The Plan

Our Action Plan: Details

Each of the areas in our action plan is crucial to the success of our great peacemaking adventure. The following discussion of the six steps will help you understand and absorb key elements of our program.

1. Inspire

Our inspiration is to make the distant, vague goal of peace definite and urgent. We all take action when we understand what we can contribute to meet a need we recognize, and we know that the need is urgent and relevant to us.

Inspiration must be tempered with reality and followed with effective action. Peace in five years is a sufficiently audacious goal; in order to stay focused, we ought to be aware of what our focus is not going to be. Just as the abolitionists made a wrenching choice in England to focus their finite resources on suppressing the slave trade rather than freeing slaves in pursuit of their ultimate goal, we have chosen in P:5Y to focus on putting an end to political violence through repositioning peace and making it easy to apply through collaboration. Although the following objectives are related to world peace, we are not focused on them:

• Eliminate poverty and hunger
• Cure most diseases
• Create global social justice
• Empower all women
• Spread democracy and the rule of law to all corners of the earth
• End violence and crime
• Save the global ecosystem and stave off climate change

Along with an understanding of our focus as an organization, you and the people we inspire benefit from focus as individuals. If we want to be effective, we have to realize what we do not have time for. When we personally asked ourselves what we would not have time to do if we focused on fulfilling our pledge to create world peace by February 14, 2014, we came up with the following list:

• Solving all of the world's problems
• Getting permission
• Doing everything perfectly
• Hesitating
• Developing political positions or a platform
• Returning all phone calls (we delegate this when possible)
• Reforming general legislation and institutional processes

We are not giving up on these items, just putting them aside personally while we focus on peace. This is a very personal list. Our focus as individuals and our choice of activities will not be the same as yours. Take a moment to make your own list. What would you not have time for in order to create world peace by 2014?

2. Discover Your Greatest Contribution

We are discovering what the world will look like as a peaceful place. Although our plan is solid, there are many details to work out, and no one can know exactly how to create peace in five years. We do know that the average person is an untapped resource—and that includes you. Our job is to encourage individuals to ask the question of themselves over and over: How can I create world peace in five years or less? We hope answering this question will help people discover what unique contributions they can bring. People have resources and solutions. Together we can come up with the answers we need.

One important peacekeeping function, articulated by William Ury, is the Provider. The Provider meets people's needs so they don't fight a war out of desperation. One of our friends, Paula Perlis, attended a brainstorming session we held in La Jolla, California, in which we were asking the key question, How do we create world peace in five years or less? Paula, a born Provider, is a genius with food—her business card says "Food Alchemist." She came up with an innovative twist on providing basic nutrition. She has known for years that balanced nutrition reduces violent tendencies, and she collaborates with leading neuroscientists on research in the area of well-being based on nutrition and neurotransmitter balance. Paula has developed food products that are extremely inexpensive, portable, storable, lightweight, and delicious. Eating these products generates optimum well-being and energy. Paula's solution to world peace in five years is the widespread manufacture and distribution of these foods to undernourished populations. She believes that the resulting well-being will increase cooperation and intelligence and reduce aggression and desperation. She is particularly excited about the possibilities for children.

Her assertions are backed up by a study on prisoners in Britain, where significant reductions in aggressive actions were correlated with taking simple nutritional supplements.

In another example of an ordinary citizen discovering an essential approach to world peace, Nathan's nine-year-old son, when asked how to create world peace, said, "Truth. Definitely more truth."

Anyone can make a creative contribution to the P:5Y movement toward world peace. Paula is one great example, but we need to discover every kind of peacemaker: teacher, social worker, truck driver, bookie, politician, nurse, lawyer, banker, office drone, military general, road maker, engineer, student, critical people, loud people, people of every religion and every culture. We need individuals, not just governments, stepping up to take responsibility in their specific areas. Every human has the capacity to contribute to our movement. As we write this we are most in need of strategists, peace experts, peace organizations, accountants, lawyers, journalists, tacticians, business leaders, technologists, and philanthropists. Very soon we need heads of state, activists, global communications and marketing experts, etc. Soon after that we need the combined efforts of about one hundred million people willing to commit to measurable actions for peace. Different people will be in a better position to contribute at different points in our process.

3. Commit—and Enjoy

Peace is a goal that benefits you and everyone on the planet, so making it happen should be enlightening, joyous, and exciting. Committing to a goal and making yourself accountable to your fellow peacemakers can be an enriching and fun experience. This P:5Y website makes getting involved and making a commitment to peace fun, rewarding, and easy to do.

The following are some of the types of commitments we need:

• A team to write and legitimize the Global Peace Treaty. We need a crack team of international lawyers and UN policy wonks to craft a simple, clear treaty that invites every nation to commit to world peace.
• Governments to ratify the Global Peace Treaty and align their policies with the interests of their people and the world.
• NGOs to create and collaborate on effective national and regional peace plans.
• Individuals to make their unique contributions, add volunteer and financial power to the agencies and NGOs, and to actively support adoption of the Global Peace Treaty.
• A software team to develop the software that will create world peace.
• A standards of peace safety team to write the manual that will guide the GPT and the national plans. Expert peacemakers, UN staff, NGO personnel, and academicians are all needed to generate a high-quality, clear, understandable, well-structured manual.
• Teams for each area to create the national plans. The Israeli-Palestinian plan is of particular urgency.
• Media partners to help reposition peace, market P:5Y to the world, and invite and inspire you, us, and everyone.

Connecting with the P:5Y community can be an enriching experience for everyone who chooses to. To get an idea of how exciting it is to involve different people in the peace process, complete the following exercise. You will see how powerful the peace network can be.

Influential Peacemakers—Write the names of four influential people you know or know of who would make a huge impact if they were working for world peace in five years. Imagine that each person agreed to get involved and you are assigned to give them one task to do or change to help reach our goal.

What would you assign each of them? Make each task very specific and assign a DEADLINE. Be as effective as you can with this resource. How might you invite or inspire your chosen people to commit to your assignments? Would they be inspired by your leadership and creativity?

Unusual Peacemakers—Write the names of four influential people (media stars, politicians) who you believe would NOT work for peace in five years. Imagine each person DID agree to get involved, and you were assigned to give them one thing to do or change to help reach our goal.

What would you assign each of them? Make each one very specific and assign a DEADLINE. Use your sense of humor, but don't abuse your power. Be as effective as you can with this resource. Unlikely contributions can be some of the most valuable. From this exercise, we hope you see that everyone, including those whom you do not believe have a contribution to make, can make one if they choose. It is up to all of us to make the invitation.

4. Collaborate

By working to increase collaboration, you push world peace forward, and you are on the cutting edge of the next human leap in evolution. Giving peace a deadline implies that we must work with what we have now. We do not have much time to wait for the completion of laws or treaties (even the Global Peace Treaty) in order to begin accomplishing our milestones. Fortunately, the world has ample resources—technology, know-how, expertise, communication, and money—to apply to this critical problem. Our job is to collaborate with organizations and individuals so that we can focus all of these resources to create peace.

P:5Y is responsible for generating the national and global plans for the effective practice of peace safety, both to create peace and to sustain it. Using modern business and technology tools, P:5Y will facilitate the integration and coordination that is essential to collaboration. Different organizations believe in various "theories of conflict" that attempt to define the root causes of war. Each of these theories yields a different approach to peacemaking. Our goal is not to find the perfect theory. Academics will still be debating theories long after we have peace in 2014. We will use what business types call an empirical process to measure and identify the approaches that work best without concerning ourselves too much about the underlying theories. However, we do have a few assumptions about the causes of war:

• Each conflict is unique in its particulars.
• Each conflict has key leaders who are important as individuals to the outcome.
• Desperation fuels war.
• Failed states, defined earlier, are fertile ground for wars.
• Objectification of the "other" incites people to fight war.
• War takes place in a global context that permits it.
• Past wrongs, whether real or imagined, fuel war. "Wrongs" are violations of peace safety.
• War is foreseeable, if we keep our eyes open.
• War is preventable, if we implement the practices of peace.

Since we must begin immediately, we don't have time to find the perfect, most effective approach to creating peace. Fortunately a great deal has already been done.

As a starting point, we will use the peacemaking model proposed by William Ury in his book The Third Side and website www.thirdside.org.

As a basis for our national plans for peace, we use the model proposed in Fixing Failed States by Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart. To summarize very briefly, the authors propose that effective state-building is key to world peace, and that the current methods of dealing with failed states—namely, military and humanitarian interventions—"cost billions but do not leave capable states in their wake." They propose a program to establish states capable of entering and benefiting from the global economy and providing a system of government to their citizens to ensure adequate liberty and security. A key component of their program is to create a national plan to build the state and monitor that the various stakeholders, agencies, NGOs, local government units, etc., follow the plan. They propose a collarborative process, not an externally imposed "technical assistance" program. They write about national programs in a way that is highly congruent with P:5Y's proposals:

"National programs are a glue—of flows of information, rules, money, and decisions—that can combine the spontaneous ingenuity of networks with the hierarchical form of priority setting and resource mobilization to harness and balance energies in relationships of mutual accountability. In national programs, citizens are not inert objects to be acted upon or delivered to but are active agents with capabilities and ideas for collective action."

The model we are using for making peace user-friendly is derived from Nathan Otto's work with his business partner Paul Tarnoff, called Plenable Solutions. In a nutshell, all business processes are viewed as tasks with triggers, information, action, and confirmation. The P:5Y website and tactical implementation aims to identify and streamline tasks for all participants. These tasks will be streamlined for national plans, for political action, for individual participation, and anywhere else necessary. Participants would include, among others, developing government leaders, NGOs, individual volunteers, and P:5Y management. Examples of tasks include making a commitment, creating a report, or integrating an NGO specialty into a national plan.

The aim of making peace user-friendly and collaborative is to allow maximum ease, flexibility, and communication while streamlining action. Including local leaders and citizens in developmental zones is vital. Making P:5Y tools indispensable to national leaders, government agencies, NGOs, and journalists is also important, as well as encouraging use by funneling resources to participating parties.

5. Measure—to Build Trust for Collaboration

You get to see the impact you are making on world peace when you measure your contribution. Certainly if we are businesslike in our approach, we need measurements to mark our progress. But as far as we know, no one has used measurements in a campaign for peace. Currently, the United Nation's millennium goals, which include some measurable targets, don't include an end to politically organized deadly conflict.

One of the most valuable effects you get from measurement is building trust with other peacemakers. When facts are known and agreed upon, your scope for disagreement is narrowed, and your opportunity for collaboration is increased. When countries, NGOs, corporations, and other peacemakers report on their measurable results, trust is built.

As an application of measurement, we have to set milestones. Here are some of our preliminary milestones, which we're always refining and developing.

Resolution of the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict

If you want to have the greatest effect on world peace right now, focus your efforts on resolving this conflict. The conflict between Israel and Palestine is not just between those two countries, nor does it affect just those two countries. This conflict violates the safety of all of us, as we witnessed at the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York City and in numerous bombings around the world. Although there have been many peace attempts reported in the news over the years, it appears that a comprehensive approach such as we propose with P:5Y has not yet been tried.

A Return to Principled U.S. Foreign Policy

Through the Global Peace Treaty and P:5Y collaboration tools, the United States can be guided back to a principled foreign policy that uses principles of peace safety to create real safety and prosperity for Americans and populations in the rest of the world. The United States is special, and it has a special responsibility for world peace. As mentioned elsewhere, the United States' violations of human rights, including secret prisons, waterboarding torture (simulated drowning), the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Guantánamo, extraordinary rendition (snatching suspects off the street in foreign countries), and domestic spying are all violations of peace safety. These violations create and encourage enemies, and they undermine peaceful processes everywhere.

At present, U.S. foreign policy is all tactics and no strategy, with the result as predicted by Sun Tzu in the quotation at the beginning of this chapter: It is the noise before defeat.

The United States must return to an understandable, principled foreign policy based on the highest ideals of the nation. Ratifying the Global Peace Treaty would be a good start, but policy can change before that. Once the United States understands that the long-term interest of the country is served only by promoting peace, then policy will shift. The administration that will be sworn in January 2009 provides an excellent opportunity to make that shift.

6. Communicate

Your commitment to clear communication is what will create peace in five years. Communication may be considered so fundamental, that when it fails, we have war, and when it succeeds, we do not. Like actor Strother Martin said in the movie Cool Hand Luke, it may be said of war, "What we have here is a failure to communicate."

Communication is your tool for generating clarity, commitment, and concrete results. You may feel you have accomplished something for world peace, but until you communicate it to the people who need to know what you have accomplished, and who can use and build on your accomplishment, your task is incomplete.

Communication is the glue that holds the whole plan together. Responsibility of communication lies with the person communicating. If you are communicating something important, then it is your responsibility to verify that your communication was received.

Now you have a familiarity with the four principles, the six tactical modules, and the six procedural steps to apply the strategic plan. Armed with this understanding, you can initiate potent and inspiring conversations and other actions to create world peace in five years.