A recent report by an independent commission in the U.S. recommended purging the 26,000-member Iraqi national police to purge it of corrupt officers and Shiite militants. The report decries the sectarianism of the current police force which can only be eliminated by scrapping the current force – basically, starting over.
I have been thinking about this recommendation in connection with a book I’ve been reading “Learning to eat soup with a knife: Counterinsurgency lessons from Malaya and Vietnam” by John Nagl, who was a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army when he wrote the book. He shows how the British were able to revise their strategy in countering the Communist insurgency in Malaya in the 1950s. In contrast, the U.S. Army was unable to make necessary changes in order to respond to the insurgency in Vietnam. Nagl is fairly gloomy about the resistance the Army showed, ignoring advice from the British, ignoring lessons from its own Special Forces and from the U.S. Marines. He demonstrates how the Army may just be incapable of change from its culture of annihilating enemy forces. This mindset worked in the Civil War and during WWII, and in Korea. But it missed the point in Vietnam and in Iraq. Army leaders who tried to change the mindset in Vietnam got nowhere.
Well, if the Army has a dysfunctional mindset and if it is incapable of change, maybe it is time to think about dismantling the U.S. Army and starting over. Perhaps we can use the experience of rebuilding the Iraqi police force as a test case.
And all of this raises the questions of how to know when an organization needs to make fundamental changes in its mental model of how it is supposed to work, and how to know if that organization is capable of making those changes.
Comments (3)
Gary, Your post made me think about parallels with companies looking to change their corporate culture. The last point about how to know if an organization is capable of making those changes is critical for senior leadership teams. If the answer to the question is that an organization is not capable of making such changes how do they best go about building (or rebuilding) such capability without disrupting or compromising performance?
If an organizational mindset such as the one you refer to as gripping the US army has a long evolved history is there a way to stimulate and accelerate a shift in the mindset evolution in a sustainable and impactful way?
My experience has demonstrated that patterns in narrative and stories can reveal organizational mindsets. The new insights shift perspectives for a short period of time but often the historically evolved patterns quickly take over again. Would appreciate any thoughts you might have on methods that could help leaders and organizations hold new perspectives longer and to take action and stimulate change from the newly discovered perspectives rather than old patterns.
Posted by Michael Cheveldave | September 12, 2007 4:25 PM
Posted on September 12, 2007 16:25
Would a more liberal approach to basic organisational management help perhaps? That is, if a company's managers and management culture was more open to input from others within the organisation, even to the level of dissent and loyal opposition. Societies such as Australia, Canada, the US, the UK have managed to get along without fundamental change in basic organising principles, whereas more rigid, managed societies with insular leaderships - say, the USSR - could neither survive or change.
I am, of course, making an analogy between a society and a more narrowly focused organisation like a company - I have always found this an instructive analogy, to a point.
If the power of managers in organisations depended less than it does now on their place in the hierarchy and all the legal/institutional buttresses to that; and more on justifying whys and hows to people who can reject those arguments, might not organisations avoid sclerosis?? Despite the subject of this post, this may be less appropriate to armies than civilian organisations.
Posted by Justin Kerr | September 14, 2007 9:40 AM
Posted on September 14, 2007 09:40
We need to be careful in the way we distinguish learning organizations from non-learning organizations. The U.S. Army is a wonderful learning organization for improving the way it pursues its primary goal of being the master of the battlefield. According to John Nagl (author of "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife), the U.S. Army showed much better learning than the British in WW II and in the Persian Gulf War.
So the real issue seems to be whether the organization is asked to pursue a mission that conflicts with its own identity. Because then the organization might need to undergo some sort of cognitive transformation.
Posted by gary klein | September 14, 2007 2:26 PM
Posted on September 14, 2007 14:26