I spent yesterday teaching at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey on the the Homeland Security Course. Its a lovely set of grounds with some wonderful buildings and a few too many prefabs! One is named after the mathematician Root whose name, for my generation, will also be linked to log tables before we moved onto slide rules. Slide rules were wonderful things, they took away the mechanics of calculation, but you had to have a sense of the right answer as which power of ten was down to you. The calculator generation can be out by a factor of ten to the power 23 and not realise it. Personally for the sake of developing the cognitive capacity I would bring back slide rules, or for the adventuresome an abacus. They both require understanding of the principles of mathematics.

Now this links with my teaching. The course was mostly people in the front line of work in both federal and state work. Not just counter terrorism, but disaster relief, planning etc. Firefighters, police chiefs etc. It was a great group to teach as they all had practical wisdom. They have been there and done it, which means the ideas of complexity, crew based approaches to cross silo organisation and narrative all have an intuitive appeal. Complexity is very much the science of common sense, so those with common sense find it a lot easier to understand.