Tuesday, September 10, 2002

The After Action Review - The AAR At the heart of the US Army's work to devlop a Collegial Culture where all ranks could have straight talk is the AAR. David Gurteen has the best analyisi that I know of what it is. The Army themselves describe it as follows. My favourite journalist Tom Stewart has brought his own spin to the AAR as well. Col Ed Guthrie who played a major role in the Pentagon in developing and deploying the AAR then went on to help BP use it as the foundation of its own journey to a Collegial Culture 2:04:11 PM    comment []

Desert Storm - Already big movement in culture The best book on the progress today of the US Army is General Sullivan and Col Mike Harper's book - "Hope is Not a Method". Here is an excellent book review that will give you a sense of how the Army made the step up to a "Collegial Culture". I ma convinced that there is no collaboration until there has been a facilitated change to a "Collegial Culture" What is a Collegial Culture? It is the type of culture that we found paradoxically in the U Boat where 30,000 out of 40,000 total complement died but morale remained high until the surrender. How? Because on a U Boat all the men lived the same life and all died together. The Captain was the Captain but all had a key role to play and all had access to each other as men. This type of culture maximizes the power of the full energy and intelligence of all the unit and gives all an honoured place. A Collegial Culture is not a democracy. But it is a culture where we are all listened too and valued for what we do. 1:54:24 PM    comment []

The Army Starts to Think About Culture and Knowledge in 1984 Back in 1984 post Vietnam - the US Army were already thinking about what type of culture would be required to support collaboration. When I read this piece I thought that it could have been written today. (Col Huba Wass de Czege was one of the early deep thinkers that the Army has produced)   1:44:53 PM    comment []

The First of a Series on the Changing Face of the Military So on this the anniversary of September 11, we look at how the Gulliver fights the Lilliputians. War is a great driver of change. It was Grant who saw that War was no longer an engagement of heroes who sought a decisive battle but the engagement of economies who sought to crush the enemy's society. He lived at a time when the agrarian age was being overwhelmed by the industrial age. Now we live in a time when the industrial model for war as exemplified by the cold war and by the triumph of Desert Storm no longer works. The 1st Armored division arrives in Bosnia to discover that its equipment does not allow for deployment. The Abrams Tank and the Bradley fighting Vehicle are too heavy and cumbersome. The Apache too vulnerable to shoulder held missiles. It took months to deploy the forces in the region to fight the first Iraqi war. There is no longer the time to deploy at that scale. If an enemy chooses not to fight conventionally, America's might can be a drawback. So the US military, and all others, are going to have to find a new doctrine just as Grant found a new doctrine in the civil war. The attached article from the Times points out some of the steps. But this is a huge subject and we will look at a number of factors not just about equipment but more importantly about mindset and world view. We will especially look at the culture that is demanded of the new military. Why am I doing this? Because it is likely that we will see the new organization in action early in the military and we can then use the lessons to apply this learning back into the civil sector. For another trend is that the military is the organizational model. What the army does we do later. They do it first because they have a greater Darwinian pressure to adapt than a business. 1:34:15 PM    comment []