Second Chain Strategist

Nostalgia for the Frontier

“What do you actually do?” This is a question I get asked fairly often and I tend to respond with a vague murmur of “I work around foreign policy and emerging technologies.” This doesn’t really convey either what I actually do nor what I strive to achieve, and so after many months - years I suppose - of pondering and testing, I have decided to try and articulate the career and role I am trying to carve out. It is also, I think, one that may become more necessary and popular in the coming years.

I’m going to call it a Second Chain Strategist (SCS), a position I’ve created but that roughly pulls together several historic and more recent precedents. The ‘Strategist’ component encompasses many of the following qualities: an analyst with significant tacit knowledge, a translator of technical and non-technical concepts, a herder of people on their own frontiers, a curator and surfacer of ideas and, frankly, an unusual vagabond character (which I’ve written about previously). The ‘Second Chain’ part refers to a framework I often use when I’m trying to think about information and power, which is a series of concentric circles outlining expertise from the frontier of an issue to its outer limits.

The SCS sits close to many different frontier communities, understanding the ideas, people and networks who inhabit these collectives. Critically, they must remain independent enough to objectively analyse these figures and concepts, not dissimilar to an anthropologist observing a new tribe. As essential is years of cumulative tacit knowledge of the specialist and adjacent circles, for a successful SCS must detect and curate important signals, translate them across domains, bring external expertise and constraints back into the specialist conversation, red-team assumptions, and route the right people and ideas towards one another. This involves a high level of literacy of both new and legacy media, and a wide ranging interest in things.

I was once taught a helpful way of contextualising knowledge: received versus derived. The former looks something like reading The Economist and being able to recite back the key points from an article on Tanzania’s economy, while the latter could be the process of mulling over an answer to an open ended question along the lines of “why has Tanzania’s economy performed so well relative to its neighbours?” Of all the ‘W’ questions, ‘why’ will be the one that the SCS ends up pondering the most: Why was this built that way? Why did this CEO share that particular article at this moment? Why has this disparate block of politicians decided now is the moment to act on this? The role requires that ability to both dig into the underlying humanity of an action, and then explain and contextualise it to other audiences - and yourself.

The 21st century Dragoman

“Frontiers are the natural home of interpreters and translators.”¹

Throughout its history, the Mediterranean has served as a petri dish for civilisations, explorers, traders, generals, kings, warlords, ideas, technologies and philosophies to meet each other, to mix, to do business and war. As these new and ancient foreign frontiers pushed against each other, intermediaries became indispensable: how else could they begin to understand each other, to do business, to set out rules of engagement and norms? By the twelfth century, writers in the eastern Mediterranean had begun to describe an emerging phenomenon in the many ports that dotted the sea’s shores: the dragoman.

The dragoman was far more than simply a translator or interpreter. He would negotiate between rulers, screen access to a sultan, introduce foreign merchants to local traders, witness and ratify transactions, settle disputes, or carry intelligence. In this role, he needed to understand not only what each party said - literally, by speaking several languages - but what they meant, what they wanted, and what they might accept. He had to know the history of the area and the industry, what prices to expect, why they mattered. It was a position that involved deep tacit knowledge of human incentives, history, and patterns.

In his essay on this subject of dragomans in the early Medieval Period, the scholar Travis Bruce adds:

“Dragomans gained access to their profession by engaging a capital of competency and reputation, and it was this same capital that they employed in building lasting relations with foreign merchants. They also carried within them the presence of the state, and the capacity of the state to intervene when necessary to ensure legal market practices.”

The dragoman emerged as an increasingly formalised position across the Mediterranean that would carry weight for the next seven hundred years because it possessed something that neither side could easily reproduce internally: sufficient access, knowledge and trust, the ability to move between otherwise separate systems, between those concentric circles.

The SCS shares some elements of this role, sitting in intellectual ports between different expert groups at the frontiers of their respective fields. The skillset that made this an essential role for nearly a millennia across multiple empires rising and falling are as essential today, perhaps even moreso with the commodification of all written intelligence in the coming years.

Every Frontier Needs A Port

Half a century ago, Carl Sagan reflected:

“For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game — none of them lasts forever. It is beyond our powers to predict the future. Catastrophic events have a way of sneaking up on us, of catching us unaware. Your own life, or your band’s, or even your species’ might be owed to a restless few — drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds. Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians: ‘I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas . .”’

What is it that drives the restless few towards the frontier? Greed? Adventure? Intellectual curiosity? Purpose? An unspecified longing? A friction deep in the soul, itching, scratching, forcing movement to find a sense of temporary calm? Ambition in its purest form is fundamentally a pursuit of the frontier in terms set by its pursuer, and ultimately represents the only vehicle possible to achieve this fulfillment. By its very nature, it is a destination - sometimes in science, in technology, in politics, or literally a geographical frontier - that attracts a minority of outliers, for it involves shrugging off many norms and rewards a relentless drive. Many who take part are aware that on balance someone has to fail, but it cannot and will not be them. The SCS must understand the mental models that drive those they work with to these frontiers.

Today’s ports appear wherever frontier communities encounter established power: between an AI company and Washington, between bioscience and national security, between China specialists and economic institutions; or between technical researchers, investors, journalists and politicians. These groups may nominally share a language while possessing entirely different vocabularies, incentives, assumptions, value systems, cultures, capabilities, capitalisation or time horizons.

The SCS is therefore the natural inhabitant of these modern ports, an extension of the dragoman from a thousand years prior. Along frontiers, the SCS meets others who exist in these spaces, in little ports, and can offer critical services. They need to move their ideas to other ports in other frontiers, and to import ideas and technologies from their peers. The SCS’s advantage does not come from knowing more than the Specialist Core about its own subject but from an intuitive ability to recognise what matters, enough about adjacent worlds to understand its wider significance across the landscape, and a critical and nuanced ability to move key ideas through otherwise opaque and foreign machines and systems.