The Mumbo-Jumbo of Design

The video and the text helped me develop a view, although I'm not sure this view is the intent of the design process designed for the military.

The military in general relies on alogorithmic processes (step by step process) or models for solving problems. The military decision making process (MDMP) is an alogorithmic model of sorts (although inputs and outputs are not constrained by the model).

Design appears to be more of a heuristic model/process to enhance learning and discovery.

Maybe the integration of design flow is to first use operational design to explore and better understand the problem(s) in a holistic context. If our interpretation of design suggests a particular military mission would be helpful, then the military unit assigned that mission would still use MDMP, but the staff officers participating in the process would be able to provide better informed input on the pro's and con's of particular course of action.

I actually see more use for this design process at the Strategic-Operational level than the Operational-Tactical level. If we actually had a design process that would enable our national leaders to have a more holistic view it may help us develop wiser policy decisions. However, like any model/process garbage in equals garbage out. For these processes to work contrary views must be incorporated, otherwise we got back to group think and we'll still find ourselves making poor decisions.

Somewhat off topic, but not completely. I remember the first time we integrated a couple of female planners into a well established joint planning group, and it didn't take long for the group to see significant value from their views (women look at the world differently). Also had the experience of working recently, although briefly, with an officer who grew up in South L.A. and his views based on his perspective expanded the realm of possibilities and provided greater understanding. The point is diversity truly does add value, it isn't simply a politically correct slogan. Use design with a diverse audience providing input it will probably function as advertised. I'm over generalizing, but use design with a couple of white, MAJs or LTCs, and you'll get the same results we would have without it because there are no opposing views to inform their view.

I think design can bring value to the military, but you just can't shove it on top of what we do now to have the best result. Instead you will have redesign (pun intended) the entire decision making process.

Slap,

Thanks for the link to this article. Im somewhat of a closet fan of design, but I dont think design is ready to be brought out the closet just yet.

The quote below (from your link) I believe is targeting the deeply flawed practice of effects based operations (EBO) which led the military astray with bloated staffs focused on hopeless attempts to accurately measure a wide spectrum of effects and then attempt to attribute those measures of effectiveness to a particular operation (because we did X "we" created behavior Y), which ignored the reality that there are multiple factors in any environment that impact the decisions the populace may make or the price of tomatoes. EBO sounded good in theory, but in practice it came up short.

"It is very interesting to see an organization so defined by science and technology see the limitations of purely scientific thinking."

Realizing EBO as practiced was more harmful than useful some military advocates developed a new method to teach its members "how" to think about complex adaptive environments. Design accepts complexity and provides context that may be useful in helping commanders understand their operational environment. I think it provides a process for key leaders to take a step back from their tunnel vision view of the problem and get a more holistic view and see all (or at least more than they did previously) the factors influencing it, which in turn may allow for the commander and staff to envision creative indirect solutions that were not visible before.

What I dont fully understand is how it enables decision making. War has always been complex and chaotic, a good military planner works hard at getting from complex to simple (not to be confused with easy because it is hard work to get to simple and clearly thought out ideas). Despite all the noise and chaos a commander will have to deal with a good one will generally use MDMP to focus his effort on the essential tasks that analysis indicates will result in mission success. We have to accept complexity, but that doesnt in its self facilitate needed actions, so my questions for those who have studied and practiced design are how do you get from design to military (or ideally whole of government) action? What is design providing to the military that we dont have now?

Xenophon:

<i>Everyone sticks in a sentence or two or changes a term here and there. After about three staffings where dozens of people take their shots on the document, you get a pile of disconnected crap cooked in a pot to produce indescript mush.</i>

That explains a great deal. I've often looked at documents and thought that it's simply not possible for one person to think so incoherently. The process you describe provides a very credible alternative explanation.

AN:

<i>proponents contend that Design introduces a new way of "how to think" and emphasize things like collaboration & dialogue, competition of ideas/clash, confident commanders, humility/sense of fallibility, shared understanding, recorded results of work, learning organization and holistic understanding.</i>

Taken down to the fundamental level, though, is it really a "new way of thinking"? Or are we talking more about getting back to basics?

It's actually pretty difficult to find a "new way of thinking". There's been a fair bit of thinking done through history and most ways have been used already. It matters because when we announce that something is new it's easy to get fired up over the novelty and fail to give concepts the critical analysis they deserve.

<i>If semantics were the only issue it would not be a problem, except for the unfortunate individuals who have to read the documents and endure the presentations. Unfortunately language is the mirror of thought, and all too often sloppy, overweight, needlessly complex writing reflects thinking with the same characteristics.</i>

I would add to this problems with the development process itself. At least on the Marine side, these concepts get codified in a doctrinal pub, then staffed down throughout the organization. Everyone sticks in a sentence or two or changes a term here and there. After about three staffings where dozens of people take their shots on the document, you get a pile of disconnected crap cooked in a pot to produce indescript mush.

It's amazing to see. I'm currently in a job where I route a few of these down each week.

AN:
<i>
Dont all of these say the same thing?
</i>

We seem deeply committed to saying the same thing in racy new terms, advertising it as something revolutionary, and burying whatever inherent virtue the concept might have under a tidal wave of garbled verbiage and incomprehensible diagrams. Brevity and simplicity have apparently ceased to be virtues.

If semantics were the only issue it would not be a problem, except for the unfortunate individuals who have to read the documents and endure the presentations. Unfortunately language is the mirror of thought, and all too often sloppy, overweight, needlessly complex writing reflects thinking with the same characteristics.

I sometimes wonder what the past masters of these concepts would think of the way we present them... what Subotai Bahadur would think of our discourse on maneuver warfare (has anyone ever done it better?), or what Hannibal would think of our discourse on design.

correction: clutter on top of clutter (you knew what I meant, but I didn't want an English teacher correcting my paper).

Clutter on top clutter, and we keep piling on it, and the more we do so the further we get away from the truth, which was clearly visible before we covered it with EBO, design, metrics, human terrain teams, etc.

AN

The participation of commanders is always the key. I suspect if you were able to sit down and interview the great captains over the ages: Alexander, Ceasar, Napoleon, Grant, etc; (yes, of course I had to slip Grant in to the short list!) you would find that they would be both shocked and amused by the massive staffs we employ and the isolation of commanders.

They all rose to the tops of their professions for a variety of reasons, but I suspect most, if not all, had a talent for doing all the things we put in our doctrinal cookbooks in their heads.

Like Michalangelo could look at hundreds of blocks of marble and find the one that contained the David; these guys could absorb and process the vast amounts of inputs around them and understand what it was they must do to win.

We have artists too, but we force them to operate in a paint-by-number world. Many of our senior leaders today rose to where they are because they are masters of paint-by-numbers. Artists often make them nervous.

For EBO fans a commentary on NPR's marketplace is worth listening to. Even with quantifable data economic forecast models are generally worthless at predicting outcomes, and we think we can measure and predict outcomes with EBO in complex adaptive environments? We need to start a stop the madness movement.

A quote from the article: "Now, you probably knew that most economists failed to predict the 2007 recession. What's news is that even after the Great Recession arrived, our complicated models failed to recognize the new reality.

Bob Dylan sung it best: "You don't need a weatherman/To know which way the wind blows.""

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/09/21/pm-dont-bet-o…

We occasionally would tell the design guys that "Design is MDMP on steroids" and they would spin out of control (hey, they were trying to build a product to sell the military, and so probably overly focused on casting it as very different than MDMP, rather than as, more accurately, a new and important component to MDMP).

But steroids work, so no harm if the dose is right...

I see Mission Analysis in MDMP as important, but limited. Too Intel driven. One assesses the threat, the terrain, the mission statement, their own capabilities; but not the problem itself. In MDMP one never goes back to the commander and says: "Sir, you told us X, but we are here to explain to you why the actual answer is Y."

But in design you do. A couple of us went out to Leavenworth and shared some design products with two of the SAMS groups that were wrestling with Design, and when we shared that perspective you could see about half the group light up with "Yes!" and the other half turn pale with "You can't do that!"

Any commander who doesn't want his staff to think is not worth much. The military gets into a lot of F'd up situations because someone higher in the chain thinks "Let's invade Iraq to defeat al Qaeda"; and then just does MDMP to come up with three great COAs for how to invade Iraq to defeat al Qaeda. Under the principles of Design, a good staff would come back and say "You can't defeat al Qaeda by invading Iraq and here is why, but you can get at defeating them in the following ways. However, if you really are just set on invading Iraq, know that it won't likely defeat al Qaeda and will likely produce the following immediate and higher effects; and here are three great COAs for how to do it, designed to mitigate the negative effects as much as possible, and to also have the greatest affect on al Qaeda."

I don't know if the military is ready for the culture of design. The process they will figure out in short order.

I am a long time reader of SWJ, but not contributor, for the simple reason that, I'm a retired naval aviator, not snake eater, and thus read to learn, not write to expose my inexperience on the ground in combat (and for that, I remain thankful - Scotch under the bunk on good ole USS Big Boat was always nice to return too.)

I have the articles out of SAMS and the Design Text and have been studying in context not of Army/military use, but rather as a possibly unique tool for the diaster planning world in context of what Dr. Erwan Lagadec at John Hopkins notes as "Unconventional Crisis." In the most simple terms, an "unconventional crisis" is one through size, unexpecteness, cascading, magnitude of stakeholders, destabilizes the leadership in charge of response and recovery - in other terms, the "CAT 5s."

He suggests that because many disaster playbooks are behavioral reaction based plans, implementing them when faced with an unconventional event can be exactly the wrong thing to do. So how indeed, does one prepare here? "Design" and focus on "reflection" in parallel to operational planning holds interest. I want to add more but as preliminary I offer a synopsis I find most pertinent on command in highly stochastic events from a 1983 Air University Center for Aerospace Doctrine, Research, and Education,
Maxwell Air Force Base by Major George Orr:

Chapter III, Command of the Combat Operations Process from "Combat Operations C3I: Fundamentals and Interactions" argues that the nature of combat makes command of combat operations vastly different from other managerial or process control tasks. This argument is based on three observations:

1.The nature of combat is such that the commanders decisions do not always determine the results of the combat.
2.Even when the commanders decision does have significant impact, the probabilistic or stochastic nature of the combat process means that the commander is only influencing the probability of outcomes rather than directly controlling.
3.Even the probabilistic structure of the combat of the combat process is unstable. This makes the predictions of outcomes extremely difficult.

These observations indicate that usual managerial and control techniques, which are essentially based on the notion of controlling outcomes or results, are insufficient to define commanders function. The stochastic nature of combat and the varying degree of actual command decision impact on the combat process suggest that the primary function of command in combat is managing sources of potential power in order to be able to exploit opportunities as they arise.

In cases where decisive control of results is possible, command is concerned with controlling results to obtain the best results possible. In severely stochastic situations, the best that can be done is to manipulate the initial state to achieve the highest possibility for favorable outcomes or the lowest probability for unfavorable ones. In a completely indeterminate situation, one must proceed intuitively, protecting as well as possible against disaster at each point while attempting actions more designed to learn about the situation than control it.

The unstable nature of combat operations process (particularly severely stochastic and indeterminate scenarios), as reflected in the significant tendency of serious failures to snowball even further into complete disasters, makes command of the combat operations process much more sensitive to risk than is command of more stable stochastic type event processes, suggesting that management of risk is as at least important as the management of expected results.

I most welcome comments, and hope I'm not deviating too far from subject.

I like this piece because it frames the debate around the institutional propensity to accept or reject alternative paradigms.

I think Andrew B. Nocks also gets to the issue of philosophy with respect to practicality quite forcefully.

So I really appreciate what he has done here.

Here's my metaphoric explanation (using biology) of the issues. What the community may be inappropriately doing (which I believe they did with EBO -- a version of "complex adaptive systems theory," borrowed from biology) is try to ingest the proposed paradigm, then becoming insular or self-referencing once it is being digested "inside the body." When the body doesn't "agree" (as would a stomach), it either pukes it out or experiences loosened bowels.

If we examine the arguments in Nocks' paper, virtually all of the references are made to military writings about design (indicating an insularity that also plagued EBO).

To survice as a profession, the community of theory and practice needs to get away from thinking that the best esoteric source of knowledge has to be doctrine. In other professions, I cannot think of an analogy to doctrine as being the source of professional knowledge. The most effective professions are much more ecclectic--open to other theories of action.

Also, design (actually framed by the originator, HA Simon, as the "science of the artificial") is about divergent thinking (a.k.a. critical reasoning) and the creation of new (and mostly ephemeral) knowledge that is very situationally unique. Is it possible to teach and learn critical reasoning and creative thinking? Is institutionalizing creativity oxymoronic?

Nocks is seeking to answer these questions using the tools we are familiar with -- doctrine and military community insular discourse. Design requires a diversity that our current tools-of-the-profession do not provide.

What Donald A. Schön did in his two volumes is explain how education would have to be altered away from known-knowns and reorient on handling the unknowns (he calls this reflective practice--a very artful, inventive process). His ideas are essential (if not synonymous) to design thinking and a potential rennaissance of the profession of arms.

Again, my hat is off to Nocks for initiating this conversation.

@Anonymous

"Read the article, my take was the exact opposite. He was concerned that design was getting over simplified. If you only read the prologue then you missed out on his actual intent."

I (re)read the article at your insistence. I wasn't able to see a theme regarding a concern for the over-simplification of design.

Your post was actually instructive to me in a very interesting way. You read the article and did not agree with my take on it. Therefore, you assumed that I did not read the article since my vision of reality didn't match up with your own, and admonished me to "read the article" which of course, I had already done prior to commenting.

As so often is the case in the Army (and I suspect other organizations), when lower doesn't see things the way higher does, higher assumes the problem is a lack of information. The response is inevitably more detailed orders, more regulations, SOPs, briefings, procedures, and so on, all in an attempt to get everyone "synchronized."

Of course, the missing link is that we fail to see the different people see the world in different ways. However, instead of trying to reconcile those views into a shared understanding (purpose of design), we rely on increasingly detailed "products" (presuming a lack of information) in the vain hope that shared understanding will result. It never does.

Starbuck

I find interesting your comment regarding "our" tendency to oversimplify complex problems. The reason I find that interesting is that my experience working the majority of the past 8 years in 4-star HQ (DA, PACOM and SOCOM) is the opposite. There seems to be a great love for complex answers to complex problems. The more complex and convaluted the approach the better it must be seems to be the rule of the day. Better yet if you can couple the complex solution with a very expensive bit of software that promises to then take the staffing out of staff work.

The fact is simple works. Another fact is that comimg up with simple answers is far more difficult than coming up with complex answers.

I worked with one COL who was brilliant and hard working. He was a huge advocate of Effects and assessments and developed a family of colorful powerpoint charts showing shaded trends on a dozen points. Eached was backed by some 1000 questions and was done quarterly. Generals and Admirals loved it. Here was hard factual meterics that assessed their progress. They confused complexity for accuracy.

The reality was that the process was so onerous that a country assessment was dropped on some different staff officer each quarter, who then spent a week or two doing his own assessment of what the 1000 answers were. Major X looks at country Y in the Fall; Major Z looks at country Y in Spring; etc.

The Colonel's points would trend up and down and he would enthral senior leaders with the complex changing colors and show them the clear progress being made, or lost; driving new orders to the ops guys to run to the right, then to run to the left, as they worked to plan programs of engagement. Lunacy. It was like trying to assess global warming trends by having a person who loves the cold take measurements of icepacks and assess the weather in January, and then have one who hates the cold do the same in August, and then post the differences in their reports as objective assessments of trends.

Granted there are some simplistic approaches to COIN out there:

1. Defeat the insurgent win the insurgency.

2. Win the Hearts and Minds and win the Insurgency.

3. Create effectiveness of government and win the insurgency.

It's a lot like the joke of the 5 blind men each touching a different part of an elephant and describing what it looks like.

"They touched this part of the elephant in Malaysia in the 60s, so it looks like this"

"We touched this part of the elephant in Iraq, so it looks like this."

"They touched this part of the elephant in Sri Lanka in 2010 so it looks like this."

And so forth.

There also (to continue the elephant analogy) is a ton of research and study on how to deal with elephants, but not much work on what it is like to be an elephant and what is going on from his perspective; so we have a government biased perspective in much of our COIN work.

I think simple is good, but I recognize it takes a great deal of hard work to get there.

I've done the design class and it was indeed overly complex and onerous in how it is presented. Way too much new vocabulary and rigid process for my taste. I've also worked on a team that actually employed a lot of design, and we left the vocab and the process back at the classroom, and focused on the princples of the concept and the thorny problems before us.

Doctrine is to planning and fighting like recipies are to cooking, or paint by number is to art. It's a good way to ensure that virtually anybody can come up with a decent product (as rigidly defined by that same doctrine), but it sure constrains the hell out of your artists.

Design is for the artists on ones staff, the Army will neuter it by over codifying it, and will produce more Colonels like the one at the top of this sad tale; who will bedazzle and amaze with their mastery of paint by numbers and the desribe in great detail what an elephant's ass smells like.

Right off the bat I get the impression that the author doesn't care for Design - the title of "Mumbo-Jumbo" does not instill me with confidence that I am about to read a fair assessment of the subject, rather, I am about to hear a persuasive essay on why I, too should think that Design is a bunch of mumbo-jumbo.

One quote from this article kind of sums it up for me. "Once again, we were poised to introduce a philosophy as opposed to tangible, easily understood concepts and principles beyond those of our current doctrine."

This seems to indicate a couple of things:
1. There is no room for philosophy in doctrine.
2. All concepts and principles in our doctrine must be tangible and easily understood.
3. Concepts and principles, particularly those which are intangible and difficult to understand, are even more undesirable when they fall outside our current doctrine.

One thing that the last nine years have taught us is that understanding war is largely about understanding intangibles and philosophies. This is hard stuff. Simple doctrine doesn't mean the world will conform to fit neatly inside it. In fact, our doctrine used to be pretty tangible and easy to understand - and it was also found wanting when it came time to head for the desert.

The comparison between EBO and Design is apples and oranges. EBO assumed cause and effect relationship (EFFECTS-Based Operations), while Design assumes the opposite - that cause and effect are relationships that rarely occur in the social, cultural, political, and psychological regimes of war.

The author seems to be concerned that Design can't be put in a neat package, such as a tangible, easily understood checklist. Our Military Decision Making Process is an example that comes to mind of a process that fits that description. As a former observer/trainer at the Battle Command Training Program, I have witnessed more MDMPs than I care to remember. Inevitably, when you ask a staff officer what a given step of the MDMP is supposed to produce, they will tell you about the product at the end of the step. For example, they will tell you that the purpose of mission analysis is to produce the mission analysis brief.

This is absolute craziness! The purpose of mission analysis is to produce a common understanding of the mission and the environment. The brief is secondary. However, we have lost sight of that precisely because we have a detailed checklist and a "deliverable."

As a student at CGSC, we have recently begun an exercise wherein we devise a regional strategy for a fictional scenario. Rather than do the traditional Army method of having every functional team do their slides independently and then collate and brief the results, we did something different. We did Design.

We all sat around a map and a white board and spent a couple of hours with no slides and no briefings. We simply talked through the situation in order to get a shared understanding of the problem and the environment. Our instructors commented positively on the quality of our work and the depth of our understanding.

Getting rid of checklists and tangibles frees the mind of preconceived models and paradigms. Thinking about a problem within a broad philosophy opens the floodgates for novel ideas which are unconstrained by the need to fit one-size-fits-all processes advocated by a central authority.