Hi Ron,

Quote Originally Posted by Ron Humphrey View Post
Would it be a beneficial exercise if we were to use an example something like the thread Mike F had but with perhaps a non military problem and help differentiate between complexity both objective and subjectiveLink

then try to tease out why and how it differs
from actor to actor.
Might indeed be a good idea..... Hmmm, if you've got one in mind, why don't you go ahead and start it? Right now, I'm still trying to pull my perceptions on the entire process together, which means that a lot of my "thinking" is pretty incomprehensible on the subject .

Let me give you a vignette of where my thinking is running (well, limping slowly...).

I was watching the "new" case study video at TRADOC, and one of the scenes showed the commander of a reaction force up on a hill observing the operations of a police check point. The facilitators (who were great BTW), noted that some 300 civilians were leaving the objective. My immediate reaction was to think to myself "Oh, crap, there's an ambush coming...". No one else really seemed to think it or, if they did, they didn't say anything.

Latter on, I was asking myself why I had that thought, and it popped into my head that it was because all of what I "know" about war comes from reading and talking with people who have actually fought. Civilians fleeing an area in advance of combat is such a classic trope in the literature, that it had become ingrained as a sign in my mind (a "clue" in the Piercian sense) with a very high probability that the civilians knew an ambush was coming and were fleeing the area. Why couldn't the commander see this (and, BTW, he didn't - he got caught badly)?

Bringing it back, does this mean that our experiences condition our perceptions? personally, I would say yes, but in more ways than we would like to think.

One of the key tropes of the conference was on "adaptability" - a term I dislike for a number of reasons, but mainly because it is used incorrectly. Anyway, how could that commander have been trained to think "adaptively" and avoid the ensuing debacle? Where my mind is going now is towards what I'm starting to call the tyranny of lexicality. Thinking through long term effects, "taking the long view", tends to be defined as a matter of "strategy" and "grand strategy", which is the prvince of generals and politicians, not CPTs. This means that implicitly CPTs are supposed to fix their perceptual and interpretive lens on a limited number of "in the present" and "in the short term" stories of what they should be doing. If they don't, then they will get hammered by the organization (that's a general observation of probabilities). Indeed, a commanders intent actually serves to define the universe of discourse and, by implication, the universe of perception.

Anyway, that's where my brain is heading at the moment. I'll see what other neuronal drivel comes out later .

Cheers,

Marc