Turn Every Page: The Importance of Being In The Room
“The immigrant emerges with unprecedented financial power
A system he can shape however he wants
The Virginians emerge with the nation’s capital
And here’s the pièce de résistance:
No one else was in
The room where it happened
The room where it happened
The room where it happened
No one else was in
The room where it happened
The room where it happened
The room where it happened
No one really knows how the game is played
The art of the trade
How the sausage gets made
We just assume that it happens
But no one else is in
The room where it happens.”
- Aaron Burr, “The Room Where It Happens,” from Hamilton
In any political drama, I’m always attracted to the Chief of Staff—think Leo McGarry in The West Wing. In dramas like The Godfather, I want to be Tom Hagen, the family’s consigliere. What makes these characters—these roles—so attractive? I think it’s because they are always “in the room.”
Even if a Chief of Staff or consigliere is not the ultimate decision-maker, they are part of the action. They have the information and provide the decision-maker with the resources they need to make an informed decision. It’s particularly interesting to me to watch the dynamics of a board of directors or group of executives when I’m in the room. My role is to make sure that those making decisions do so based on the best, and most complete, information that I can provide. Their discussions are often wide-ranging and, at times, I am able to play the Devil’s advocate. That is, just when the group starts building consensus around a decision, I bring up another facet they had not considered, or I offer a thought about the consequences of the action they are considering.
My being able to provide information and be “in the room” has helped clients and others make better decisions. I may not agree with the decisions—and it’s often not my job to make the decision—but I am confident that they have done the hard work of analyzing the information they have and making a good decision.
But an issue arises when we are not in the room and we only see the consequences of a decision later on. The post-hoc criticism of a decision is only helpful for pundits. We love to criticize people for their past decisions when they have not worked out. How many people are eager to criticize officials who put COVID restrictions in place? Without being in the room and knowing the information those officials had to work with, it’s hard to say that their decision—at the time—was bad. The restrictions may have had negative effects on people or society, but we only know that after the fact. It is just as nonsensical to criticize someone for buying shares of a particular stock today based on good information because a month from now, the company will precipitously fall into bankruptcy. If the investor had known that would happen at the time he bought the stock, he would not have invested. That’s obvious. But the criticism of hindsight does not carry the weight of a reasoned argument, as any Monday-morning quarterback knows.
Two books I’ve read recently touch on these issues. The first was Marc Thiessen’s Courting Disaster. The second was Company Man by John Rizzo. Both books discuss being “in the room” for some significant events in U.S. history. For Rizzo, his 34 years as an attorney for the CIA put him “in the room” more times than he could count. He knew more than almost anyone in the agency about all its operations. As the Acting General Counsel in the post-9/11 era, Rizzo’s account of being in the room while wrestling with CIA interrogation methods and legal authorization was intriguing. Those interrogation methods and the CIA’s program is the central subject of Thiessen’s book. He gained his knowledge as a speechwriter for President Bush in the post-9/11 era and was tasked with writing the speech disclosing enhanced interrogation techniques and the transfer of several high-value detainees to Guantanamo Bay. He was in the room, at least for purposes of writing the speech, and only a small handful of people knew what he knew.
I was an undergrad in Washington, DC on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. I remember walking back from dutifully dropping off my weekly Senior Seminar essay to the Dean’s Office. It was a beautiful, clear morning like any other Tuesday in the fall. When I got back to my college, I was met by someone in the lobby who told me that I had to get upstairs to the television lounge right away. I arrived to images of smoke billowing from the north tower of the World Trade Center and had sat down just in time to see the second plane hit the south tower on live television.
The Pentagon attack was announced by F16s circling D.C., and military helicopters flying low in formation. Some of us ran toward the roof of the building—there was a tower where we’d often go to hang out—and we saw the smoke rising from the Pentagon. The days after 9/11 were eerie. Fully armed miliary and civilian law enforcement stationed at Metro stops. The mall was a ghost town. No one knew what to do or what might be next.
That is why these books were so intriguing. We who were not in the intelligence community did not know what to do. We were not “in the room” for those discussions. But there were people who were actively looking at materials immediately after the attacks and gathering information that would lead to government action of all sorts in the months and years to come.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb says 9/11 was a Black Swan event, which has these three attributes:
The event is a surprise (to the observer).
The event has a major effect.
After the first recorded instance of the event, it is rationalized by hindsight, as if it could have been expected; that is, the relevant data were available but unaccounted for in risk mitigation programs. The same is true for the personal perception by individuals.
These events happen periodically, and they seem to come out of nowhere. In my own experience dealing with corporate compliance, corporate officers are shocked that some event took place right under their nose, completely unexpected. These are events that we cannot predict with any certainty, no matter how well we study history or detect patterns of behavior. They are marked by their randomness.
In his book, The Black Swan, Taleb discusses another important aspect of this problem—that of “silent evidence.” Silent evidence refers to how we only take into account things we can see or experience. Historical accounts are written by those who survive, not by the many who may have been lost in a particular event. We don’t look to the cemetery, Taleb says, to tell us what happened. So there is a body of evidence, of information, that does not get considered because there is no one to speak up about their experience.
It strikes me that this is part of the advantage of being “in the room.” If you are in the room, there is little—or at least, less—silent evidence. As both Thiessen and Rizzo attest, CIA operations and practices after 9/11 thwarted Al Qaeda attacks on the United States. But to those of us who were not privy to the information, the lack of an attack was silent evidence. Because the attacks that were prevented were not disclosed at the time, it seemed to a lot of people outside the room that nothing was being done to fight Al Qaeda. In reality, the CIA had launched operations on a number of fronts to track down plots and individuals in the organization.
Thiessen is unabashedly pro-CIA and pro-enhanced interrogation techniques. Rizzo’s account of his 34 years in the CIA is more balanced and nuanced. Yet both offer a glimpse of what it’s like to be in the room. And anyone who has that experience is worth reading and listening to, even if we disagree.
Remember to turn every page. Enjoy your weekend. Please let me know whether you need anything.
Best,
Aaron