The authors challenge the old school of hierarchical strategic leadership that dominates the military professional culture and, in contrast, emphasize complex adaptive systems (CASs) as a compelling alternative mental model to view the military profession. The authors suggest eight leadership tasks that come to the fore when the mental model of the military as a professional CAS is used to examine the circumstances that engulf military activities: relationship building, loose coupling, complicating, diversifying, sensemaking, learning, improvising, and emergent thinking. These are distinguished from the traditional tasks of role defining, standardization, simplifying, socializing, decision making, knowing, commanding and controlling, and planning based on estimates.
Jeffrey Pfeffer, Organizations and Organization Theory (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1992), 227—28.
2.
For example, see Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA : Belknap, 1957).
3.
Ian Morrison, The Second Curve: Managing the Velocity of Change (New York: Ballantine, 1996), 2.
4.
Ruth A. Anderson and Reuben R.McDaniel, Jr., “Managing Health Care Organizations: Where Professionalism Meets Complexity Science ,” Health Care Management Review25, 1 (2000): 83—92.
5.
Don Snider and Gayle Watkins have written on what the decaying Army profession. For example, see Don M. Snider and Gayle L. Watkins, “The Future of Army Professionalism: A Need for Renewal and Redefinition,” Parameters30, 3 (Autumn 2000): 5—20. For the Air Force version, see Scott Snook, Friendly Fire: The Accidental Shootdown of U.S. Black Hawks Over Northern Iraq (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Also see Mark Lewis, “Army Transformation and the Junior Officer Exodus,” Armed Forces & Society31, 1 ( 2004): 63—93.
6.
For example, see Paul K. Davis, David Gompert, and Richard Kugler, Adaptiveness in National Defense: The Basis of a New Framework, National Defense Research Institute Issue Paper (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1996). Also see James Burk, The Adaptive Military: Armed Forces in a Turbulent World, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1998); Chris C. Demchak, “Numbers or Networks: Social Constructions of Technology and Organizational Dilemmas in IDF Modernization,” Armed Forces & Society23, 2 (1996): 179—209.
7.
Gregory R. Beabout and Daryl J. Wennemann , Applied Professional Ethics: A Developmental Approach for Use with Case Studies (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), 26.
8.
Eliot Freidson, Professionalism Reborn: Theory, Prophecy, and Policy ( Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994).
9.
Karl E. Weick and Reuben R. McDaniel , Jr., “How Professional Organizations Work: Implications for School Organization and Management,” in Schooling for Tomorrow: Directing Future Reforms to Issues That Count, ed. T. Sergiovanni and J. H. Moore (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1989), 330—55.
10.
Peter F. Drucker, “Knowledge-Worker Productivity: The Biggest Challenge,” California Management Review41, 2 (1999): 79—94.
11.
Weick and McDaniel, “How Professional Organizations Work.”
12.
Ibid.
13.
Lloyd J. Matthews, “Is the Military Profession Legitimate? ” Army (January 1994): 19.
14.
Huntington, The Soldier and the State.
15.
Katherine J. Worboys, “The Traumatic Journey from Dictatorship to Democracy Peacekeeping Operations and Civil-Military Relations in Argentina, 1989—1999,” Armed Forces & Society33, 2 (2007): 149—68.
16.
David R. Segal, “National Security and Democracy in the United States,” Armed Forces & Society20, 3 ( 1994): 375—93.
17.
Huntington, The Soldier and the State, 256.
18.
Kermit D. Johnson, “The Military Ethic of `Duty, Honor, Country,'” Parameters29, 1 (1999): 166.
19.
Don M. Snider, “Officership: The Professional Practice ,” Military Review133, 1 (2003).
20.
Anderson and McDaniel, “Managing Health Care Organizations .”
21.
Gregory Bateson distinguishes lineal systems from the mathematical concept of linear relationships: “Lineal describes a relation among a series of causes or arguments such that the sequence does not come back to the starting point. . . . The opposite of lineal is recursive.” Bateson, Mind and Nature (Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Bantam, 1979), 251.
22.
Paul Cilliers, Complexity and Postmodernism (New York: Free Press, 1998).
23.
Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Also see Snook, Friendly Fire.
24.
Humberto R. Maturana, Francisco J. Varela, and Robert Paolucci , The Tree of Knowledge (Boston, MA: Shambhala, 1987).
25.
Cilliers, Complexity and Postmodernism.
26.
Ilya Prigogine, The End of Certainty (New York: Free Press, 1996).
27.
Stephen H. Kellert, In the Wake of Chaos: Unpredictable Order in Dynamical Systems ( Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993); Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam, 1984).
28.
Taleb refers to this attribution of rationality in an unpredictable past as “retrospective determinism.” Nassim N. Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbably. (New York: Random House , 2007, p. 106).
29.
Ralph D. Stacey, Complexity and Creativity inOrganizations (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1996).
30.
Anderson and McDaniel, “Managing Health Care Organizations”; Benyamin B. Lichtenstein, Mary Uhl-Bien, Russ Marion, Anson Seers, James Douglas Orton, and Craig Schreiber , “Complexity Leadership Theory: An Interactive Perspective on Leading in Complex Adaptive Systems,” Emergence: Complexity and Organization8, 4 (2006): 2—12; Reuben R. McDaniel, Jr., “ Strategic Leadership: A View From Quantum and Chaos Theories,” Health Care Management Review22, 1 (1997): 21—37.
31.
Lichtenstein et al., “Complexity Leadership Theory.”
32.
Massimo Warglien and Michael Masuch, “The Logic of Organizational Disorder: An Introduction,” in The Logic of Organizational Disorder , ed. Massimo Warglien and Michael Masuch (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), 1—34.
33.
Ibid.
34.
Shona L. Brown and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, Competing on the Edge (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998).
35.
Bateson, Mind and Nature, 253. Bateson describes the stochastic strategy as enacting events in a partially random manner, some of which achieve a preferred outcome.
36.
Freidson, Professionalism Reborn.
37.
Kauffman, At Home in the Universe.
38.
Uzi Ben-Shalom, Zeev Lehrer, and EyalBen-Ari, “Cohesion during Military Operations: A Field Study on Combat Units in the Al-Aqsa Intifada,” Armed Forces & Society33, 1 (2005): 63—79.
39.
Reuben R.McDaniel, Jr., and Michelle E. Walls, “Diversity as a Management Strategy for Organizations,” Journal of Management Inquiry6 (1997): 363—75.
40.
Karl E. Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations ( Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995).
41.
Karl E. Weick and Darlene H. Roberts, “Collective Mind in Organizations: Heedful Interrelating on Flight Decks,” Administrative Science Quarterly38 ( 1993): 357—81.
42.
Donald M. Berwick, “The Double Edge of Knowledge,” Journal of the American Medical Association266 (1991): 841—42.
43.
For example, see Mark Lewis, “Army Transformation.” Also see Ad L. W. Vogelaar and Eric-Hans Kramer, “Mission Command in Dutch Peace Support Missions,” Armed Forces & Society30, 3 (2004): 409—31.
44.
Brown and Eisenhardt, Competing on the Edge.
45.
Ben-Shalom et al., “Cohesion during Military Operations.”
46.
McDaniel, “ Strategic Leadership.”
47.
J.D. Sterman , “Learning in and about Complex Systems ,” System Dynamics Review10 (1994): 171.
48.
The U.S. Army has adopted the Balanced Scorecard method (BSC) as part of its Strategic Readiness System. BSC is a prescriptive method to measure performance, from the works of originators Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996).
49.
Clause Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
