Learning to Disrupt Ourselves: Why the Army Needs an Experimental Culture and How to Create It
James Long | June 17, 2019
The After Action Review. Like morning PT and issuing salutes, the AAR has become just something we do. And for good reason. It has served its purpose remarkably well—praised as “arguably one of the most successful organizational learning methods yet devised†by Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. But is it optimized for the future battlefield?
While AARs use event-based feedback for evolutionary performance improvement, they are not designed for the discovery learning and experimentation central to multi-domain operations. Overcoming this limitation and harnessing tactical innovation requires creating new tools that complement the incremental performance benefits of AARs with practices from data science and a framework called human-centered design.
Employing the right learning strategy requires first mapping problems along a continuum—something that reflects the concept of “known knowns,†“known unknowns,†and “unknown unknowns†that Donald Rumsfeld famously articulated. While AARs are ideally suited to the “known known†domain of established challenges and solutions, they are fundamentally unable to address the ambiguity of the “unknown unknown†domain surrounding emerging warfare concepts. This transition from addressing the “known known†quadrant to effectively engaging with the “unknown unknown†domain is described by Greg Galle of SolveNext as moving from the “predictable pathâ€â€”with its consistent outcomes, “right†answers, and linear chains of causation—to the “bold path†and the unprecedented frontiers of innovation.
AARs cannot make this transition in their current format because they ask the wrong people the wrong questions, in pursuit of the wrong outcomes, to handle ambiguity.
https://mwi.usma.edu/learning-disrupt-army-needs-experimental-culture-create/
