Discussion questions

CASE 12.1 THE U.S. ARMY As I used to tell my kids, “You don't have to make every mistake personally. I've made plenty of them, and if you just let me tell you what they were and how you can avoid them, there's still plenty of mistakes for you to make.” Col. Orin A. Nagel, former director of Center for Army Lessons Learned The first systematic application of management principles in the United States was not by, say, General Motors, but by the U.S. Army. From 1899 to 1904, Secretary of War Elihu Root made drastic reforms in the army's organization and efficiency, established the Army War College, and introduced the principle of the general staff (a group of officers that assist a commander by performing detailed duties of administration, planning, supply, and coordination). The U. S. Army has also been on the cutting edge of information technology ever since 1946, when it unveiled the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), the world's first operational, general-purpose computer. Today few institutions, if any, better exemplify the learning organization ideal than the U.S. Army; it is a premier example of a learning organization—in which everyone engages in problem solving.1 This case examines four important ways in which the U.S. Army manages its information in the twenty-first century. After-Action Reports (AARs) Probably the best-known example of leveraging knowledge within a team is the army's use of After-Action Reports (AARs). These reviews had their beginnings in training simulations as a way for a team to engage in a mock battle to gain as much learning as possible from the training. An army brigade of three thousand or so travels to the National Training Center (NTC) in California, where it engages in simulated combat with crack units based at the center. AARs proved so useful to team effectiveness that gradually they began to be used in nontraining situations as well. Today they have spread throughout the army, not because someone at the top has required their use but because the troops find them helpful in getting the job done. Thrust into a new kind of operation in postwar Iraq—certainly not the conventional combat for which they had been well trained—junior officers (lieutenants and captains) illustrate how AARs and the sharing of knowledge can improve a unit's next action. Six features of AARs are worth noting. First, although they are called After-Action Reports, they are actually cyclical—part of a cycle that starts before and continues throughout each campaign or simulation. The AAR regimen includes brief huddles, extended planning and review sessions, copious note taking by everyone, and the explicit linking of lessons to future actions. The AAR cycle for each phase of the campaign or simulation begins when the senior commander drafts “operational orders.” This document consists of four parts: the task (what actions subordinate units must take); the purpose (why the task is important); the commander's intent (what the senior leader is thinking, explained so that subordinates can pursue his goals even if events don't unfold as expected); and the end state (what the desired result is). The commander shares these orders with his subordinate commanders and then asks each for a “brief back”—a verbal description of the unit's understanding of its mission (to ensure everyone is on the same page) and its role. The second feature is that AARs are experimental. As a result of the disciplined preparation described above, the action that follows becomes a learning experiment. The leaders have individually and collectively made predictions about what will occur, identified challenges that may arise, and built into their plans ways to address those challenges. So when units act, they will not only be executing a plan but also observing and testing that plan. Third, AARs are unemotional and egalitarian. Colonels say where lieutenants made mistakes— and vice versa. Fourth, they are focused. At the end of an AAR meeting, the senior commander identifies the two or three lessons he expects will prove most relevant to the next battle or simulation. If the units focus on more than a few lessons at a time, they risk becoming overwhelmed. If they focus on lessons unlikely to be applied until far in the future, soldiers might forget. Fifth, they are multilayered. Immediately after the senior commander has identified the lessons and the meeting ends, subordinate commanders gather their units to conduct their own AARs. Sixth, AARs are iterative. Those who are experienced with them know most lessons that surfaced during the first go-round are incomplete or plain wrong, representing what the unit thinks should work and not what really does work. They understand that it takes several iterations to produce dynamic solutions that will stand up under any conditions. The Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) A second example of the army's management information system is a center, based at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, founded in 1985. Its initial role was to capture lessons from NTC. Later, as the army's mission broadened to include “operations other than war”—interventions in Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti, plus fire fighting, flood control, and other forms of disaster relief at home—CALL was charged with learning from those experiences as well. The model on which CALL is based involves essentially three steps. The first step is for senior leaders of the army to determine what knowledge will be needed for the future and where gaps exist in current knowledge. That is where CALL focuses. The second step is observing and collecting knowledge. CALL observation teams are among the first troops on the ground in any army operation. They collect on-the-spot information about new practices, new techniques, problems, and trouble spots; distinguish approaches that work from those that do not; and share their findings with others. The objective here is to avoid the tragedy of having a soldier in one battalion make the same mistake (perhaps fatal) tomorrow that was made in a different battalion today. Who are these observers that CALL sends forth? They are subject-matter experts, on loan from other parts of the army, including people with expertise in logistics, communications, linguistics, engineering, and supply. They are given training in how to be effective collectors of knowledge data. They gather multiple perspectives on each event, watching, interviewing, and taking digital photographs and video. They follow decisions that have been made to their outcomes and backward to discover the reasoning and logic that led to each decision. In so doing, they tease out tacit as well as explicit knowledge.2 This information is then sent back to CALL, where it is analyzed by yet another group of experts who are responsible for synthesizing a large amount of disparate data from the multiple observers and then constructing new and useful knowledge out of it. Their preliminary interpretations are put on the Internet for comment by other professionals. The third step is creating knowledge products. Between 2002 and 2005, call catalogued 6,200 battlefield and training ground observations and produced 400 reports on them. Nancy M. Dixon writes: By the time the second wave of troops was sent into Haiti six months later, CALL had developed twenty-six scenarios of situations faced by the initial troops. These scenarios became a major training tool for their replacements. The scenarios included footage of actual events so that arriving troops were to some extent on familiar ground. Empowering Soldiers to Contribute Wiki-style The third example of army knowledge management is only a three-month pilot program but has interesting implications for many government agencies. In July 2009, the army began encouraging its personnel—from privates to generals—to go online and collectively rewrite seven of the field manuals that give instructions on all aspects of army life. The program uses the same software behind the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and could potentially lead to hundreds of army guides being “Wikified.” The goal is to tap more experience and advice from battle-tested soldiers rather than relying on the specialists within the army's array of colleges and research centers who have traditionally written manuals. Not surprisingly, top-down, centralized institutions have resisted such tools, fearing the loss of control that comes with empowering anyone among the chain of command to contribute. Yet the army seems willing to accept some loss of control. Under the experiment, the current version of each guide can be edited by anyone around the world who has been issued the ID card that allows access to the army Internet system. As is true with Wikipedia, those changes will appear immediately on the site, though there is a team assigned to each manual to review new edits. Unlike Wikipedia, however, there will be no anonymous contributors. Advancing Knowledge About How to Lead a Company3 Young captains who are company commanders lead between 70 to 200 soldiers in complex, often dangerous, ever-changing environments. In spring 2000, a team of officers developed and launched w­w­w­.­C­o­m­p­a­n­y­C­o­m­m­a­n­d­.­c­o­m­ (CC) as a means of connecting past, present, and future company commanders in an ongoing conversation about leading soldiers and building combat-ready units. The mission of the leaders of CC was to provide cutting-edge, world-class resources for their colleagues. Use of the Web site spread rapidly. In 2002, the CC team “gifted” the Web site to the army. As a result, the Web site was placed on military servers at West Point and given the “army.mil” URL, but mission and team leaders remained the same. CC builds on the basic principle that connections, conversations, and content can work in a mutually reinforcing manner to enable members of the professional forum to advance knowledge about commanding a company. More specifically: Connecting company commanders to each of other gives them access to the knowledge of the profession. Having a connection means more than just having contact information-it means being aware of what the other person knows. A professional community that is highly connected knows who knows what. Connections make conversations possible. It is through the back-and-forth of conversation that context and trust are established and that knowledge is both shared and created. Conversely, conversations can create connections that lead to relationships and learning. Content grows out of conversations. Content can be both the topic of conversations and an end product. For example, if five company commanders who have experience with convoy operations have a conversation, the result is valuable content that is useful to many others. To be useful, content must be current, rich in context, and relevant to the immediate needs of company commanders. Relationships, trust, and a sense of professional community are critical factors that set the conditions for effective connections and conversations. Moreover, each positive interaction is a reinforcing process that creates stronger relationships, more trust, and a greater sense of professional community. Here's an example of how relationships can lead to content that sparks valuable conversation. The Company Command leaders used their relationships with commanders who had served in Afghanistan to develop a booking providing valuable company-level content for company commanders going to Afghanistan for the first time. Then, they set up face-to-face conversations among past and future Afghan commanders, and those conversations were informed by the content of the book. In the course of these conversations, new relationships formed and people developed the trust necessary to bring up knowledge that could sound stupid, like, “Hey, have you ordered mousetraps? The tents in Afghanistan attract rats, and rats attract snakes, and you don't want snakes in your tent, so you need lots of mousetraps to keep the rats away.” Who would've thought that soliders in Afghanistan need mousetraps? Not the commanders who had not yet been there. That important piece of knowledge emerged only from the interplay of relationships, trust, content, conversation, and context. Case Questions 1. What could other government agencies and nonprofit organizations learn from the army? What could individual managers learn from the After-Action Review process? 2. Although some organizations have employed AARs quite effectively, most struggle to capture the true value of such lessons-learned exercises. Why do many AAR processes fail? 3. What concepts or ideas presented in the chapter could the army use? Explain how. 4. What concepts or ideas presented in this case could other government organizations use? Be specific. What kind of federal agencies might benefit most from being “Wikified”? 5. According to some experts, the most successful knowledge management projects are not launched with a top-down, big-splash approach but rather developed bottom up. Why do you think the latter tend to be more successful? 6. Discuss the following statement by Kent Greenes, an adviser to the Company Command project: Relationships also facilitate the most powerful kind of knowledge transfer, that which passes directly from one person's brain into another's, in a conversation where contacts can be communicated through the back-and-forth exchange. Knowledge that is codified into content—written down or put on media—before it is shared is transferred less effectively. Granted, if people have contexts and experiences very similar to those of the contributor of a piece of content, they may be able to use the content as is, but more commonly they can make use of only some of it. The unfortunate fact is, as soon as you codify content, it loses some of its meaning. Therefore, conversation is the most powerful way to transfer knowledge. Case References Noam Cohen, “Care to Write Army Doctrine?,” New York Times (August 14, 2009); Marilyn Darling et al., “Learning in the Thick of It,” Harvard Business Review (July–August 2005); 84–92; “Special Report American Military Tactics,” Economist (December 17, 2005): 22–24; Nancy Dixon, Common Knowledge (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 2000): 106–8; Nancy M. Dixon et al., CompanyCommand: Unleashing the Power of the Army Professional (West Point, New York: Center for the Advancement of leader Development and Organizational Learning, 2005); David A. Garvin, Learning in Action (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 1999): 83–90; Greg Jaffe, “On Ground in Iraq, Captain Ayers Writes His Own Playbook,” Wall Street Journal (September 22, 2004); Interview with Lieutenant General Stephen W. Boutelle, Military Information Technology (July 2004); Lee Smith, “New Ideas from the Army,” Fortune (September 19, 1994).