p.40 If we now consider briefly the subjective nature of war - the means
by which war has to be fought - it will look more than ever like a gamble... From the very start there is an interplay of
possibilities, probabilities, good luck, and bad that weaves its way throughout the length and breadth of the tapestry. In
the whole range of human activities, war most closely resembles a game of cards.
-Clausewitz, On War.
CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ’S metaphoric description of the condition
of war is as accurate today as it was when he wrote it in the early 19th century. The Army faces
an operating environment characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Military professionals struggle
to make sense of this paradoxical and chaotic setting. Succeeding in this environment requires an emergent style of decision
making, where practitioners are willing to embrace improvisation and reflection.
p.41 [the army's Operations Process called] Design
is defined as "a methodology for applying critical and creative thinking to understand, visualize, and describe complex,
ill-structured problems and develop approaches to solve them." Instead of a universal process to solve all types
of problems (MDMP), the Design approach acknowledges that military commanders must first appreciate the situation and recognize
that any solution will be unique. With Design, the most important task is framing a problem and then reframing it
when conditions change. Framing involves improvisation and on-the-spot experimentation, especially when we face time and space
constraints in our operating environment...
In the course of intuitive decision making, we use mental heuristics
to quickly reduce complexity. The use of these heuristics exposes us to cognitive biases, so it is important to ask
a number of questions. What heuristics do we use to reduce the high volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity,
and how do these heuristics introduce inherent bias into our decision making? How do these biases affect our probabilistic
assessments of future events? Once apprised of the hazards rising from these heuristic tools, how do we improve our
decisions? This article explores these questions and their implications for the future of military decision making.
p.44 Imaginability Bias. When confronted with a situation without any
available memory, we use our imagination to make a subjective premonition. [JLJ - perhaps a "hunch"]
p.50 In dealing with highly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous
environments, military professionals need to improvise and experiment with a variety of new methods. These activities
are part of the critical task of reframing the problem
p.50 The volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity
of our operating environment demand that military professionals make rapid decisions in situations where established
military decision making processes are either too narrow or ineffective... The solution may lie in the organizational
embrace of the concept of reflective practice as advocated by previous authors in this journal. Instead of the usual
striving toward a “best practices” methodology, which is also full of potential heuristic biases, reflective
practice calls for "valuing the processes that challenge assimilative knowledge (i.e. continuous truth seeking) and by embracing
the inevitable conflict associated with truth seeking."
