Dr. Sheila R. Ronis is president of The University Group, Inc., a management consulting firm and think tank specializing in strategic management, visioning, leadership, national security and public policy. In addition, Ronis is an associate with Argonne National Laboratory University of Chicago. She is also an adjunct professor of management at Walsh College, where she retired as distinguished professor of management and director of the Center for Complex and Strategic Decisions. She serves on the National Defense University Foundation Board of Directors as chairman emeritus and serves on the John Glenn College of Public Affairs Advisory Board at The Ohio State University, where she also teaches the capstone of the Master of Public Administration and Leadership online program.
Ronis is an active member of the Federal Foresight Community of Interest in Washington, D.C. Along with professor Leon Fuerth, she is co-director of the Project on Foresight and Democracy funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Her Bachelor of Science is in Physics, Mathematics and Education. Her master’s and doctorate are from The Ohio State University in large complex social system behavior.
Ronis participates in the OECD Foresight Community in Paris and has published two United States Government foresight case studies for the OECD. Visionarios have been developed and published with her colleague, Dr. Richard J. Chasdi for the U.S. Army. She has also developed visionarios for the National GeoSpatial Intelligence Agency, several academic conferences, The International Journal of Intelligence, Security, and Public Affairs, in Europe, the Government of Finland, The U.S. Government Accountability Office, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, The International Management Institute, Nahalal, Israel, the Royal United Services Institute of Defense and Security Studies in London.
Ronis served as guest speaker on the use of foresight methodologies to improve public policy on Sept. 12, 2014, at The Royal Society in London. She traced the center’s work on the Project for National Security Reform. It included details on how the CCSD experimented with judgment and decision sciences for a conceptual set of capabilities for the Executive Office of the President of the United States. On June 12, 2013, Ronis was awarded the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Outstanding Public Service Award in a formal ceremony in Washington, D.C.
Ronis is the former chair of the Vision Working Group of the Project on National Security Reform in Washington, D.C., which was tasked by Congress to rewrite the National Security Act of 1947. As a distinguished fellow at PNSR, Ronis was responsible for the plan and processes to develop The Center for Strategic Analysis and Assessment; the place where the president of the United States will conduct “grand strategy” on behalf of the nation working with LTG Brent Scowcroft and Fuerth as advisers. On July 30, 2010, she chaired a conference at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, where she presented the findings of the PNSR Vision Working Group Report and Scenarios which she edited, that outlines why foresight capabilities are essential to the workings of the Executive Office of the President of the United States. She was awarded a Fulbright Specialist Scholarship and studied these issues in Singapore in August and October 2011.
In August 2010, Ronis chaired the conference “Economic Security: Neglected Dimension of National Security” at the National Defense University that explored a “grand strategy” for a healthy U.S. economy. A publication based on that conference, edited by Ronis, was published in December 2011. Ronis facilitated a workshop entitled “Energy as Grand Strategy” in May 2012 at the National Defense University co-sponsored by the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and the Center for Technology and National Security Policy. In November 2011, Ronis chaired a symposium at the National Defense University, Institute for National Strategic Studies, “Forging an American Grand Strategy: Securing a Path Through a Complex Future,” in Washington, D.C. A publication based on that conference, edited by Ronis, was published in 2013.
In her career of more than four decades, Ronis has worked with many organizations in the public and private sectors. Known as a complex systems security strategist, Ronis has authored hundreds of papers.
This commentary is intended as an addendum and recent update to the original research article published in World Affairs, “The High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina: The Unusual Institutional Arrangement of a Non-Authoritarian, yet Controlled, Democracy”