Washington DC 22 APL 2023
Leadership - Building Contentious Harmony
Warfare is a learning activity conducted in a social setting. So is building a creativity culture. The leader has to set conditions for success. In MILabs experience, running military planning staffs or War College graduate seminars, the following approach works. It creates the conditions for hard core Alpha’s to set their egos aside, listen to one another and learn from one another. Once the rules are established and the team gels (mutual respect), then the sky is the limit for valuable strategic thinking.
Humor and a sense of fun are critical to group dynamics. It’s a pressure release and a foil to redirect conversation in beneficial ways with no one losing face. MILab used to have a “Quotable Quotes” section on the white board where over the year a list of questionable comments were amassed. Getting on the board made everyone laugh in the moment. Without fail, MILab would get a plague of all the outrageous stuff I had said over the course of the year. They adorn my office wall to this day as treasured memories of groups of people working in contentious harmony.
Regardless of echelon, it is essential that the leader has been trained in this technique. Without it, the process will not yield optimal results.1
What you need in a strategic planning team
A military staff that is “confident, responsible, reflective, innovative, [and] engaged”. To attain these attributes, the team must be encouraged to adopt individual and group skills of “perseverance, self-control, attentiveness, resilience to adversity, openness to experience, empathy and tolerance of diverse opinions
an ability to tolerate uncertainty and persevere at a task to overcome obstacles
not being afraid to make and learn from mistakes
an ability to suspend judgement while generating ideas
willingness to take sensible risks or go out of their comfort zone in their work.
A creative [staff officer] needs to be able to develop and apply a set of skills that they can use in the open thinking mode. These include being able to:
clarify, analyse and re-define the problem or question to uncover new ways of looking at it
ask thoughtful questions
notice connections between seemingly unrelated subject matter
challenge established wisdom by asking: how would I improve this?
recognise alternative possibilities
look at things from different perspectives.”2
Notes
War and warfare are distinct categories. War is the contest, the ‘why’. Warfare is the activity, the problem solving (and creation) - the ‘how’, ‘where’, ‘when’, ‘ways’, and ‘means’ to achieve the ‘why’.
KSA = Knowledge Skill or Ability
MOS = Military Occupational Specialties
Our Priorities are Inverted
Principles
It is best to start with a new group of people with diverse skills and experiences. New is best because there are no existing antagonisms or personalized competitions. If new is not possible, the creation of a sense of a new adventure for the group will help. The point is to reset egos and group dynamics. If antagonisms are too high then the job requires a firmer application of the following rules. The good thing about military hierarchy is leadership can force a reset if needed. MILabs has never come across a truly broken group that cant be reset using these techniques.3
Emphasize the unique characteristics of both the operating and thinking environment. War and thinking about warfare take place in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous contexts beset by fog and friction. They contain wicked problems that have no black or white answers (if they did, they would, by definition, be “tame” questions with straight-forward, provable answers).
Warfare is a learning activity. Be curious. Use this time to discover the answers to questions you never had the opportunity, gumption, or audacity to ask. Encourage curiosity in the group. Cultivate a ‘no-fault’ environment for questions and explanations. There really is no such thing as a stupid question in a group of military professionals. What seems obvious to an aviator might be revelatory when seen through the eyes of a logistician. The most elementary questions can sometimes be the hardest to answer and getting to an answer can uncover unseen or new things.
Warfare is a team sport. Explain how each individual brings special KSAs to the table that the team will need at some point. MILab would put everyone on notice that he looked forward to learning new information and how he could incorporate that into his speciality - strategic assessment work.
Make sure the team know you are relying on them. Because you are. If you are not, they or you, should not be on the team. Shared responsibility works wonders as a motivator.
Be humble and authentic, people can see through a fake. Don’t bluff or BS or change the subject. Acknowledge your limits. Warfare is incredibly complex. No one has all the answers. For example, there are 190 different MOS’s just for Army enlisted personnel. Each was created to address a different activity or skill. Then multiply that by service (often even the same MOS is done differently in different services) - then add-in different KSAs for different domains and then add-in all the different KSAs needed for work in the IC or interagency. So don’t be hard on yourself or others - it is ok not to know something. In fact, it’s a secret power.
Ignorance is a power.4 Use it. If you don’t know something or if you do not understand an explanation (acronym, concept, published doctrine, policy, or how a weapon / platform / system works or is intended to work, etc) - acknowledge it. You will be respected for your honesty and humility. Someone at the table will likely know the answer. Seek them out, encourage them to speak, support them, and the group will learn not just about the issue but about your expectations for mutual respect. If no one has a robust explanation for an important topic, that is a sign the group needs to collaborate to find an answer.
How often have you asked a speaker to explain an acronym or buzzword they are using and they stop, reflect, then admit they don’t exactly know? Its a great conversation starter.
More importantly, deploying ignorance may uncover something really important - for example that no one is brave enough to admit they don’t know something about an important matter. MILabs was back-row room-meat in a briefing delivered to an audience of flag officers. Room-meat is for show, they are not expected to ask questions - although this is ostensibly why at least SME’s are invited. After all, silence is consent. 5 Once MILabs started to peal back the onion on something, all the stars chimed in that they didn’t know either and they started demanding answers.
MILabs audacity to pipe-up gave the seniors ‘permission’ to ask questions they thought were “too stupid” to ask. See this video… MILab has used this technique countless times to enormous benefit. In fact, it has never once failed or backfired and usually resulted in people coming up afterwards saying how they had the same question but self-censored.Knowledge does not respect rank or status. Military uniforms are walking billboards for someone’s resume. They have pieces of colored cloth on them that tell others where they have been, what they have done, and who they did it with. The billboard does not have a sign or symbol denoting if someone has good ideas. The only rank or status in a planning cell should be the quality of ideas and the coherence and clarity of their expression measured in their adoption by implementers.
Have fun! Be upbeat. Trying something new should be fun. In fact, a sense of fun and adventure is a critical enabler of positive group dynamics. In the nest article MILabs will explain in detail how vital humor and fun is to creative thinking. Think of it as an experiment where the leader is a ‘scientist’ and ideas are ‘guinea pigs’. Whatever metal model motivates you to try something new without a safety net.
Bearing in mind the difference between inputs and outputs. Anyone can measure inputs - those are the things over which we have control. Outputs can often be hard to measure. Did the enemy drop its plans to use a one-off low yield nuclear weapon because we deterred him or because his allies made sure this was unacceptable to them (knowing it would destabilize the world and their economies and security).
Make sure you build a team of detectives and not priests. Otherwise you will end up with a Jihad on your hands, and as we know, those are intractable and everyone ends up getting killed or maimed.
SET THE RULES OF THE ROAD - This is THE CRITICAL STEP.
GROUP MOTTO: SAPERE AUDE - Latin for "Dare to know"
ZERO TOLERANCE for any culture war talk. No cable news talking points. No domestic political partisanship. None of these things will be tolerated. It is poison. These are the techniques of adversary political warfare aimed at America to inject friction into thinking and acting in our own interests. As military professionals we see it and reject it. By design, politicization is counter productive to genuine strategic thought. Abortion, or what an M&M is wearing or the policies of the Disney corporation, are completely stupid culture war distractions and have nothing to offer the profession of arms but disruption.6
DEMAND MUTUAL TOLERANCE IN THE GROUP. “No one has the answer. If you did, we would not be here”. Thats a great leveler. Leadership by humility is key. MILabs would explain what he does not know (plenty) and that the project was solely reliant on team members professional input. That we were on a journey of discovery and that we would all be surprised by what we found. If we didn’t experience surprise at some point, we were doing it wrong.
Military officers are strong characters, with big egos, who arrive into a group with rank, status and authority. These are all counter productive to free thinking. They are usually highly competitive Alpha’s who have accomplished a lot in their careers. All of these characteristics are excellent for refutation of weak hypotheses and building a common operating picture. The upside of their KSAs have to be tapped the right way to gain the greatest benefit. The key is that everyone at the table is valued by the leader and teammates. This is achieved by incentivizing listening. This is most effectively done by frequently explaining how different contributions by teammates have advanced knowledge and understanding in the group.SWITCH TO AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL. Once mutual respect and listening are established, the role of the leader changes from enforcer of the rules, to facilitatory of discussion. The leader then has to act like air traffic control - neutral but vested in landing all the planes (ideas) safely. So explain that in any group there are different personality types and the job of air traffic control is to make sure all are heard. Explicitly state that this will sometimes require putting someone into a holding pattern and/or drawing comments out of someone who tends to be quiet. When someone makes a contribution, explain its utility to the discussion and use it to bounce more ideas about. If you dont understand terms or their meaning, say so. Seek elaboration.7 As noted above, ignorance is a power. Use it.
FACTS COME FIRST. It is essential to establish a baseline of agreed facts. This is not a function for some other enterprise - like intel. This is an essential baseline group function. Assume every fact is suspect until proven otherwise.8 As Kissinger is believed to have once said, “just because something is highly classified does not mean it’s true!” Essential to this is openly questioning assumptions. For example, if something is put forward as a fact, question it. See if all agree that the idea, issue, event, or record, is fully agreed by all as the same thing. It almost certainly will not. Perception is critical and useful. Difference, variance, disagreement, are all valuable tools to dissect something, to reduce it down to its essence, to get a common operating picture, prior to assessment. Do not fear uncertainty, ambiguity, or difference - encourage them - they the stepping off points to discovery and result in learning.
BUILT A TEAM OF DETECTIVES - REJECT PONTIFICATION. Encourage group members to think like detectives. Their duty is to investigate and question everything with an open mind. Detectives stick to the facts and evidence in order to create a hypothesis of the case. They continually return to facts and evidence to test their hypothesis. They know they will have to convince a jury of independent thinkers that their explanation of what happened is not just plausible but convincing. Detectives also know that they have to establish the facts in an adversarial system where defense counsel disputes their hypotheses and the jury are primed to doubt everything beyond a reasonable doubt.
Bad priests, on the other hand, pontificate church doctrine regardless of its applicability or alternative ways of seeing the world (other religions).9 They see their duty as conforming facts and evidence to doctrine. They use power, position, volume, repetition, and worse tactics, should people start to “stray from the true path” (think differently). God forbid. Bad priests ascribe to the law that there can be only one true doctrine - theirs. So make sure you build a team of detectives and not priests. Otherwise you will end up with a Jihad on your hands, and as we know, those are intractable and everyone ends up getting killed or maimed.POSSIBILISM - THE GROUP OPERATING SYSTEM. Pessimism and optimism are emotional states. Emotion has no purpose in strategic thinking.10 It is the essence of friction. Possibilism sees the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. It is concerned with unrestricted curiosity-driven, reason-based problem-solving. Possibilism looks for ways to find advantage in chaos. It demands challenges are examined for opportunities. Possibilists have "a worldview that is constructive and useful. [They] neither hope without reason, nor fear without reason.”11
Possibilist organizations are designed to deliver optionality to decision making via a thorough analysis of the context around an opportunity. It is interested in disproving ‘no’ as an answer. Any organization with a default position of 'no' is not a thinking organization. Default “it cant be done” non-thinking is easy. It doesn’t rock the boat. Organizations that are intent on listing all the reasons something cannot be done, typically never bother to thoroughly check all underlying assumptions, circumstances, actors interests/motivations, and methods of analysis, to find new opportunities. They leave themselves exposed to the worst thing that can happen - surprise.
Possibilism seeks lines of operation in the tension between circumstances (realism) and action (ideation). EH Carr persuasively argued, realism without new ideas is barren and prohibits change. Of realism he said that it lacks "a finite goal, an emotional appeal, a right of moral judgement and a ground for action" and reminded the reader that without ideas "passive contemplation is all that remains to the individual".Possibilist’s use a methodology that critically reexamines everything we think we know to find new contexts (situations, associations or relationships) that can help create constructive solutions. In the world of grand strategy and military operations, things are constantly changing in ways that are not always obvious ‘to the naked eye’.
Possibilist’s maintain an awareness of the fact that in strategic analysis there is always a lag between emergent trends and fully assessing their causes and significance. Since the 1980s the Australian department of defense operated on the not unreasonable assumption for the time, that they would have ten years advanced warning of a coming war. They planned to use that decade to enhance their force structure, posture, capabilities and capacity to meet the emerging challenge rather than pay for a war-ready defense force when it was not immediately needed. Also a reasonable approach for the time. In April 2023 they announced that they did not consider the emergent trend lag and that in consequence, they had lost 7 of the 10 years to prepare for war. The important thing was once they realized that the environment had changed, they accepted the fact, and acted on their established planning basis.DOUBLE TRINITY LENS IN POSSIBILISM
These concepts come from Thucydides and Clausewitz. Every actor in the international system is comprised of three parts - the people, military, government (and each are subject to “passion, chance, and reason” respectively). Each of these constituent parts are also subject to “fear, honor, [and] interests”. Within a state, what the people perceive as fear, honor or in their interest, could be at significant variance from the government or militaries estimation of these factors. Typically governments fear their own people. Military’s too can feel threatened by the people or the government.
Never assume synchronized alignment between the people, government and military. That would be a huge mistake and rob the group of critically important strategic insights. Careful analysis of gaps in this model is required on a continuing basis as these relationships shift.
Each entity is conditioned by chance, passion and reason. Changes in these factors may be obvious. More often they are not. A sudden coup attempt in a stable democracy, for example, will reveal tensions previously unseen, downplayed, or dismissed by conventional wisdom that failed to apply possibilist rigor to its thinking.
Possibilist’s do not accept a static view of the international system but constantly probe for alterations in these comparative balances of power within and between states and non state actors.
Armed with the right operating system, mutual respect, and lens through which to analyze strategic issues, groups charged with strategic thinking will not only be fun and fascinating places to be, they will invariably uncover new ways of seeing the world that might turn challenges into opportunities - a key objective of possibilism. Emotional thinking and ego competition substitute personal agendas for clear thinking. They are painful, counter productive and will result in almost certain defeat.
In the next article we are going to have some fun!
We are going to discuss the role of humor in running a creative group and provide concrete steps to get to great outcomes.
Occasionally leaders know how to do this instinctively but thats rare. The technique is not hard to learn but it may be hard to successfully carry off. The troops have to respect you and you have to practice what you preach. So when you blunder, and you will, fess up and turn it into a learning example.
Cambridge Assessment International Education, Developing the Cambridge Learner Attributes, Cambridge University Press, 2011
If such groups exist, the command has bigger problems than how to be creative. Breaking up and shuffling personnel into different groups is likely the only answer to a really broken staff.
Ignorance is lack of knowledge or information. It is not something to be ashamed about. Ignorance is different to stupidity although they are often confused which is why people censor themselves and dont ask questions that 9 time out of ten everyone is else wanting the answer to but are too afraid to ask.
The term room-meat comes from the movie In the Loop. It concerns a senior British delegation that come to DC. They think they are coming to help plan the war in Iraq but they soon discover they are - room meat. It’s a hilarious film. As an outsiders take on how DC operates, its is also genuinely educational.
As a war college professor my officers (I rarely called them students because they were Majors and Colonels, not children, and I would learn as much or more from them as vice versa) could never tell my political beliefs. They were irrelevant to understanding America’s place in the world. This did not mean I was uncritical of an Administrations policies on an issue. The difference was I “played the ball and not the man” as the saying goes. In other words, I explained how the issue or question was complex and could be addressed multiple ways and the domestic political party of the person responsible for making a decision was irrelevant. Again, this is not to discount tensions between the executive and legislature (for example). These were explored/explained in the constitutional structural context not in red or blue terms. Politicians have more in common with one another as a class of actors in a system than differences. Their motivations, incentives, rewards and punishments are largely the same. These maybe in decline and increasingly petty, but that does not change the fact that they are largely the same.
The military world is so filled with acronyms and jargon that it has its own dictionary approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I am not making this up. See the intro to Red Teaming. I cant count the times a term or acronym was bandied about that when I sought a definition, even the originator was stumped. Again lots of ego and inter service talking past one another goes on. It is not malicious. Dig in - demand definitions and explanations. Make sure your team are all on the same page. Too often team members will assume they “should know” what others are taking about and to ask for an explanation is to show weakness. It is a sign of intellectual strength to admit when you do not know something.
This is a great article on a related issue of buzzwords which is a particularly pernicious thing in the Pentagon. Everything must be new and exciting sounding. The acme of skill in this game is to come up with a 3 letter acronym for something as old as Clausewitz but making it sound like we only discovered it last week and if we get it right we will win all wars.
MDO is my current favorite. It’s the EBO of the 2020s. Multi-domain operations. When these terms comes out, the best way to throw the BS flag is to opposite them. So are the proponents saying we only fight in single domains? Effects base operations was the same. Are we operating in ways that avoid having an effect?
Then author does make the important bureaucratic political point that
“The first benefit of buzzwords is that they create cognitive distance from something that already exists, creating space for individuals to think in a new way. Buzzwords are a promising weapon in the arsenal of individuals seeking to shape an organization. Buzzwords introduce a new label that can delink us from our prior knowledge and expectations.”
So MILab in on board with surgical use of buzzwords if it gets the job done.
Exactly where to draw the line on axiomatic facts is often a common sense judgement but sometimes even the most “obvious” fact, can, with probing, turn out to be not so obvious after all. This is a matter of judgement and group dynamics. Tread carefully. Assumptions are most often where the really big strategic mistakes lurk.
Please note the use of the word “bad” priests. Many religious leaders do not act this way and indeed the best compare and contrast their philosophy with competing world views. This is not meant to insult anyone but just a rhetorical devise to make a point about enforcing a doctrinally obsessed viewpoint in disregard for alternatives.
Which is not the same thing as saying its not important to understand emotion in the world and its impact on ones self, ones group and others.
Hans Rosling coined the term possibilism. His thinking is similar to the great International Relations theorist EH Carr, who in The Twenty Years Crisis, was critical of both realism and idealism. Carr argued for an essential interplay between realism and idealism, where the former ensures analysis starts with the world as it is, and the latter provides a basis for imagining alternative worlds and provides a creative platform for reform. As reform hypotheses are developed they are then subject to evaluation and refutation by interrogation grounded in realistic knowledge of the world. Thus a never ending cycle of ‘what might be’ is refined by the limits of ‘what is’ and vice versa.