Why It Is Important to Be Cautious in the Analysis of Military Organizations: A Reply to Hasselbladh and Ydén

Abstract

This article is a reply to a recent publication by Hasselbladh and Yden in this journal, entitled “Why Military Organizations Are Cautious About Learning?” They argue that there is good reason for military organizations not being very successful in organizational learning. Based on historical experiences related to the military’s bureaucratic character and specific task environment, they argue that military organization’s hesitation to learn is not necessarily dysfunctional. This reply refutes this assertion as it is not based on sufficient knowledge of organizational learning in general, but more importantly because it “scholarly” legitimizes the impeding of attempts to improve military performance in the broad sense of the word.

Recently, Hasselbladh and Ydén (2020) published an article in this journal on organizational learning in military organizations. While using a question mark in their title “Why Military Organizations Are Cautious About Learning?” they in fact are more convinced of themselves as they intend to “explicate why military organizations are cautious or even hesitant to learn and why that characteristic is not necessarily a dysfunctional trait” (p. 478). They argue that “the traditionally cautious approach in military organizations to “constant learning” is both historically understandable and often quite sensible,” while

a rapidly changing and perfectly adaptable “learning military organization” is likely to be very expensive and will be at risk of losing other important capacities, such as the ability to display resilience and robustness in the face of the uncertainty and chaos of the battlefield (…). (p. 477)

Their goal is not to raise questions: They know what is going on and what is right. They refer to the past as well as to the large-scale bureaucratic character and unique character of the military organization’s tasks as reasons why it is understandable that attempts to implement “lessons learned” in military organizations are likely to fail. Because the military’s task is so unique and because the military always did it this way, it is not so bad (“dysfunctional”) not to be good at organizational learning. Stated differently, because it always went this way and because the military is the military, military organizations don’t need to engage in organizational learning, let alone be good at it.

The main goal of this reply is not to show that the authors did not study the field of organizational learning, in general or in the military, very well. Nor do I intend to unravel their tendency to make a caricature of the risks and negative consequences of organizational learning and change. The main motivation of this reply is to point at the ideological implications of their message because it will provide “scholarly” ammunition for conservative and traditionalist power-holders in the military not to improve their performance in the broad sense of the word.

Two Rebuttals

The first thing that surprises is that the authors do not refer to the work of former U.S. Army lieutenant Chris Argyris, one of the founding parents of theories of organizational learning (e.g., Argyris, 1999; Soeters, 2020, pp. 64–77). If they had done this, they would have discovered that there are at least two types of organizational learning: single-loop and double-loop learning. For simplicity’s sake, I leave a third type of organizational learning out of the equation. Single-loop learning occurs, as Argyris explains, when an error is detected or corrected without questioning or altering the underlying values of a system. In most organizations, this is standard practice, as there is no alternative. Not correcting mistakes will lead to an organization losing its license to operate.

Indeed, military organizations, for instance, air forces, are also really good at this. Italian scholars Catino and Patriotta (2013) describe meticulously how fighter pilots engage in continuous processes of after-action reviews and evaluations of flights, which in fact is organizational learning. Whereas the evaluations consume a lot of time, are relentless and do not spare anyone, they are very inner-directed. There is no doubting or questioning whatsoever of what the flights intend to do and try to achieve. Hence, this organizational learning in the Italian air force (which is quite comparable to other national air forces’ practices) is restricted to Argyris’ single-loop learning; they don’t encompass any sort of double-loop learning. Double-loop learning occurs when mismatches are corrected by first examining and potentially altering the governing variables (goals, values, principles, norms, and practices) and then the actions. In second-loop learning, one first questions the temperature at which the thermostat has been programmed—for instance, because of sustainability concerns—and then repairs the device if it is broken (the latter being based on single-loop learning).

Practicing double-loop learning is not easy, as it probes fundamental beliefs and judgments in the organization, and it is likely to affect existing power relations. In connection to this, is the idea that double-loop learning comes at the expense of single-loop learning. This is something that Hasselbladh and Ydén seem to have in mind when they argue that organizational learning will be detrimental for the resilience and robustness of the military organization. However, it has been known for a long time that single-loop learning (repeating and improving existing practices) and the exploration of new practices can go very well together (March, 1991). Additionally, Argyris is well aware that people are hesitant and even reluctant to engage in double-loop learning, as it will lead to irritation and negative defensive reactions, particularly at the top of the organization. Especially, managers at the top will deem anything different from the usual way of doing vague, ambiguous, stressful, dangerous, and threatening. And even if managers really intend to improve processes of organizational learning, an emphasis on being positive hinders a true self-examination of both leaders and employees. Such organizational learning is also threatening because it may reveal competency traps: sticking to ways of working that have produced favorable performance so far but may result in suboptimal results when applied to new assignments or conditions. Such competency traps should not become too obvious. Yet, they may explode in the open when circumstances change (Soeters, 2020, pp. 65–67).

Then, there is a second rebuttal in relation to Haselbladh’s and Ydén’s work. Next to neglecting the various sorts of organizational learning, they don’t pay attention to the reason why organizations would want and would need to engage in organizational learning. People and organizations engage in processes of learning because they have ambitions or are confronted with goals for which they don’t have the skills or capabilities yet. A young student wants to be a medical doctor and in order to fulfill this ideal, a long process of learning is waiting. The same implies to organizations, even more so today than in previous times. In the current times of disruptive application of new technologies, it is all the more important to keep the same pace as others, and preferably to stay ahead of the pack. This presupposes organizational learning, continuously. There is no reason why this would be any different for military organizations.

These days, military organizations are met with a large variety of goals and types of conflicts, whose intricacies and dynamics are often hardly understandable (e.g., Christia, 2012). They meet with evaluations of their performance showing disillusionment of what has been achieved (e.g., Farrell, 2017) to outright societal indignation about the “collateral damage” that has been caused. They are faced with unintended, and oftentimes negative, consequences to the population in the area of operations, and with a variety of (national) approaches to solve the challenges at hand leading to uncertainty about what is the best thing to do in a given situation. There is no need to substantiate and illustrate these dynamics as they are too well known.

All these dynamics contain fundamental uncertainties about what needs to be done; at least, if one is open to what sociologists have referred to as substantive rationality (e.g., Soeters, 2020). Substantive rationality indicates the ambition to bring the wider goals and consequences of action under scrutiny; it is comparable to the double-loop learning process that was just mentioned.

As said, military organizations have no problems in learning in the single loop; they want their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and weapons to be stronger, faster, and deadlier; their personnel to be safer; and their losses smaller, no matter what it will cost. As such, militaries are proud to conduct operations with as little losses as possible. Yet, they don’t tend to question the overall results of the mission in relation to the actions that have been conducted or ponder about what will happen in the area of operations once the operation will have ended. Such “lessons learned,” even if they are wanted by the military’s rank-and-file and mid-level officers, seem difficult to implement as Hasselbladh and Ydén summarize on the basis of experiences in a number of national forces that were deployed to Afghanistan, such as the ones in the UK, the United States, Sweden, and Norway. The unsatisfactory results relate to the ambiguous character of the experiences that are often contested by senior officers at the domestic headquarters.

If Hasselbladh and Ydén had read Argyris, however, they would have known there are many reasons for such less than optimal double-loop learning processes. Some of them we referred to earlier. But, instead of suggesting ways to overcome those difficulties, they simply state that this is the way it is and that we need to accept the military the way they are. After all, “armed forces are attuned to reproduce sameness” (Hasselbladh & Ydén, 2020, p. 489), which makes them less likely to learn and change course, no matter which operational experiences they have may had.

In their analysis based on experiences in Afghanistan and their inclination toward battlefield engagements, the authors forget about the studies of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping that put organizational learning at the center of improvement, such as Lisa Howard’s study about UN peacekeeping missions (Howard, 2008, pp. 14-20). Howard made clear that UN missions are more successful if they are capable of what she refers to as “first-level” organizational learning. This is learning inside the mission based on step-by-step approaches in which the various factions of the host-nation population are included in the process of policy-making and implementation. She, for example, refers to the UN missions in Namibia, El Salvador, Mozambique, and East-Timor, where such organizational learning has led to success in peacekeeping. For Howard, organizational learning in military missions based on including others inside and outside the military is key to success. Would it then really be impossible or unnecessary to include the military rank-and-file and mid-level commanders in organizational learning processes and organizational change as Haselbladh and Ydén suggest?

One Conclusion

Hasselbladh’s and Ydén’s message should not go unchallenged. They take recent empirical findings as to unsatisfactory, double-loop organizational learning that has emerged from the operations in Afghanistan, as experiences that will never change and in fact, don’t need to change. Their message is not even one of dynamic conservatism (Ansell et al., 2015), but one of bluntly clinging to what was and still is. For many people in the military, Hasselbladh’s and Ydén’s message will provide a big relief and the article will often be quoted. It provides an excuse for not learning and not changing in whatever direction, even if this direction may help to improve the military to become better, that is, more effective, credible, and decent, at what they are set to do.