A Link in the Chain: Founding the Reut Institute, II

The Reut Institute emerged from an idea to an organization through nearly two years of experimentation. This post offers a version of these years.

For Part I, click here

The idea of establishing an organization like the Reut Institute emerged in 2002 but only crystallized in 2004. Two years of experimentations were inevitable and invaluable to the process.

The initial idea had been to establish a professional, non-partisan and non-advocacy policy group that would specialize in real-time systemic strategic analysis. The objective was to address the mismatch between the complexity of the challenges Israel faces on the one hand, and the weakness of our decision-making tools, on the other. As the reason for this weakness is structural and institutional, the remedy has to come from out-of-government until a successful reform of our electoral system takes place.

In the summer of 2002, I returned to Israel and brought the idea to the Economic Cooperation Foundation, where I had worked prior to joining the Government of Israel in 1999. They accepted the general concept but limited its scope to Israeli-Palestinian relations. The name I gave the project was 'Project Reut'.

During this first incarnation, Project Reut attempted to create Israel's most responsive 'think tank'. Modeled after other similar organizations, we recruited dozens of senior experts, generals and professors and organized them in working groups with the mission of offering real-time strategic decision-support interventions.

But ultimately I realized that this model fell short of delivering the output and real-time impact I desired. Many of the experts, who had many parallel commitments, were unavailable when we needed them. Furthermore, ego issues of seniority repeatedly got in the way of convening them.

But, most strikingly, I saw that many of them were no longer willing to 'roll up their sleeves' and get down to the work of creating new knowledge. They would come, offer their perspective - which included both diagnosis and prognosis - and leave. There was no capacity to go into depth, to synthesize or translate knowledge into 'action items'.

A different problem had been the tension between my commitment to a non-partisan and non-advocacy approach, on the one hand, and ECF's mobilization behind the Geneva Initiative, on the other hand. I believed that an enterprise like Project Reut, which came to help frame relevant strategies and assess their merits in an unbiased manner, could not exist in an organization that took strong advocacy positions.

Hence, at the end of 2003, I had to go back to the drawing board. Together with a few friends - Noa Eliasaf-Shoham, Bari Bar-Zion, Moti Cristal, Noam Bardin and Boaz Israeli, from Praxis - we convened to check whether it made sense to reinvent the formula of Reut.

Our conceptual breakthrough came together one Friday afternoon after a few meetings and many hours of deliberations.

We suddenly realized that we could create an organization that would focus on the challenge of helping decision-makers stay relevant rather than on helping them collect and analyze information; that there is unique value to be brought by mastering the process of strategic thinking as opposed to mastering knowledge based on research or experience; and that the core of our organization can be made up of younger full-time staff while senior experts would serve as a resource and be brought in on an ad-hoc basis.

This model would not only be more efficient and effective but also much less costly to operate. This breakthrough was a combination of the path breaking work of Praxis, the experiences at the Bureau of the PM and the days of Project Reut.

Most importantly, we believed that the new model had a fair chance of serving our mission: to sustain significant and substantive impact on the future of Israel and to bring unique value while doing do.

The new model had also met one of the initial objectives that I set for myself while I was at the Kennedy School of Government to create and be a part of a school and a network of individuals that share the commitment, passion, knowledge and skills to make significant and substantive contributions to the future of Israel and the Jewish world.

Based on these ideas, we reincarnated the idea of Reut, this time as the Reut Institute. Noa registered the organization as an Israeli nonprofit on January 13th, 2004 and I left for the United States to raise the resources that were essential for its launching. When I returned to Israel at the end of January, we bought the rights from Praxis to use their package of theory, methodology and software tools in perpetuity, while serving the Israeli public sphere. Shortly thereafter we moved into an office, hired our first employees and the Reut Institute began its incubation. It was not before the end of 2004 that we had proven the feasibility of our model.

Gidi Grinstein is the founder and president of the Reut Institute.