4 Reflections on “Design” that are guiding my inquiry, inspired by thought provoking article and commentary at the School for Advanced Military Studies, which is engaged in deep think on the entire military decision making model:
1. The challenge of codifying artful design. I am trying to integrate these 2 statements from the article; It may simply be that we want to get the principles right as opposed to creating a checklist, template, and standard process for Good Design:
“The Art of Design is a cognitive paradigm shift from a 20thCentury doctrinal model that emphasized check-lists, templates and processes.”
“Our collective goal is to codify these practices for doctrine.”
2. Multiple ways to Design?
“The Design approach makes explicit what Commanders have been doing intuitively in combat as they learn from acting within complex and complicated systems. Our collective goal is to codify these practices for doctrine.”
We have accepted within the college that there are multiple learning styles. Action Research is a tradition of inquiry associated with discovery learning in cycles of “plan-act-observe-reflect” and which appreciates multiple ways of knowing (experiential, presentational, propositional, practical). If the essence of the Commander’s art that we want to codify in Design is ‘learning from action’, is there a sense that there may be more than one way to design? Particularly in light of later statements that:
“Because conflicts are unique, they require individually tailored solutions. There is no recipe or formula to choose between competing solutions for resolving this tension, because resolution depends upon the creative application of military judgment.”
3. The relationship between Design and the current body of knowledge of Operational Art
“Design provides the logical connection between strategic ends and tactical means that is the foundation for adaptive action in the face of novelty and complexity.”
- Is Design taking the place of what we called operational art?
- Or the operational level of war which connected strategic goals to tactical means?
- If so, is it replacing the construct of operational art?
- Or being offered as an alternative?
- Or to be used in lieu of current operational planning when complexity and uncertainty make current planning models unsatisfactory?
- Is “logical connection” the right characterization of the output of design? What would “artful” or “hypothetical” or “tentative” do to the meaning of that sentence and our appreciation of what Design is engaging with?
4. Certainty in Framing so we can proceed to Planning?
“Creation of an adequate Systems Frame allows the commander and his design group to cognitively map their environment. They create a relevant Problem Statement and Theory of Action for moving an unsatisfactory state of affairs to a manageable condition that is within tolerance of the political leadership or of a senior military commander.”
I had a vision of a Commander and staff working on their systems frame until they judge that they have a workable model that accommodates multiple points of view. I asked myself: “I wonder how they will know that this systems frame is finished? Or good enough? Or relevant? Or satisfying to stakeholders? Or representative of the current situation? Or offers enough insights to begin taking actions?
Could this be construed as putting the cart before the horse? On what basis will the Commander’s and staff judge that their map is sufficiently like the territory that they can proceed? That their problem statement is relevant? That their Theory of Action provides the basis for informed action? That their plans will have a causal connection to a change in the state of the mess they propose to manage?
My sense is that a situation that calls for design will not let you judge the efficacy of your design without many and continuous iterations of experimenting , and that your design will become an evolving set of continuous approximations that are informed by feedback. And because we know that the environment is dynamic, it will learn from (or at least react to) our iterative experiments, there is every reason to believe that we will not be able to “Design Once, Plan Many”, but engage in an open ended of iterative Design/Planning cycles that are integrated and continuous; that these Design/Plan are not separable, until we have evidence that the situation has become stable enough that our existing planning doctrine is sufficient for ongoing operations.
If this line of inquiry has merit, I would be looking to see the sense of open-ended action research cycles of “Plan-Act-Observe-Reflect”, with conclusions about our new unsderstandings, theories and concepts evolving through each cycle, with an adequate Systems Framework and Theory of Action emerging only after much hypothesis testing in the environment we propose to manage. The very uniqueness of the situation that demands we respond with Design is unlikely to become logical and understood at the front end of Design/Plan campaign.
Is there such a thing, then as The Design, or only continuous “Designing” to inform planning, and that we discover that we no longer need to change the design when the environment no longer demands it but not before? And then, only for as long as the environment remains in an acceptable range of dynamic equilibrium?
Imagine we are at the end of a successful campaign and look back at our path. Would we be surprised if we had a series of “designs along the way”, each good enough and relevant enough for action based on previous feedback and our then-current level of appreciation validated by stakeholders, and that as we acted/observed/reflected we gained a new appreciation of how the situation was also evolving around us, so that we had a sufficiency for action, without ever having a complete Truth, and that the working model of the world that informed our design was unique and quite different, yet strung together by our reflection and learning until we reached a state where we had something like an acceptable, stable-enough reality.
At what point did we “know” we had it right? That we had made a “logical” connection between goals and means? That we NOW understood what was going on in the environment? My sense is that those only become clear in hindsight when we construct the narrative of the “secrets of our success” and convert the winning narrative into our next template, until the world decides to tip over our applecart.
The commentary above about humility and learning (and we can learn a lot of things without getting closer to the Truth) is inspiring and challenging. We may be in the situation Argyris and Schoen (1974) described as “Few espoused theories but effective theories in use” in Theory In Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness.