexts not immediately evident to any decision-maker posing specific questions....Better still, they are quite obvious in what they leave out, and in this are less deceptive than traditional maps."
• "Th e language and image of empire is universally visible and available to its nominal subjects, while the reverse is not usually the case."
• "...the rise of imperial power creates the demand for a whole host of new government functions and institutions, which cannot be created, except with great difficulty and foresight, ex nihilo. Far easier, and more common, is to simply adapt existing institutions to new roles..."
• "Modern Americans have come to believe that the norms and values encapsulated in their form of government and their ways of conducting foreign relations are the birthright and open options for men everywhere. In accordance with this persuasion there simply can be no 'others.' " [Adda Bozeman quote]
• "...new information—in order to make sense—must fit into a narrative, a history, and this history amplifies the problem of the other/same dichotomy. 'As distinct from the present, the past is alien, exotic, or strange; as continuous with it, this past is familiar, recognizable and potentially fully knowable.' [Hayden White quote] "
• "Empires thrive despite, rather than because of, their information institutions."
• "In early days, say just after you have sacked Carthage or defeated the Nawab of Bengal, you might know very little, but you also know what you don’t know, i.e. basically everything. This makes the 'known unknowns' a very large category, but also makes the more dangerous 'unknown unknowns' very small. As imperial experience progresses, as administrators learn the languages and jurists incorporate local legal principles, the 'known known' flourishes in a rhizomatic way...For as 'known unknown' shrinks with every census and cartographic survey, the 'unknown unknown' consequently expands proportionately. While the analogy may be inexact, imperial power becomes more expert over time, and consequently more subject to the patterning and heuristic biases associated with the 'Paradox of Expertise.' "
• "My general assessment has been that empires are always at an information deficit—telling more than they hear—and the deficit over time becomes associated with a lost capacity to listen."
• "A perspective which presumes the role of an objective machine loses twice over by deliberately abjuring to assimilate the specifically human factors that only humans can collect, while making inevitable bias more difficult to detect in bureaucratically neutral discourse."

As someone who is more critical realist than postmodern, I think Kelley occasionally overstates his case. But, given the growing importance of Complex contexts and the growing number of "virtual empires", he may be right to do so.