Mike, thanks for mentioning the huddle aka collaboration. As an academic, I've seen two ideal types (in the Weberian sense) of this. The first involves collecting people who are "like minded" and will reinforce the "correctness" of what you write, while the second is closer to Red Teaming (I suspect that in academia it derives from the old Advocatus Diaboli position).

Of the two, the first reinforces any perceptual pathologies that are present. In effect, this type of collaboration is worse than useless, it is destructive of creative thinking. The second type, when done properly, identifies holes in one's thinking and may or may not produce creative solutions. Some of the research on organization culture seems to indicate that there is a strong correlation between HR practices (especially rewards and punishments) and styles of collaboration. As a rough rule of thumb, the more clearly laid out HR policies are in terms of ordering (e.g. promotion and pay structures in a linear form), the greater likelihood that "collaboration" will tend towards the first type.

Part of this seems to centre around the organizational culture's formalization of "problems"; i.e. how they are defined, who "owns" them, how the must be approached, what may or may not be considered as a legitimate problem, etc.

Let me take an example of this. Let's suppose that a critical "problem" in gaining support for an HN government centres around a local perception held by the populace that the governor of the area is "corrupt" (in quotes to indicate a level of corruption beyond the culturally accepted limit). Let us further suppose, for the sake of this example, that that condition is true. Gaining the support of the local populace for the HN "government" will be increasingly difficult as the depredations of the local governor go on unchecked. The local governor is, in effect, one of the greatest recruiting tools for the insurgents in the area. How are you going to define the problem in a manner that would allow a local (foreign) commander to "solve" it?

Will this planning process - design - encourage such problem identification and increase the likelihood that such "problems" will be acted on?