Playing to Win: Crafting a Creative Strategic Vision for Maritime Superiority
April 30, 2020 Guest Author
By Heather Venable
Daydreaming, meditation, and long walks in the forest do not spring to mind as ways to achieve maritime superiority, much less to win the next peer conflict. But these simple approaches to thinking reward institutions with unparalleled dividends. The deepest discernment, as Isaac Asimov explains, occurs when the mind can “take new pathways and make erratic associations you would not think of consciously. The solution will then come while you think you are not thinking.â€1
This approach is imperative because—amidst the proliferation of many weapons technologies—the Navy faces a challenge to its current force structure potentially more disruptive than the shift from battleships to carriers or even from sail to steam.2 Yet it sometimes takes institutions too long to accept ideas internally even as it becomes clear to external observers how desperately updating is required.3 Simultaneously, the Navy must open up spaces for creative thinking in order to regain its lost strategic acumen.4 Fortunately, solutions are not costly, but they do require a cultural shift that recognizes the importance of creativity in crafting strategy.5
http://cimsec.org/playing-to-win-crafting-a-creative-strategic-vision-for-maritime-superiority/42369
