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Thread: The Army Capstone Concept: the Army wants your comments

  1. #121
    Council Member marct's Avatar
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    Hi Wilf,

    Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
    Mate, all fascinating, but with respect, so what? Seriously, what is the big problem? Seriously, the agenda here from the "WOW-COIN" generation is to try and say that today A'Stan and Iraq are more "complex" than was Vietnam, the Lebanon and/or even Mogadishu.

    Really? Does anyone really believe that?
    A gut guess would be that they do believe it (whoever "they" may be ) for two reasons. The first is that the nice little mental state of "We Understand War" has been blown up because "they" didn't understand these wars. So calling the current setting increasingly "complex" is a reaction to having nice conventional perceptual models destroyed. The second reason, IMHO, has to do with changes in budgets over the past couple of years (i.e. inter- and intra- organizational squabbling over the budgetary pie).

    What I'm going to write next might sound like an indictment of TRADOC, but it is not meant that way - I am using them, and this document, as an example of how large organizations operate, so please bear that in mind .

    All large, hierarchical organizations rely on standardized knowledge "bytes", i.e. the ability to construct a representational model of their claimed area of responsibility that is a) internally consistent, b) makes "sense", and c) allows for parsing out sub-tasks to specific offices (not individuals; for any interested academics, this is drawing of of Weber's concept of rational-legal authority, Mary Douglas' How Institutions Think, and Abbotts The System of the Professions). These "knowledge bytes" (Abbot calls them Tasks), are assigned to locations in the organizational status system (offices, ranks, branches, MOS, etc.), and are assumed to operate at a minimal level that meets the requirements perceived when they were created (the time element is crucial here).

    Now, these organizations compete with other organizations for both resources and, also, for the social "right" to "own" a task-space. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of "professional" organizations is that they exercise, with varying degrees of success, a monopoly over the social right to conduct these tasks and, at the same time, over access to their knowledge systems.

    Now, these knowledge systems are all about the containment of socially perceived risk. If a society views a risk as "low", then the resources associated with it tend to be lower, while the obverse is true - high perceived risk leads (generally) to higher resource allocations. Now, playing Darwinian here an applying some natural selection models, how do you think that these organizations will act in the public sphere? Are they going to say that "Things are getting easier"? Nope, things will always be getting "harder", the risk area must always be getting more "complex", simply so that the organization can keep getting a share of the social resources.

    But it is also a balancing act; organizations cannot, under any circumstances, allow the decision makers who parse out resources to believe that they are incapable of somehow handling the risk; that would be an admission that their entire knowledge system, and organization, etc., is fatally flawed and would, inevitably, lead to the de-professionalization of the knowledge area or, at least, to a loss of the monopolistic hold of one organization over that area or parts of it (BTW, the history of organized religion over the past 1000 years or so in the West is a good case example of this process).

    Now part of this "balancing act" is the construction of a social perception amongst decision makers that the "professionals" know what they are doing. Part of the process of constructing this impression is constructing rhetorical arguments that have enough symbols in them that mesh with the decision makers prejudices (think of it as an IO campaign by the profession aimed at the decision makers). When we look at this document, several of these symbols just jump out: "adaptive", "complex", "unique", etc. They are not used in a semantically rigorous manner; they are used for their emotional impact on the minds of decision makers.

    The goal of documents like this is to lay out an emotionally satisfying vision statement that reinforces the perception amongst decision makers that the professional group a) knows what it needs to do, b) is capable of doing it, and c) "understands" their (the decision makers) concerns. At the same time, the document also has to serve as a semantic map for changes made by the professional organization, so the same symbols that are used for their emotional resonance amongst external decision makers also must be capable of being interpreted by members of the profession, i.e. those who have access to the knowledge set, as being "reasonable" and desirable. In order to convey this "double message" as it were, the document must be vague and mildly alarmist without alienating either the decision makers or the members of the profession (BTW, a similar type of document is the recent AAA report on the HTS).

    So, back to your question Wilf. I think you have identified the agenda incorrectly; it's not "to try and say that today A'Stan and Iraq are more "complex" than was Vietnam, the Lebanon and/or even Mogadishu" so much as to say "there is a risk and we know how to handle it". The document uses a rhetorical proof set aimed at non-professional decision makers rather than an intra-profession argument and really should be read, at least to my mind, with that in mind. The intra-professional argument will be showing up over the next few months with the production of documents relating to actual changes and their rationales.
    Sic Bisquitus Disintegrat...
    Marc W.D. Tyrrell, Ph.D.
    Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies,
    Senior Research Fellow,
    The Canadian Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, NPSIA
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  2. #122
    Council Member Ken White's Avatar
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    Default Yes, indeed...

    Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
    ...The first is that the nice little mental state of "We Understand War" has been blown up because "they" didn't understand these wars. So calling the current setting increasingly "complex" is a reaction to having nice conventional perceptual models destroyed. The second reason, IMHO, has to do with changes in budgets over the past couple of years (i.e. inter- and intra- organizational squabbling over the budgetary pie).
    As I said back in September:

    ""It is, broadly, a waste of time and the taxpayer's dollar -- but it is the way we do business. (emphasis added / kw)

    It is, as someone mentioned, as much a pre-budgetary guide as it is a pre-doctrinal guide. It isn't a schedule and certainly isn't a map, it is an Echelons Above Reality encapsulation of syllabus. Maybe not even that, maybe a prospectus."
    "

    As you say so well:
    ...Nope, things will always be getting "harder", the risk area must always be getting more "complex", simply so that the organization can keep getting a share of the social resources.

    ...The document uses a rhetorical proof set aimed at non-professional decision makers rather than an intra-profession argument and really should be read, at least to my mind, with that in mind...

  3. #123
    Council Member Hacksaw's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
    The goal of documents like this is to lay out an emotionally satisfying vision statement that reinforces the perception amongst decision makers that the professional group a) knows what it needs to do, b) is capable of doing it, and c) "understands" their (the decision makers) concerns. At the same time, the document also has to serve as a semantic map for changes made by the professional organization, so the same symbols that are used for their emotional resonance amongst external decision makers also must be capable of being interpreted by members of the profession, i.e. those who have access to the knowledge set, as being "reasonable" and desirable. In order to convey this "double message" as it were, the document must be vague and mildly alarmist without alienating either the decision makers or the members of the profession (BTW, a similar type of document is the recent AAA report on the HTS).
    So, back to your question Wilf. I think you have identified the agenda incorrectly; it's not "to try and say that today A'Stan and Iraq are more "complex" than was Vietnam, the Lebanon and/or even Mogadishu" so much as to say "there is a risk and we know how to handle it". The document uses a rhetorical proof set aimed at non-professional decision makers rather than an intra-profession argument and really should be read, at least to my mind, with that in mind. The intra-professional argument will be showing up over the next few months with the production of documents relating to actual changes and their rationales.

    MARCT,
    A disclaimer first... I have seen the the TRADOC enemy and he is I... In one way or another I have worked with/for TRADOC or a subordinate command for the last six years... The entire portion I deleted... I think was spot on... it PERFECTLY described how the bureacracy of TRADOC "works"...

    The only real issue I take with your assessment is that the concept is an explicit attempt by TRADOC to sway resource decision makers in the manner you describe... Rather, I think TRADOC presumes it's monopoly/legitimacy to address these issues...However, I do agree that the document (at least explicitly) is intended to only drive the internal mechanisms you describe...

    What I won't hazard to debate (because I stood/stand to close to the TRADOC hearth) is whether the messaging to resource managers is the de facto self licking ice cream cone portion of TRADOC's relationship with that audience... very real possibility of that - I just have seen no evidence that anyone from Gen Dempsey down to the lowest GS employee views the Capstone Concept in that manner...

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  4. #124
    Council Member marct's Avatar
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    Hi Hacksaw,

    Quote Originally Posted by Hacksaw View Post
    The only real issue I take with your assessment is that the concept is an explicit attempt by TRADOC to sway resource decision makers in the manner you describe... Rather, I think TRADOC presumes it's monopoly/legitimacy to address these issues...However, I do agree that the document (at least explicitly) is intended to only drive the internal mechanisms you describe...
    I think you are quite right that "TRADOC presumes its monopoly / legitimacy to address these issue" and I certainly haven't seen anything that would indicate otherwise. Let me just take issue with the "explicit attempt" interpretation of what I wrote.

    Part of the problem with how organizations and organizational cultures operate is that they frequently obscure the rationale for why something is done in a certain manner; it becomes "tradition" or "just the ways it's done". Let me give you an amusing example....

    Have you heard of "Honourary Colonels"? A couple of years back, Canadian comedian Rick Mercer was appointed one (see here). Now, originally, the institution was designed as a way of bridging between a defanged aristocracy and a professional military such that the always cash strapped army regiments could get some needed resources without tapping into the Crown's purse. A nice trade-off whereby an aristocrat could gain social status and a regiment could gain a patron at court and needed resources. Well, nowadays, it's unlikely that people like Mercer will provide much in the way of operationally relevant resources (like, say uniforms which used to be a fairly common one), but it still acts as a moral booster. We just don't see questions about "Why do we do this?", we just do it - it is a tradition.

    For 200+ years now, TRADOC and their precursors have been dealing with Congress in a similar manner in documents like this - it's a "tradition" - that doesn't require an explicit attempt; it just "is".

    Quote Originally Posted by Hacksaw View Post
    What I won't hazard to debate (because I stood/stand to close to the TRADOC hearth) is whether the messaging to resource managers is the de facto self licking ice cream cone portion of TRADOC's relationship with that audience... very real possibility of that - I just have seen no evidence that anyone from Gen Dempsey down to the lowest GS employee views the Capstone Concept in that manner...
    Ah, should have clarified - I wasn't talking about the ACC, I was talking about the ALDS.

    Cheers,

    Marc
    Sic Bisquitus Disintegrat...
    Marc W.D. Tyrrell, Ph.D.
    Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies,
    Senior Research Fellow,
    The Canadian Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, NPSIA
    Carleton University
    http://marctyrrell.com/

  5. #125
    Council Member William F. Owen's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
    A gut guess would be that they do believe it (whoever "they" may be ) for two reasons. The first is that the nice little mental state of "We Understand War" has been blown up because "they" didn't understand these wars. So calling the current setting increasingly "complex" is a reaction to having nice conventional perceptual models destroyed.
    MarcT mate,

    I do, to a limited extent, understand the human, emotional and organisational behaviour I am witnessing, but I don't want to let it slide. The system is constantly defended by virtue of being "the system." It's the "hate the game, not the player" argument - and that is the source of all the sophistry and evidence free assertions that permeate this thing passing for debate.

    Until someone hits the re-set button the error is likely to compound.
    Infinity Journal "I don't care if this works in practice. I want to see it work in theory!"

    - The job of the British Army out here is to kill or capture Communist Terrorists in Malaya.
    - If we can double the ratio of kills per contact, we will soon put an end to the shooting in Malaya.
    Sir Gerald Templer, foreword to the "Conduct of Anti-Terrorist Operations in Malaya," 1958 Edition

  6. #126
    Council Member marct's Avatar
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    Hi Wilf,

    Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
    I do, to a limited extent, understand the human, emotional and organisational behaviour I am witnessing, but I don't want to let it slide. The system is constantly defended by virtue of being "the system." It's the "hate the game, not the player" argument - and that is the source of all the sophistry and evidence free assertions that permeate this thing passing for debate.

    Until someone hits the re-set button the error is likely to compound.
    The scary part is that I don't disagree with you - then again, as Stan keeps saying, I'm a hopeless romantic .

    Personally, I'm just assuming that the ALDS is (roughly) what I outlined and I'm waiting for the real meat to come out - the operationalization of it.

    In many ways, TRADOC is in a very "interesting" situation. They have a window of opportunity to get at least part of a "re-set" going and, from what I have seen, read and heard, they are actually trying to do that. The truly unfortunate thing is that they just don't have control over the "system", so they can't do a system "re-set".

    I've been trying to work out (to my own satisfaction) what they would need to do and, quite frankly, the list of modifications is somewhat scary. I mentioned some of the HR issues in an earlier post responding to Rob, but some of the other things include actually developing technologies and techniques to identify talents for situated leadership potential and then figuring out techniques for nurturing the right balance of those talents.

    Another part of what they need to do is to figure out what we might call an optimal "talent balance" - too many talented "war fighters" and too few logistics types will also lead to failure, but too much of a cultural split between them will lead to intra-organizational faction fights - the collapse of the Byzantine Empire is a classic example of that one - while the cultural knowledge vs "conventional" split is nicely exemplified in the dangers of the Barracks Emperors period (~3rd century ce Rome). In some ways, the optimal model is along the lines of an "ecclesiam", but that requires a lot of balancing.

    Sometimes, I suspect it's all just my brain running away with analogs

    Cheers,

    Marc
    Sic Bisquitus Disintegrat...
    Marc W.D. Tyrrell, Ph.D.
    Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies,
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    The Canadian Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, NPSIA
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  7. #127
    Council Member Hacksaw's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
    Ah, should have clarified - I wasn't talking about the ACC, I was talking about the ALDS.
    Ewww....

    OK that is an explicit dialogue with the resource decision makers... so we are in complete/total/unequivocal agreement...

    and WILF...

    you are right as well, but then again...

    I think all this rhetoric, really covers up the issue that we in the US Army presumed was not an issue...

    Our education systems were not rigorous enough... we had fallen into a paradigm in which the real hard "teaching" occurred at the CTCs... we said we were teaching how and not what to think, but in fact we were only in rare cases teaching exactly what to think...

    In other words we bought our own bill of goods....

    I think this document uses those terms and coaching the issues the way it does to both address that we need to be far better in teaching Soldiers how to deal with wicked problems... without explicitly acknowledging that we ought to have been doing better

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  8. #128
    Council Member Bill Jakola's Avatar
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    http://www.army.mil/-news/2009/12/09...tegy-released/

    Okay, here is the link to the TRADOC News Stroy and ALDS document.

    I enjoy the discussion you all are having over the ALDS; and, it is important to think of the ALDS as a strategic document. In doing so, we need to place the ideas contained within the ALDS in a strategic context, because context is critical to most things and especially important in war. Thus, answering your questions of how the ALDS impacts the budgetary process or helps reset TRADOC or the Army at large will help our understanding of where this leader development strategy fits in the larger concept for organizational change.

    Here is our thinking from my foxhole. Over the last year, General Dempsey and the team here at TRADOC have thought deeply about organizational change and as we transition into year two, of his command, we are focusing on implementing many of the changes we identified in year one. Therefore , for those paying attention, we can expect to see more detail and context; and that will help our understanding of the our doctrinal changes, e.g., ALDS and the Army CapStone Concept, as well as, the new FM 5.0 with its chapter on design.
    Last edited by marct; 12-11-2009 at 02:14 PM. Reason: Link fixed

  9. #129
    Council Member William F. Owen's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bill Jakola View Post
    Therefore , for those paying attention, we can expect to see more detail and context; and that will help our understanding of the our doctrinal changes, e.g., ALDS and the Army CapStone Concept, as well as, the new FM 5.0 with its chapter on design.
    I can't save you from the sophistry of "Design," but what context and detail gets invented and made up, I guess I can at least challenge.
    Infinity Journal "I don't care if this works in practice. I want to see it work in theory!"

    - The job of the British Army out here is to kill or capture Communist Terrorists in Malaya.
    - If we can double the ratio of kills per contact, we will soon put an end to the shooting in Malaya.
    Sir Gerald Templer, foreword to the "Conduct of Anti-Terrorist Operations in Malaya," 1958 Edition

  10. #130
    Council Member marct's Avatar
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    Hi Bill,

    Quote Originally Posted by Bill Jakola View Post
    I enjoy the discussion you all are having over the ALDS; and, it is important to think of the ALDS as a strategic document. In doing so, we need to place the ideas contained within the ALDS in a strategic context, because context is critical to most things and especially important in war. Thus, answering your questions of how the ALDS impacts the budgetary process or helps reset TRADOC or the Army at large will help our understanding of where this leader development strategy fits in the larger concept for organizational change.
    I'm going to play semantician for a minute, here. I think that one of the crucial problems many of us have had with this document and similar ones surrounds the use of the word "strategy". I certainly can't speak for the other people here (they'd shoot me if I did ), but I suspect that many of us have been using a specific rather than general understanding of the term.

    Does TRADOC use the term "strategy", as applied to documents such as this, as a way of defining a visioned end state within an environment composed of "peer competitors"? If it does, how are you currently seeing these "peer competitors" (nation states? other services? other departments? other providers of overlapping current tasks? current/future opponents?).

    I'm asking for this because I think it will have a major impact in several areas, including recommendations for specific operationalizations.

    Quote Originally Posted by Bill Jakola View Post
    Here is our thinking from my foxhole. Over the last year, General Dempsey and the team here at TRADOC have thought deeply about organizational change and as we transition into year two, of his command, we are focusing on implementing many of the changes we identified in year one. Therefore , for those paying attention, we can expect to see more detail and context; and that will help our understanding of the our doctrinal changes, e.g., ALDS and the Army CapStone Concept, as well as, the new FM 5.0 with its chapter on design.
    One of the things I learned a while back after being involved in and studying major organizational re-engineering is that it takes quite a while to make changes at the level of "informal organizational culture". So, not doctrine, not "Concepts", and not "strategies" but, rather, the automatic, assumed reactions to stimuli; the organizational narratives if you will. "Official (or Formal) culture", the documents, vision statements, etc. are crucial but, in the long run, they are pretty useless unless there is a solid grounding in lived experience (the "informal culture"), so when we see successful organizational re-engineering, it has a tendency to focus on the lived reality part as the primary focus.

    Seeing "more detail and context" as you put it, will be crucial, but putting that detail and context into action as a day-to-day, lived reality for people will be the key to actually changing the informal culture. This, BTW, was part of the reason why I was mentioning HR issues in an earlier post, and why I have talked a bit about the use of "mentoring".

    Bill, if I haven't said it before, then let me say "Thanks" for posting these documents and getting these discussions going here !

    Cheers,

    Marc
    Sic Bisquitus Disintegrat...
    Marc W.D. Tyrrell, Ph.D.
    Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies,
    Senior Research Fellow,
    The Canadian Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, NPSIA
    Carleton University
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  11. #131
    Council Member Ken White's Avatar
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    Default Bill, I think part of the problem TRADOC faces

    Quote Originally Posted by Bill Jakola View Post
    http://www.army.mil/-news/2009/12/09...tegy-released/

    Okay, here is the link to the TRADOC News Stroy and ALDS document.
    is engendered by 1919 Personnel and Force Structure system that impacts everything you do. You can tweak the training but that will never adequately correct for the major systemic flaws that have built up over years of resistance to change (including on the part of the Congress...).

    For example, aside from a Personnel system lost in a time warp, we have structure and grade problems that it creates and that are exacerbated by dysfunctional force design.

    Company commanders should be Majors, and each should have two CPTs, a supporter and a trainer of the LTs who are PLs (period) as well as a 1SG who's the trainer of the enlisted swine AND an Admin Spt NCO (7 or 8) as well as 6 or 7 Operations and Training NCO (peacetime) / Intel NCO (wartime).
    Companies are undermanned; Bn and Bde Staffs are way overmanned.

    Thus you are trying to train an organization that is really not well organized and one that has to adapt on an ad-hoc basis for every war. Fortunately, we have in the past done ad-hoc well. I'm not all sure we can reliably do that in the future...

    I'm sure General Dempsey is very much aware that he effectively wears two hats, director of training for the US Army -- and the proponent for the DOCTRINE that drives both the personnel system and force structure. Or should. I do not question that it should. I question that it does in fact do so.

    Improving leader training is important -- improving the force they lead is equally important. Good, well trained leaders can overcome dysfunctional organization and doctrine but they can perform so much better if those impediments are removed.

    As you said:
    Thus, answering your questions of how the ALDS impacts the budgetary process or helps reset TRADOC or the Army at large will help our understanding of where this leader development strategy fits in the larger concept for organizational change.(emphasis added /kw)

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    Ken:

    In grad school many, many years ago, my prof needed an article on national-level Industrial Policy, so I researched and researched....

    Lot's of articles, books, quotes. Distilled to: "Knowledge is transferable but wisdom is not."

    Yours is, perhaps, a more precise and focused version:

    "Improving leader training is important -- improving the force they lead is equally important. Good, well trained leaders can overcome dysfunctional organization and doctrine but they can perform so much better if those impediments are removed."

    Steve

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    Council Member Bill Jakola's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post

    Does TRADOC use the term "strategy", as applied to documents such as this, as a way of defining a visioned end state within an environment composed of "peer competitors"? If it does, how are you currently seeing these "peer competitors" (nation states? other services? other departments? other providers of overlapping current tasks? current/future opponents?).
    Marc,

    Again, this is my view: This concept of an end state is worth exploring because it is a key to understanding how I view the changes at TRADOC. The term "end state" does not accurately convey the nature of warfare in general, or the current conflicts and environments we face. The idea of moving to a specific set of conditions where we reach an end is misleading because warfare is a subset of politics, and political relations flow over a wide range human interactions—including diplomatic discourse and armed conflict—that never really come to an end; although there are important and achievable intermediate goals or ends that people work toward. Since, we know political/military interaction is a continuous or ongoing process we should prepare our forces for the reality of this understanding.

    In addition, our view of the complexity in warfare is different than it was during the Cold War. Then, our understanding allowed us to prepare our forces with a high degree of tactical proficiency in certain specific skills that dealt primarily with the application of mass fire power and battlefield maneuver of large mobile units. I am not saying we did not have to fight other types of battles; however, conventional logic of the time said that, if we prepare for the most dangerous situation we would be prepared for lesser threats. Thus, if the cold bipolar superpower struggle between the U.S. and the Soviets ever went hot, the West prepared to achieve a specific end state i.e., the destruction of the “the enemy”. This end state view meant a complete domination of one side over the other.

    Moreover, this type of warfare was no more or less complex than any other type of warfare, but because of how we planned to fight the Cold War—that is by synchronizing large mobile units and massive firepower—and the threat we faced—massive mechanized and armor formations—meant that only a relatively few senior commanders of a centralized hierarchy needed to fully understand these complexities, while the subordinate units all executed in close coordination from the top. In other words, we built a large hierarchical organization that required the vast majority of leaders to execute set tasks and battle drills (e.g., mission essential task list (METL)) with little consideration of the complex nuance we now require of all leaders. Now after the end of the Cold War and especially after more than eight years of war since 11 Sep 01, we understand that most, if not all, of our junior field grade and company leaders need to fully comprehend the complexities that have always existed in warfare.

    Thus, I see the leader development strategy as an effort to arm leaders at every level with the mental agility and resilience required to conduct complex problem solving. Since, many things we need to accomplish are not in our control and, we have to rely on the assistance of others, like local political bosses, religious heads, and tribal chiefs, to achieve results; our leaders need the people skills to influence others. This requires more than just issuing orders at rifle point; it means team building, and all the other interpersonal skills to convince people to behave the way we desire.


    Bill
    Last edited by Bill Jakola; 12-14-2009 at 02:02 AM.

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    Council Member slapout9's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
    One of the things I learned a while back after being involved in and studying major organizational re-engineering is that it takes quite a while to make changes at the level of "informal organizational culture". So, not doctrine, not "Concepts", and not "strategies" but, rather, the automatic, assumed reactions to stimuli; the organizational narratives if you will. "Official (or Formal) culture", the documents, vision statements, etc. are crucial but, in the long run, they are pretty useless unless there is a solid grounding in lived experience (the "informal culture"), so when we see successful organizational re-engineering, it has a tendency to focus on the lived reality part as the primary focus.


    Marc
    MarcT,Bill Jakola, thought you guys might be interested in this adaption of Warden's rings relative to Marct's post here.

    http://customerinnovations.wordpress...er-experience/

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    Council Member Bill Jakola's Avatar
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    Slapout9,

    Okay, I see how Systems Thinking may be of use in business; and, this Wordpress blog post uses a five ring model, similar to Warden's, to argue that leadership is key to organizational change. This seems like a no brainer conclusion; and is totally in agreement with what I was saying earlier about the our focus on leader development as critical to making the Army more adaptive to the environment that we must operate within and threats we must counter.

    However, the blog seems to infer that it is only necessary to focus on the center leadership ring and only on the most senior level of leadership to make these organizational changes. Specifically, Mr. Capek says "I will make the case that focusing on front-line employees is generally NOT the most important place to start if your goal is to significantly improve the customers’ experience." But as I attempted to explain in my last post, front line leaders now need the skills that these senior leader have always needed. We are not talking about changing the senior leaders as much as providing all leaders with the skills that the seniors already possess.

    Bill Jakola

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    Council Member slapout9's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bill Jakola View Post
    Slapout9,

    Okay, I see how Systems Thinking may be of use in business; and, this Wordpress blog post uses a five ring model, similar to Warden's, to argue that leadership is key to organizational change. This seems like a no brainer conclusion; and is totally in agreement with what I was saying earlier about the our focus on leader development as critical to making the Army more adaptive to the environment that we must operate within and threats we must counter.

    However, the blog seems to infer that it is only necessary to focus on the center leadership ring and only on the most senior level of leadership to make these organizational changes. Specifically, Mr. Capek says "I will make the case that focusing on front-line employees is generally NOT the most important place to start if your goal is to significantly improve the customers’ experience." But as I attempted to explain in my last post, front line leaders now need the skills that these senior leader have always needed. We are not talking about changing the senior leaders as much as providing all leaders with the skills that the seniors already possess.

    Bill Jakola

    Hi Bill, I think he is agreeing with you because he goes on to state the following. Particularly the 3 major rings of leadership,unwritten rules,and IT systems to support the change.

    Copied from the website:
    Most systems are surprisingly resistant to change. Unless these three components that are close to the Center of Gravity are addressed in a coordinated and holistic way, I would expect that efforts to train, motivate, and engage front-line employees will lead to marginal results.


    Relative to the Military I would substitute front line employees for Jr. Officers.

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    Council Member marct's Avatar
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    Hi Guys,

    Quote Originally Posted by Bill Jakola View Post
    However, the blog seems to infer that it is only necessary to focus on the center leadership ring and only on the most senior level of leadership to make these organizational changes.
    Quote Originally Posted by slapout9 View Post
    Relative to the Military I would substitute front line employees for Jr. Officers.
    If you are looking for a private industry example of organizational change that makes more sense, take a look at the case of KLM Royal Dutch Airlines in the late 1970's; it is a very close analog. In that case, by ~1975, KLM had dropped about 6-7 points in market share, down into the low teens, and brought in a new CEO.

    His first couple of months was spent looking at complaints from customers about frustrating experiences with front line employees. Figuring that this was the key driver behind market share loss, he started working as a ticketing agent (can't remember which airport), and realized that the organizational regulations totally hemmed in the front line workers to the point that they could not make any responsive decisions but had to pass it back up the line (in military terms, an insane ROE combined with totally inappropriate METL). In order to solve this, he required that all senior executives had to spend 2-3 weeks out of every quarter working in a frontline position (think about a 2 star General running a squad). Within the space of a year, the rules and regulations had been cut by a third (from ~60,000! down to ~40,000), and most of the rest had been harmonized so that the frontline workers had a wide range of allowable options to solve immediate problems.

    Where the senior leaders come in in this form of organizational re-engineering is in the area of "lived experience" as well as "push". The truly crucial "A ha!" experience came from those same leaders realizing that what looks good on paper interacts with everything else to turn a good idea into an operational nightmare. The forced experience of working in a frontline position meant that they had an immediate, in their gut, feel for any new regulations that were proposed.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bill Jakola View Post
    Thus, I see the leader development strategy as an effort to arm leaders at every level with the mental agility and resilience required to conduct complex problem solving. Since, many things we need to accomplish are not in our control and, we have to rely on the assistance of others, like local political bosses, religious heads, and tribal chiefs, to achieve results; our leaders need the people skills to influence others. This requires more than just issuing orders at rifle point; it means team building, and all the other interpersonal skills to convince people to behave the way we desire.
    If I may boil that down to:

    "Well educated officers who can implement US National Policy by using a variety of means to get others, using force if required, to do their will."

    If I have got this correct, when was this not the case? I understand the intent, but I can't see the novelty, unless the previous training was always inadequate. Is that what TRADOC does not want to admit?
    Infinity Journal "I don't care if this works in practice. I want to see it work in theory!"

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    - If we can double the ratio of kills per contact, we will soon put an end to the shooting in Malaya.
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    Quote Originally Posted by marct View Post
    Where the senior leaders come in in this form of organizational re-engineering is in the area of "lived experience" as well as "push". The truly crucial "A ha!" experience came from those same leaders realizing that what looks good on paper interacts with everything else to turn a good idea into an operational nightmare. The forced experience of working in a frontline position meant that they had an immediate, in their gut, feel for any new regulations that were proposed.
    That's why I say the best generals were the ones that started out as Privates

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    Quote Originally Posted by slapout9 View Post
    That's why I say the best generals were the ones that started out as Privates
    No disagreement there, Slap ! However, if the KLM model were actually implemented, it would be a case of each general has to become a sergeant for a tour !
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    Carleton University
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