Introducing Mid-Term Outlooks

Good morning.

Yesterday, I shared the first STREP (situation report) describing and analyzing how current events affect stability in a country. These are designed to give you snapshots of how things are in a location right now and whether the situation is more or less stable (or broadly the same).

That lets you decide if you need to take steps in the short-term to respond to a situation. Or, if nothing else, help answer the question, ‘is this normal?’ when you’re looking at a situation.

This is as close to a real-time or breaking news kind of product that DCDR is likely to have for the simple fact that the BBC and CNN do a much better job of reporting the news fast.

(And as I noted yesterday, information without context is not much use: we still need to spend some analyzing and contextualizing the information if it’s to be useful.)

Today, I want to share something very different and give you a glimpse of the future.

Introducing Mid-Term Assessments

Let’s start by being clear: these aren’t predictions of what will happen. There are too many imponderables to accurately forecast how anything geopolitical will play over any kind of timescale. So trying to predict an outcome is — to me — more problematic than helpful.

Why?

Because the folks reading an assessment that you present with ‘high confidence’ will be anchored to that outcome, potentially ignoring other possibilities, even if these play out in front of them.

But that doesn't mean that we can’t get some sense of how things will play out if we are thoughful.

How DCDR Peeks Around The Corner

In the case of DCDR, that takes the form of a multi-part assessment process.

1 - Determine what’s ‘normal’ for that location

These baseline assessments are built using 300+ specific conditions (aka the ‘stability pairs’) that I’ve developed over 2+ decades of country risk assessments. These give us a consistent way to assess conditions in a location and to provide a stability assessment.

2 - Identify what’s coming up over the next 60-90 days

Next, we look for significant events that are scheduled in the next quarter or so to get a sense of what’s coming up. In addition to fixed events, like a scheduled election, there may also be ongoing or floating events like peace negotiations or even changes in season.

3 - Ask ‘so what’?

Finally, we use a combination of the stability pairs and some specific assessment prompts to get the model to how events might play out with respect to country stability.

➡️ The result?

The result is a report that outlines how things could develop including, in many cases, flags to look out for. These flags are where it gets really interesting, but we’ll come back to that in a moment.

First, here are a couple of examples of mid-term assessments to let you see what I’m talking about. But I need to stress that these preliminary assessments for demonstration purposes only. Please don’t rewrite your entire strategy on Sudan based on this report….