Design for military operations

[slapout9]

What I found confusing was the concept that somehow Design had become separated from systems analysis or systems engineering!!! It used to be called Brain Storming (I think) but it was the first step and progressed through planning and engineering to make sure it was feasible. Anyhow here is the entire process that Colonel Warden teaches for over 10 years now. Design is the first and hadest step.

Short version: is Design-Target-Campaign-Finish.

Long Version: is Design The Future-Target for Success-Campaign to Win-Finish with Finesse.

[Bob's World]

Maybe some of this helps (From a briefing on SOD):

Strategic Appreciation and Design is a New Approach
Relies on an open-ended critical method.
Strategic Appreciation generates an improved understanding of the larger system in any situation with any scope or depth.
Design is concerned with creation of systems-of-actions designed to exploit identified tendencies and potentials, in order to change existing situations in desired directions.

Why is Strategic Appreciation and Design needed?
We often act before we understand our situation well enough.
As a result, we define our problems incorrectly, which leads us to apply the wrong solutions.
Ill-conceived solutions for ill-defined problems actually create greater problems.
This new approach encourages the free movement of good ideas and makes the reasoning of our actions more transparent, helping us to see how to improve what we are doing.

What is different about Strategic Appreciation and Design?
Challenges and improves our normal thought processes and decision procedures.
Focuses on a more robust form of intellectual leadership defined as the ability for an organization to move good ideas around.

Before, during, and after imposing solutions to solve problems.
Strategic Appreciation and Design is time intensive, and works best when considering future action. It is also a sound method for assessing current operations, and evaluating past actions.

The goal of Design is the creation of more favorable, self-sustaining situations.
Assessment shifts away from learning about any single action to a focus on monitoring transformation of the system itself and sustaining sensitivity to the need to make adjustments by reframing both system understanding and operational approaches to better deal with emerging conditions.

As the diagram shows (I know, what diagram? If I can figure out how to paste it in I will), reframing can occur at any point where new knowledge is developed that challenges existing understanding of the system.
As understanding increases, formulate actions to transform the system to meet our aims; identify potentials, opportunities, risks to these actions; identify how to ensure self-regulation of system after our inject in the system.
Pay attention to the creation of a learning structure to enable observation of the system during action.

[Bob's World]

Design Diagram.jpg

[J Wolfsberger]

What I found confusing was the concept that somehow Design had become separated from systems analysis or systems engineering!!! It used to be called Brain Storming (I think) but it was the first step and progressed through planning and engineering to make sure it was feasible. Anyhow here is the entire process that Colonel Warden teaches for over 10 years now. Design is the first and hadest step.

Short version: is Design-Target-Campaign-Finish.

Long Version: is Design The Future-Target for Success-Campaign to Win-Finish with Finesse.

In the 1970s, I was taught that the first step in addressing a problem was "qualitative system analysis." (The text I was given to get a handle on the technique was On Thermonuclear War by Herman Kahn.) The process consisted of expanding the problem as given to include "the whole world." After doing so, you began to shrink it back down. The purpose of the exercise was:

1. Make sure you were solving the right problem. On several occasions the SA/SE group would be tasked with optimizing X, only to come back with the answer that "X" wasn't the issue.
2. Account for the non-quantifiable dimensions of the problem. It's possible to come up with a count of victims of the Rwanda Genocide. But the event and aftermath are governed by the hate of the perpetrators and the anger and grief of the survivors. Those are thing that cannot be quantified, but they will dominate any attempt at resolution. Failure to do this leads to such stupidity as suggesting the survivors should "just get over it," which actively and strongly prevents resolution.
3. Ensure you've accounted for everything. That goes beyond declaring something relevant, to explicitly determining what isn't relevant with an explanation as to why. I know of at least one combat system (actually a subsystem) under development today that will never see production because the proponents and developer refuse to account for the fact it will be used in combat. (Yes, it really is that bad.)

I think the paper you attached as well as the paper by BG Czege are advocating exactly this kind of approach. I'm really glad to see people getting back to it.