Hi John,

Quote Originally Posted by John T. Fishel View Post
Still, the point of the staff ride in this context was not so much to debate the historical example but to get folk to think about the kinds of problems that might be useful in present circumstances.
In all honesty, I'm still processing the staff ride experience in my hindbrain at the moment. Still and all, I suspect that while what you said was the stated reason for the ride, and it's justification, that it is not the underlying reason behind it.

The more I process the experience, the more convinced I am that the underlying reason was to pull people out of their current time and "selves" (social roles). Yeah, I know, I've spent too much time studying mysticism, but let's look at it in terms of effects (snort... I think I just created a new acronym for the military lexicon Effects Based Mysticism or EBM ).

Okay, 'nuff silliness. There is a serious organizational issue that GEN Dempsey faces that has two main, internal faces. The first is the hierarchical nature of the organization with it's concomitant restrictions on expressions of thought (see here for a good commentary by Bob King). The second is the bureaucratic imperative to map out and "understand" reality (see here for some of my comments on this in the IO context). When we add in the minor point that CYA appears to be a human universal that is accelerated and rewarded in such a system, we have some real problems.

One way to deal with this is to use another piece of human nature, our ability to "act as if" something were true. Actually, we do this all the time in organizational contexts as well as in daily life, but it can also be a mental "tactic" that allows us invert certain assumptions of our current belief / perception structures. Now the crucial part is not that we can act as if something else is true, but that we can become consciously aware that our beliefs are a form of acting as it they were true. This lets us stand back from them and opens our thought processes up to let us look at our current problems in a new light.

Enough philosophy.... Let me just also note that we can get the same effect on perceptions (i.e. that type of a shift) by using humour - a point well know to GEN Dempsey.

If I had to put its purpose into a sound byte, I would say that it is to use the past to free use from the present.

Cheers,

Marc