What Benghazi Taught Me About Fragile Systems

Lose the Shock-Absorbers at Your Own Peril

A few weeks after the attack on the US mission compound that killed US Ambassador Christopher Stevens, I was on a Turkish Air flight into Benghazi. “Qaddafi was a good ruler at first…” the doctor – a Libyan practicing in Ireland – told me, “…and the monarchy was corrupt and inefficient.” He was coming home for his brother’s funeral and thought the situation stable enough to bring his son, a restless lad of six or seven. The trouble, the doctor said, didn’t start until the middle of the 1970s.

That was when Qaddafi published his Third Universal Theory – known as his Green Book. The Colonel dissolved the republic and replaced it with jamahiriya, meaning “state of the masses.” It was an experiment in direct democracy where citizens voted directly without the corrupting influence of elected representatives. Of course, the colonel was the one counting the votes.

The doctor leaned over like he was telling me a secret. “He wasn’t Libyan, you know …the hair,” he said, “you can tell by the hair. It wasn’t Libyan.”

“His hair?”

The doctor nodded quietly.

“I thought he was a member of the Quadhadhfa tribe.” I said.

“He was raised by them.” he explained.

“His hair?” I clarified.

Big Man Fall Hard

The Colonel and his haircut were gone when I touched down in Benghazi, but no one had filled the vacuum: I’d arrived in a grim twilight between revolution and civil war. It was a terrifying case study on fragile systems that applies as much to the C-Suite as much as it does to geopolitics. With the forces of Silicon Valley powering AI starting to resemble both, it bears thinking this through.

Big Man regimes like Qaddafi’s in Libya, or the Supreme Leader’s in Iran, operate as cults of personality, giving them control over the institutions that might otherwise exert influence on society. Counter-intuitively, it also makes their grip on power very brittle. Political scientists chalk this up to a lack of popular legitimacy, but more practically, it is a systems problem. The corporate equivalent is that purge of middle-managers that happens when a company wants to juice share price. These tactics solve a short-term problem at the cost of a future system stability that is very hard to spot before it’s too late.

A crucial, but unstated, function of local government and representatives, institutions and, for that matter, middle management, is to absorb the chaos and noise that vibrates through any human system, whether it’s furious voters or irate customers. By removing the shock absorbers you don’t remove the shock, just the ability to effectively deal with it.

It may be tedious, but the unruly nature of liberal democracies isn’t a bug, but a feature. If the mechanism for swapping out the Big Man or Woman runs like a flight schedule – its sheer predictability creates stability. American protests are incessant and get out of hand, but with the next chance to fire the bastard never far off, people lack the desperation to actually burn the place down. Without that mechanism in place, tensions will build to a tipping point where a system can collapse with shocking speed.

What I was flying into in Libya was the massive aftershocks of a single fruit vendor in Tunisia getting so frustrated with a corrupt system that he lit himself on fire. It was a signal for an entire region at the tipping point to act. Without managing state institutions to keep the order, the place fell apart. Within weeks the Arab Sprig took down leaders across the region, triggered a decade long civil war in Syria and erased the rich, all-powerful Libyan petrostate.

The system lacked the ability to right itself and leadership succession had become a winner-take-all proposition. And a matter of life and death for the also rans.

Hyper-polarized politics have ossified American politics – and the spasm of gerrymandering isn’t helping. Yet we are still talking about mid-terms and 2028. The Islamic Republic has no shock-absorbers against the repeated blows against the state. Despite plastering Mojtaba  Khemeni’s face on every vertical surface in the country, the IRGC is clearly in charge. The question is which faction? The decentralized defense system has created a scattering of warlords within a system not afraid to kill the opposition. This factionalism is being masked by the fact that the IRGC as a whole, is sitting on a critical global supply point. It have leverage but only at the price of immense pressure to the system. Without the ability to absorb the chaos it must export it.

With a tedious, seeming pointless alphabet of institutions like the UN, WTO, WHO and NATO getting sidelined, there is less to absorb the friction within a global order made up of competing interests.

Second Order Effects:

The ousting of Qaddafi after hollowing out the shock absorbers in the system led to a complete collapse of the system. For Iran, the wider system is just as fragile, but the state hasn't been reduced to a single figure - which gives the regime a chance to continues as parts of the system collapse.

For the globally engaged C-Suite, it’s plain bad luck that these pressures are happening to the global system at precisely the same time that companies are shedding employees for AI black-boxes for the decision-making. When tumbling into an unprecedented universe, AI predictive decision making – built as it is on old data – won’t be of much use. This matters because losing layers of management is essentially losing layers of shock absorbtion. This will matter more a AI makes more employees responsible for decisions and situations over which they have no control. The resulting frustrations and frictions will introduce more instability than efficiency into the system. The dangerous blind spot for your company is that while short term efficiencies stand proudly on a spread sheet, middle and long term instability do not.

Iran’s revolutionary republic is an apocalyptic doomsday cult, and the world will be a safer place without it. And Libya was better off without Muammar Qaddafi. Outsourcing management to an unaccountable black-box, may be efficient, but be careful what you ask for – after shocks can be a bitch.

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