TSLC March 2010

[marct]

Hi TAB,

Tony Wagner (one of the speakers at TSLC) said that change occurs incrementally, so we can expect incremental progress in this regard. But I submit that there is another way. Evolution did (does) not happen incrementally or on a steady glidepath. It occurs in fits and starts. For eons there will be a near-plateau effect of change, and then, for no discernible reason, lifeforms will make great leaps along the evolutionary path. I have not read any articles or findings that have revealed the nature of these leaps, but there had to have been some sort of catalyst.

I assume you are talking about a punctuated equilibrium model of evolution here and it is, IMO, a minor possibility. The "changes" you refer to do happen for quite discernible reasons: fluctuating environments, parcellation and local extinctions being the main ones (cf W. Calvin, Six Essentials). Applying these to the current situation vis a vis "learning" / "education" within TRADOC is somewhat tricky.

The first catalyst, fluctuating environments, appears to have a certain amount of face value until you look at the actual environment in which TRADOC operates, i.e. competition between organizations for funding within the US governmental structure. Still, an argument can be made along those lines.

The second and third catalysts, parcellation and local extinction, are barely applicable to TRADOC in the current situation, although parcellation has more applicability than local extinction (for this, think about the fall of the Soviet Union).

What we are dealing with, at least in general, evolutionary terms, is a combination of these three catalysts operating on different time spans. Since cultural evolution operates differently than biological evolution, we have to be careful about extending the theory to it either really or rhetorically.

I'm too old to be naive and too young to know everything, but who says that the catalyst for the evolution of Army Learning wasn't sitting in the room in Williamsburg earlier this week?

A point mutation argument? Unlikely in the extreme unless there was a catastrophic event along the lines of a Road to Damascus conversion that hit the entire group assembled there . Far more likely that the event marked a slight "hardening" of selection criteria and, in all probability, only of positive selection criteria.

I welcomed the sight of so many leaders who were leaning forward through thought and action. The proof is, indeed, in the pudding, but we should all be eager to work on any program whose end goal is the improvement of a soldier's ability to learn.

I saw a similar attitude at the TSLC last August, and I have been using it as an excellent example of how to conduct cultural engineering inside an hierarchical organization. I would urge you, however, to beware of group think memes such as "we should all be eager to work" since that is, actually, counter to the stated thrust of the entire revamping of the PME system.

Cheers,

Marc