Tributes to Nigel

[Jim]

Members of this forum will know of Nigel Howard's battle with cancer over the past year, and will have read his impossibly brave analyses of his relationship with Death. Now that he has achieved the ultimate resolution - Nigel died peacefully in the early hours of this morning - it seems fitting that this site should be used for two things:
1) As a space where we can share our own recollections of Nigel as a thought-leader and as a man, and our own feelings at this time
2) As a place where those of us who remain can continue the work for which he has provided such a sure foundation. Continued debate about DT is what Nigel would have wanted and we should not disappoint his memory.

[Jim]

Professor Nigel Howard (September 5, 1934 to April 1, 2008) — a tribute
Apr 02, 2008

It is with great sadness that we announce the loss of our colleague and friend, Professor Nigel Howard. He made a bold, innovative and sustained contribution to our understanding of the nature of modern conflicts. His view that these conflicts must be addressed through the resolution of "confrontations" — i.e. changing people's intentions — has influenced military thinking in the US and the UK. In 2005, General Sir Rupert Smith, former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe (DSACEUR) of NATO, acknowledged Nigel's ideas in his seminal work The Utility of Force.

In 2007, the US Department of Defense acknowledged Nigel's tireless and unique commitment to the improvement of our nation's Command and Control capabilities by awarding him the Enduring Achievement Award.

Significantly, Nigel was able to organize his ideas as a coherent body of theory, coined Drama Theory, which resulted in the development of a framework and decision support system (Confrontation Managerâ„¢) creating the opportunity for these ideas to be utilized by a wider audience.

We will miss Nigel's enthusiasm for ideas, his boundless energy and his strong-willed spirit. Fortunately he leaves behind a legacy of ideas and a group of people committed to carrying on his work. In a world of negative thinkers he remained the eternal optimist — convinced that if the world managed confrontations wisely resolution could be accelerated.

Our hearts go out to his wife of 37 years, Moya, and his children who embody his creative spirit.

[bea]

my darling daddy.

[Manuel]

It’s been an immense privilege to have known Nigel. Although I only had the chance to meet him in the last two years of his life, his brilliant ideas and his enthusiasm have had a strong personal influence on me. From the beginning, he not only helped me develop my research work but also offered his friendship. He taught me the true meaning of ‘thinking outside the box’ as well as a way to understand and resolve human conflict. But above all he inspired me with his drive to pursue ideas and turn them into something useful for the rest of us. I will remember him not only for his exceptional intellect but for his kindness and generosity. Thank you Nigel.

[MikeYoungAtWork]

About Nigel's work in Drama Theory: By Michael Young.

(The text of a tribute given at Nigel's funeral)

I first met Nigel and heard about Drama Theory at a symposium on "Mathematics and its applications" over 10 years ago. I remember being impressed by his passion for drama theory and the clear, insightful way he taught the subject..

I also had the privilege of visiting Nigel just two weeks ago, to find him holding court in his house surrounded by his family and friends, very yellow, but just as keen, enthusiastic and intellectually razor sharp as that time when I first met him.

Whilst being filmed by Saul and Gabriel he talked over the legacy he was leaving to the world, his contribution to posterity. His passion for the subject kept him going throughout the day, it was good to see him so vibrant and dynamic, and so enjoying the whole experience.

Nigel was a driven man, a man who was both blessed and cursed by the urgency of his unique mission - to spread drama theory. He understood that our present ways of thinking about conflict are not adequate but, not content to let it pass he did something about it. He personally erected an entire new edifice of knowledgew, and hawked it around to anyone who would listen, from a general to a confused student writing a paper.

Give him any conflict, anywhere in the world, from a major war to a playground tiff, and Nigel, using his tools of drama theory could cut through the verbiage, padding and emotions to identify the heart, the very essence of the conflict. These he called the options, the positions and the dilemmas. "You have" he would say, with an ever present smile, "a trust dilemma, so this is how you can resolve it."

Nigel managed to distil conflicts down to their essentials, and he taught me those skills, so I too, could use them in my work.

I also know that Nigel was very concerned that his work be carried on after his death. Recognising the brevity of life, his great desire was to make a permanent contribution towards human knowledge, and in that way to leave the world a better place than it was when he entered it.

"I won't always be here", he had said at one of our first meetings, "and I want to ensure that there are people who will carry on this work after I am gone". .

The big question is.. What happens now? Is drama theory strong enough, with enough supporters to continue to flourish after the death of its greatest advocate? Will it, like some great achievements of the past the past, languish and get forgotten, perhaps only to be rediscovered or reinvented in some future renaissance? Or will it continue to grow, and snowball into something much greater giving Nigel posthumous recognition? That is up to us. We are Nigel's successors, it is up to us to pick up the torch and carry on this work. If we choose to do so, we have one great advantage, it's an excellent theory!

Thank you Nigel

[George]

Although I did not have the privilige of knowing Nigel Howard personally, I've been a fan of his writings and theories ever since reading "how to win..." in 2003.
In postings on this forum and in mails outside it, I felt honoured by the way he found the time and effort to answer a mere interested person like my myself. Besides his empathic way of adressing, I was, and still am, struck by the clarity and combination of practical use and theoratical approach of his theory. It is not often one gets the feeling to be witness of the development of a theory that will influence people's views upon conflicts for years to come.
I sincerely hope this feeling is becoming a reality.

Thank you Nigel, your postings about your struggle with death and cancer have given me comfort.

George from Holland

[Bill MacCormick]

I will admit to never having heard of Nigel Howard until this morning. I was sitting in a hospital waiting room and was scanning The Times when I came to the obituary section. I read them all, in reverse order, so came to Mr Howard's obit last. It so struck me that I came here as soon as I got home. I have only read his four postings in this section but the last contained something with which I so wholeheartedly agree that I will spend more time here and investigate further. For, it seems, years I have been boring my wife with the opinion that the Allies in Afghanistan can move the whole process forward by buying in its entirety the Afghan poppy crop. Pay them more than the pittance they currently get from Al Qaeda, etc., and make them our clients, then our friends hopefully. And, lo and behold, four messages into browsing this forum I read:

Makes me cross how we keep up the price of heroin, badly needed for medical purposes, by destroying crops in Aghanistan on which the farmers depend. We cld just buy the crop from them, benefitting everybody except al-Qaeda. We're nuts.

It is such a relief to know that I was not the only maniac with this viewpoint that I will just have to find out more about what Nigel Howard had to say.

Clearly, he is a sad and tragic loss to his family - and a sad and tragic loss to the world too.

My deepest sympathies to all his family and friends.

[MikeYoungAtWork]

Daily Telegraph Obituary 28 April 2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1905492/Nigel-Howard.html

Scholar who invented 'drama theory', advised the military and industry, and wrote a Kung Fu film

Nigel Howard , who has died aged 73, was the brilliant, if eccentric, inventor of "drama theory" – a development of "game theory" which aims to explain the choices different parties make to resolve conflicts.

"Game theory" is a mathematical method of analysis which has been applied to biology, economics, business and political science; but its most notable application has been to peace-keeping operations in such regions as the Balkans and Afghanistan. Howard, however, who in the 1960s was an adviser to the American arms control agency during the Salt talks (the East-West negotiations on limiting strategic arms), concluded that game theory contained a fundamental weakness: it failed to allow for human emotions, and assumed that rational behaviour lies at the core of any conflict. As a result, he developed a model to include such factors as changes of mind, deliberate deceit, anger and love, calling it "drama theory".

Howard adopted the position of an outsider in any academic community, and spurned the comforts brought by the tenure of university posts. When, for example, he was offered a chair at Wharton business school, University of Pennsylvania, he declined and decamped to the Universities of Waterloo and Ottawa before returning to Britain. There he settled in the Birmingham suburb of Moseley, and became a senior visiting lecturer at Aston University and, later, visiting professor at Sheffield Hallam University.

Unlike many academics in his field, Howard was happy to deal with practical problems. He analysed the conflicts among Arab interests in the Middle East for the Royal Jordanian Institute; how to negotiate environmental regulations in the Netherlands; and problems facing the NHS, the National Coal Board and British Leyland. He advised Dupont of Canada on whether to build an ethylene plant, and ran training courses for steel plant managers in Nigeria.

One of Howard's greatest admirers was General Sir Rupert Smith, who was grappling with the problems of Northern Ireland as director of military operations in the late 1990s. He and Howard wrote a paper on the unified theory of war in today's world, and Howard helped Smith when he was writing his innovative book Utility of War (2005). Some of Howard's ideas were also incorporated into software at Nato headquarters, where Smith was Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe from 1998 to 2001.

Randolph Nigel Barrington Howard was born in London on September 5 1934, the son of Barrington Howard, an advertising man who wrote crime novels under the name Simon Stone. Nigel went to East Grinstead grammar school, which he left early without qualifications. His early ambition was to work in America as a butler. In the event he studied Fine Art at St Martin's School of Art for a year before embarking on four (unpublished) novels and two (unperformed) plays. He supported himself by working on building sites and in a wellington boot factory as well as by writing for a newspaper in south Wales.

His literary career was interrupted by two years' National Service in the Royal Navy, which sent him to learn Russian, though he was more interested in writing verse dramas. It was during this period that he came across the book Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour (1944), by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, which inspired him to explore the subject.

To pursue his new interest he had to obtain O- and A-Levels before reading Economics at the LSE. It was while working on a PhD in Applied Statistics at University College London that he emigrated with his first wife, Diana, with whom he had three children, to work at the Wharton business school, which had links with the State Department.

There Howard developed a complicated, mathematically-based formula to interpret irrational decision-making in his book Paradoxes of Rationality (1971). Twenty years later he explained drama theory in Confrontation Analysis: How to Win Operations Other than War, published by the American Department of Defence; last year the department presented him with its Enduring Achievement Award.

Howard was an argumentative man, but possessed of boundless enthusiasm. He read widely and in his later years enjoyed walking on the South Downs near his home in Brighton.

Among his more unusual later projects was advising the playwright David Edgar on The Prisoner's Dilemma, a drama about an imaginary country resembling Bosnia or Kosovo written for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Howard was also involved in making a Kung Fu film. Brighton Wok was directed and produced by his sons Gabriel and Saul, while his third wife, Moya, and their two daughters were in the cast. Howard wrote the script and played the wise, marijuana-smoking old man who saves Brighton from the machinations of evil ninjas. His death on April 1 robbed him of the opportunity to attend the premiere, scheduled for later this year.

[MikeYoungAtWork]

The Times obituary April 29, 2008

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article3834616.ece

Expert on conflict resolution whose ‘drama theory’ has been adopted by Nato strategists in the Balkans and Afghanistan


Nigel Howard transformed thinking about conflict resolution and influenced military peacekeeping operations in the UK and the US through his contributions to game theory and his development of it into drama theory.

A man of exceptionally wide learning and interests, he used game theory and drama theory to engage in everything from searching for a resolution to the conflicts in the Balkans and Afghanistan (where drama theory is being used by Nato to this day) to the analysis of character conflicts in film scripts.

As an accomplished game theorist, Howard advised the US Government during the strategic arms limitation talks of the 1960s. Last year he earned the rare distinction for a Briton of being awarded the Enduring Achievement Award by the US Department of Defence, in recognition of his contribution to that country’s protection and to its understanding of conflict.

His book, Confrontation Analysis: How to Win Operations Other than War, was published in 1999 by the US Department of Defence. An earlier work, Paradoxes of Rationality, in which he addressed the role of irrational decision-making in confrontations, first appeared in 1971 and remains a standard text. In recent years he published many of his ideas and developments on his drama theory website, dilemmasgalore.com.

Howard, a skilled mathematician with a prodigious knowledge of great literature, initially worked in the US with John Harsanyi, Reinhard Selten and Robert Aumann, all three Nobel prize-winners and luminaries of game theory, the widely used system devised in the 1950s that predicts human responses to conflicting possibilities. But he was to take a different path because of what he considered a fundamental weakness of game theory: its failure to allow for human emotions and its assumption that rational behaviour lies at the core of conflict. As a result, he devised a theory that, unlike game theory, allows a place for the irrational. He called his variant “drama theoryâ€